WISDOM OF YOUTH/EXPERIENCE OF AGE

  

In my 22nd year of training now, it’s been fun to look back and think of what I’ve learned along the way.  In a podcast I was recently featured in, I mentioned how I was SO much smarter about training when I was 14 vs when I went out and got “educated”, reading ALL the studies and the books and the articles and the forum posts that were out there on the subject of getting bigger and stronger.   Primarily because, at the age of 14, I was an action movie, comic book, video game and anime junkie that had been inundated with montages and over the top cliché so much that I KNEW, with every fiber of my being, that what you NEEDED to do to get big and strong was work REALLY REALLY hard.  And that was it.  That was “the secret”.  It HAD to be.  I saw Vegeta train at 400 times gravity and he was ALMOST as strong as a Super Sayian WITHOUT powering up!  And when Goku took off his thousands of pounds of training weights you couldn’t even see him move!  And The Punisher was ALWAYS training, even after busting up a drug ring and getting his bones broken.  And who could forget Rocky, or Vision Quest, or Bloodsport, or etc etc.  THAT was the wisdom of my youth: work REALLY hard and you get results.

Why yes, I DID train myself to the point of being able to do 1 armed push ups on my fingers...why do you ask?

 

So what led me to do all that damn reading in the first place?  Unfortunately, the folly of that very same youth: impatience.  I WAS working really damn hard: why wasn’t I REALLY damn strong?  It’s been 3 WHOLE months: what gives?!  I remember deciding one summer that I was going to get a six-pack, and to do that I was going to burn off ALL my belly fat with cardio.  There was an 8 mile loop around my house that I would run once a day, every day, during the school year to keep me in shape for wrestling, so for the summer I DOUBLED it.  I’d run the first 8 in the morning (fasted, to REALLY burn that belly fat) and then the other 8 in the evening before bed.  Looking at that, you’d imagine I’d have ZERO glycogen in my body…except for the fact I lived with my parents, with my mom being an absolute champ at buying those GIANT Costco muffins to have in the house for breakfast (which, after an 8 mile run, you gotta have at LEAST 2), and I lived in San Diego, so I had access to the BEST Mexican food in the world, to say nothing of the fast food mecca of Jack in the Box and In n Out.  As you can imagine, I was unsuccessful in my quest for abs that summer…but I DID have the most amazing cardiovascular system in the world afterwards, so that was cool.

 

But there were my 3 WHOLE months of effort and NOTHING to show for it, so of course, I turn to academia to figure out what I need to do different.  And some studies said that training fasted WAS the cure…and some said that I was being a big stupid dummyhead because I was being SUPER catabolic and eating away ALL my muscle, so no WONDER I didn’t have my six pack.  And by the way, don’t bother training those abs to get a six pack, because abs are made in the kitchen…except you SHOULD train them, because a bigger muscle shows through.  Except a six pack doesn’t even mean you’re in shape…but it IS the crowning achievement of fitness.  Maybe my issue was carb timing, or maybe I shouldn’t be eating ANY carbs, or maybe ONLY carbs.  Who was I kidding: clearly the issue was all the drugs and supplements I WASN’T taking.

In fairness, you could buy this over the counter when I was that age...

 

A few years later, one day, after a sparring session (we called them “McThrowdowns”, salute to bullshido.net, I miss you folks), someone took a group photo of us, and in it, I realized something: I had abs!  I hadn’t been training for them, I hadn’t dedicated myself to them, my diet was still whatever I could get away with…but there they were. 

 

What was the missing element?  The start of that sentence: “a few YEARS later”.  And therein is the experience of age: you do this LONG enough and you begin to realize that effort WILL pay off: it just takes time.  And yes, I know I just recently wrote “the secret is patience”, but herein we observe the detriment of IGNORING that secret.  I was letting my “lack” of results get to me, failing to understand that I wasn’t observing LACKING results: I was observing results occurring at the rate they occur at.  Which, for physical transformation, is SLOW.  If you ever get the chance, listen to Justin Harris break down the rate at which the body adds muscle, because he does a much better job that I do, but using the most extreme example (Big Ramy in this case), assuming you do EVERYTHING right, have the best genetics, are using the best drugs, eating the best food, following the best training, you’re adding GRAMS of muscle to your body each day once you’re past the beginner stages of training.  The solace of such information is that it means ONE bad day isn’t going to ruin anything…but it also means one GOOD day is also meaningless.  It’s going to take a LOT of decent to good days all stacked up in a row for anything to start mattering.

Just like you might get the gold with 1 good day...but you get to be a legend even in defeat

 

Which is something I got to learn with experience.  Because, eventually, I got fed up doing things the way I was “supposed” to do it.  I almost quit lifting entirely around 2010 because I had completely lost my passion for it.  I never liked training in the first place, but I at LEAST liked getting results, and now I wasn’t even getting that.  I was nursing year 2 of a 3 year long lower back injury I got from squatting to pins to make SURE I was squatting to the “correct” depth that kept me from deadlifting: the ONE lift I was decent at.  I was sick of doing EVERYTHING for 5 reps because that was “the best rep range”.  I was sick of ONLY doing the big compounds because “isolation work was pointless”.  And so I decided to give it one last push and just do what I was doing before…and goddamn if it didn’t work!  Because now I was willing to play the long game and give things TIME to shake out.  I had recovered from enough dislocated shoulders to know that injuries DO heal, so long as they are given time…the same time needed to see the results of the efforts of physical transformation.  And not fearing injury allowed me to push myself harder in my training, which comically enough made the results come faster than when I was trying to play it safe.  Because of my experience, I knew a TON of things that DIDN’T work: because I had tried them all before.  This made coming up with a plan for a way forward EASY: I could eliminate SO many choices.  And because of my experience, I could STILL remember being that teenager, relying solely on effort, and just how powerful it was.

 

And therein the two merged.  The wisdom of my youth met the experience of my age and I realized that, so long as I pushed myself as hard as I could, given enough time, I’d get the results I wanted.  And if I’m not getting the results, I just need to ask my younger self if I’m training hard enough and my current self if I’ve waited long enough.