DO NOT MISTAKE SIMPLE FOR EASY

One of my pet peeves is the phrase “easier said than done”, mainly because it’s horrifically obvious to the point of uselessness.  In life, the majority of all things are easier said than done.  Speaking, once mastered, becomes a trivial task (as evidence by how effortlessly many people spew nonsense nonstop), whereas action, in most cases, tends to require more effort.  This is why, whenever a training recommendation is offered and the response is “easier said than done”, it blows my mind.  Just because something is simple doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy, and in fact, in most cases, it is the OPPOSITE that is true.

That said, sometimes things come easy to simple people

I have spoken many times to the reality of just how simple it is to get bigger and stronger.  The “dumb jock” stereotype exists because it did not require great brainpower for one to become bigger and stronger.  What gets missed in the translation is that, what was lacking in brainpower was compensated for with skull splitting intensity and effort.  When you lack intelligence, you have to compensate with brutality.  This is how the animal kingdom works, and it’s why man had to be smart; because he couldn’t hope to match the sheer force of will of nature.

However, because we try to minimize language to make our understanding easier, we have falsely equated the simplicity of an action to the ease of it.  A trainee asks what the secret is to getting bigger and stronger, they are told to eat well and lift hard, and they walk away unsatisfied; surely it can’t be that easy.  But it’s NOT easy; it is merely simple.  In reality, it’s going to be incredibly hard to accomplish, with many moments of agony and misery resulting in one questioning why they ever wanted to pursue this goal in the first place, yet the entire time, the solution will be amazingly simple.  Simple, yes, but not easy.

It's simple; just eat the whole thing

But the unsatisfied trainee will not accept simplicity as an answer; if it was that easy, everyone would be big and strong, right?  Therefore, the solution must be more complex, because that will mean that we have found the hard way to do it, no?  And thus begins the search for magic bullet solutions; mysterious supplements, exotic programs with crazy rep and set schemes, Russian training manuals, secrets passed down from locker room to locker room, the perfect steroid cycle, etc etc.  To appease our need for the path to be difficult, the trainee attempts to replace hard work with complexity, equating both to be the same.

And in reality, the complexity is taking the easy way out.  One can argue and bemoan ad infinitum the amount of “effort” they have put into getting bigger and stronger in terms of how much research they have performed in their quest to “find the secrets”…but that’s easy.  Yeah, sure, it sucks that you sat at your computer chair for hours scouring torrented training books, watching every youtube channel, arguing with like-minded deviants on social media, etc etc…but how is that hard?  That’s the life of a World of Warcraft champion, not an Olympian.  For every hour you spent in an air conditioned house sitting in an ergonomically designed comfort lounger munching on Cheetos, someone was stupidly sweating in agony while a weight attempted to crush their spine out their rectum.  While you “toiled”, someone else gave themselves rhabdomyolysis from 1 too many squats.  While you were too busy being complicated and easy, someone else was being simple and hard.

Currently in the process of getting jacked

It’s so catchy now to say “just because someone is a great lifter doesn’t mean they’re a great coach”, but instead of being a rallying cry for the weak to use to explain why their advice is valuable even though they are unsuccessful, let’s really look at what this is getting at.  How can someone be a great lifter and a bad coach?  It’s because you don’t NEED to be smart to be big and strong.  A great coach NEEDS to be smart, because they need to be able to convey what they know to someone else, but a great athlete simply needs to be able to push and grind further and harder than anyone else.  A great athlete has to be able to endure the suck more than anyone else.  They have to be able to not quit, work hard, and shut up.  In short, it’s very simple, and incredibly difficult, and that is why there are so few great athletes.

Getting bigger and stronger is easier said than done; now go do it.




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As an update for my readers, slightly less than 6 months post-op I have been given the clear to train by my physical therapist.  I am still told to go light and watch for pain, but nothing is restricted.  I was told to start out at 60-70% of my previous weights, but I imagine my doctor didn't realize I was lifting over 600lbs, so I am going slightly lighter.  Still technically 6 months out from competing again, but we will see how that goes.



Already getting my squat on.

And, now that I am healed enough, here is the injury as it initially happened