THE SECRET IS PATIENCE

  

I’ve found myself saying this for a while now, so it seemed like it was time to actually make a post about it.  People are always looking for “the secret” when it comes to physical transformation.  What should I eat (spoiler: it’s often what you DON’T eat that makes the difference)?  What supplement should I take?  3 day/4 day/5 day split?  Twice a week frequency?  Protein before the workout?  After?  Isolate or compound (am I talking about protein or movements when I say that?)  Etc etc.  Isn’t it frustrating to realize that NONE of these things are the secret?  Primarily because these would be EASY secrets.  You just pick 1 thing and then you picked right and you win!  It’s like Indiana Jones: choose wisely (sorry for spoiling a 30 year old movie).  And here’s the equally frustrating part: the secret, the REAL secret, is patience.

Dude, at least go for the name brand stuff...

 

Patience is a very long four-letter word.  We are particularly spoiled these days, as things really ARE instant.  My kid has no idea what a commercial is: they’ve only known streaming television.  Along with that, they’ve never known having to wait until their favorite show comes on: their favorite show is ALWAYS on.  We can order stuff from amazon and have it delivered in 2 days.  I recently released a free e-book and had a lot of people tell me the link to it didn’t work because it took about 20 seconds of waiting to fully load.  We’re very much conditioned to expect things instantly…which means requiring patience for something is downright asking the impossible among many.  No: they want their binary choice to make that is the RIGHT choice so they can shut off their brain and get their results.  And when 3 months go by and they aren’t jacked out of their minds and photoshoot ready, they DEMAND to know how they screwed it up and why the internet led them astray.

 

The secret is patience: physical transformation simply takes a LONG time to occur.  If it didn’t, more people would look great.  There would be no fat people on vacation: everyone would always be jacked and lean.  But they aren’t, because it requires patience, and patience is in short supply.  “But what about all those stories about people making radical physical transformations in short time periods?!”  Dude: why do you think those are stories?  Those are the exceptions that PROVE the rule.  We wouldn’t report stuff like that if it WASN’T miraculous.  They very fact it’s “newsworthy” is proof of concept that the NORM is for physical transformation to require a long time and, therefore, patience to work.  How do you know you’re not one of those fast radical transformers?  The fact you are reading about it rather than living it.

And case in point, it helps to start out pretty jacked BEFORE you transform

 

This is the “secret” as to why all those bros in the gym look so jacked despite training “wrong”: they exercised patience.  They adopted the gym as a hobby, went there 3-6 times a week for a dozen plus years, put In enough effort, and saw the results.  Much like how you can graduate high school if you show up enough and put in a minimal amount of effort, you can achieve physical transformation purely through patience.  You can “wait out” the gains.  Because let’s be real about being optimal here: if training optimally means getting 100% of your potential, how less optimal is training sub-optimally?  10% less?  So if you were to have put on 50lbs of solid muscle in 15 years of training, now it’s “only” 45lbs?  That’s still REALLY good.  80%? 40lbs of muscle is a LOT of muscle.  You’d have to train so COMPLETELY off the rails to not get a solid return on investment in your training that it would be painfully obvious you aren’t there to work.  Otherwise, picking A method, executing it diligently and waiting patiently remain “the secret.”

 

Here’s another dirty secret about patience: fat is much easier to lose than muscle is to gain.  Building muscle is a SLOW process.  Once again, were that NOT the case, more people would be muscular.  Fat loss can be incredibly rapid.  Once again, talking about “stories”, the story of rapid and extensive fat loss is a very well known and popular one because it happens ALL the time.  All people need to do to make it happen is…not eat.  That’s it.  It’s INaction.  Through sheer inaction, people have lost hundreds of pounds, shedding whole humans worth of bodyweight and radically transformed themselves.  Think of the last time you saw a story about someone doing the near opposite, and adding prodigious amounts of muscle in a short time span.  Even WITH chemical assistance, the rate that muscle can be added is paltry compared to the rate at which fat can be lost.  But interestingly enough, the impact of fat loss (insofar as it relates to physique) is significantly amplified by the presence of musculature.  We’ve all seen the trainee that starts off overfat and cuts all the way down to scrawny with loose skin compared to the dude that starts off overfat BUT with a significant degree of musculature underneath.  So again: patience comes into play.  Yeah, you can drop a ton of fat quickly if you want, but if the goal is to actually look good at the end, there STILL needs to be patience.

The 10 year bulk and 2 year cut plan still works

 

“But what about my friend that never lifted before and got huge quick!”  Your friend most likely had a solid childhood background in basic athletics, while you stayed inside playing World of Warcraft.  And there is that patience again: spending the ages of 4-18 playing sports year round is the accumulation of a LOT of training volume, even IF none of it was specialized toward gaining muscle and lifting weights.  That WIDE base of general physical preparedness can now be laser focused toward a single goal and the rewards can be reaped (hey, it’s that whole “accumulation” thing all over again).  If he got to start with a 14 year head start, he’s going to pull ahead faster.  You need to be patient.  Starting today will get you one day closer than if you start tomorrow.

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BONUS SECTION: I honestly couldn’t figure out where else to put this, so here’s some interesting things to note.  Patience is the secret, but some things require more patience than others.  Muscle is going to take the longest to build, and, in turn, so will strength (because, again, the way you make a muscle stronger is by making it bigger).  Because of “beginner gains”, the further away we are from our potential, the faster we make progress toward it, so most new trainees will observe rapid progress at first that will come to a snail’s crawl soon after.  This is why the average powerlifting “career” is about 3 years: after that point, it becomes hard to progress and people quit and move on.  The secret was patience, and they failed there.  However, what’s cool about muscle and strength taking a while to gain is that it ALSO takes a while to lose.  Again, people get confused about what actually IS muscle, typically confusing inflammation/swelling/bloat with it, and think that they “lost their gains” when they go on vacation for 2 weeks and don’t train and eat right.  The truth is: when you have a REAL solid foundation of size and strength under your belt, it takes a LOT to lose it.

I've met the man in person, and he's STILL huge...

 

Below muscle, cardiovascular ability and conditioning can be improved quite rapidly, which, in turn, means you’re a real slack if your conditioning sucks.  Muscle can take months and years to accumulate: a solid baseline of conditioning can be obtained in a matter of weeks.  And once you have it, maintaining it really isn’t too difficult, and improving it is still not terribly taxing.  But, in turn, you can lose it pretty quickly as well.  So if you ARE the impatient type and want to see results NOW, go build up your conditioning.  And the cool thing is, when your conditioning is improved, your ability to build muscle will improve too.

 

Flexibility and mobility are also much quicker to improve compared to muscular size, which is why people like to brag about how DEEP they can squat vs how MUCH they can squat.  It was simply easier to do the former vs the latter.  I dedicated myself to stretching 30 minutes a day when COVID hit, and within a matter of weeks was back to the ROM I had when I was a teenager.  I subsequently ALSO suffered my first hamstring tear ever in training, and then tore something in my groin on a set of squats, at which point I resumed my previous campaign of no longer stretching.  I was doing it because I was teaching my kid some Tae Kwon Do as part of their ”at home physical education” program, and decided I’d rather just kick at the waist or lower vs keep breaking stuff.  But again, quickly gained, quickly lost.