IF YOU DO WHAT EVERONE ELSE DOES, YOU GET THE RESULTS EVERYONE ELSE GETS

I know I’ve touched on this before, because that’s what happens when you write once a week on the same subject for a decade, but that, in turn, makes this self-affirming, because here I am doing things other people aren’t doing.  What I intend to discuss here is something that is so painfully obvious to me yet seems to escape the understanding of SO many people that I feel the need to just spell it all out here.  Being average is NOT being extraordinary.  Again, that seems obvious to me, but it seems to be an idea that has not been fully realized by, interestingly enough, the average person.  When you look at a bell curve, you have the top 10% and the bottom 10%, and in the middle is that smear of average where the majority reside.  Why does that matter?  Because in the pursuit of physical transformation, we are aiming to become bigger and stronger THAN AVERAGE.  It is a quest to GET to that 10% outlier: to NOT be constrained in that 80% of the bellcurve.  Being big and strong is DIFFERENT: it is deviant, it is outside the norm, some even consider it abhorrent (your top 10% is their bottom: value of perspectives), but however you classify it, it is outside the average.  So, acknowledging it this: WHY would you do what everyone else is doing?  If you do what everyone else is doing, you get the results that everyone else is getting!

I assure you: no one else was doing this

This is NOT a call-to-arms for counter-culture purely for the sake of being contrarian, although, in truth, you could have far worse of a personal policy if your goal is to be successful.  And that is because, quite frankly, the average person isn’t successful. Success is NOT an average quality.  “Maintenance” is what most people strive for: they accomplish just enough to keep from drowning, but don’t go beyond that.  The people that accomplish significant results in ANY endeavor are rare: they make up a very SMALL amount of the population.  This is why the majority of the world’s wealth is concentrated among a SMALL population of people rather than equally distributed among the majority.  Yes yes: wealth can be inherited, illegally obtained, etc etc: please don’t focus so much on the example.

No: not counter-culture for its own sake, but deviance for the purpose of being DIFFERENT.  Being different at LEAST gives you something in common with those that are successful, and the more things you do that make you more like those that are successful, the greater the possibility that you, yourself, are, in fact, successful.  “If it walks like a duck and sounds like a duck” and such.  You SEE the results that everyone is getting: they’re not good.  At best, they’re average, for the very reasons I’ve discussed above.  They are unimpressive, not noteworthy, not anything to aspire to nor anything anyone care to write about or document in any way.  We turn on the TV to watch excellent athletes do excellent things: no one is recording the company softball game.

There are, of course, always exceptions

This is why, to BE different, we must DO different.  This is why, when someone tells me that the latest study says we must train the muscles twice a week for maximal protein synthesis, I do it once a week.  When I discover that the majority of nutritional literature expresses the importance of carbohydrates for training performance and hypertrophy, I cut carbs from my diet.  When I learn that conditioning and cardiovascular training “kills gains”, I do a ton of it.  When I hear I need to do daily stretching and mobility, I do none of it.  They make apps that make counting calories and macros even easier?  Sweet: my method of never counting them works REALLY well.  Let’s bulk when we’re at 20% bodyfat and cut at 8.  Did you know it’s possible to train REALLY hard on 4 hours of sleep?  

I am getting DIFFERENT results.  That’s my goal.  We all start out the same: perpetuating that is NOT my goal.  So if my methods diverge from what is normally considered the acceptable approach, that’s awesome!  And the majority of trainees tell me I’m training wrong, that’s what I endeavor for.  If I read about some method that is like nothing anyone else out there is doing, I’m of course GOING to try it, whereas if something looks super regimented, rehearsed, cleaned up and user friendly it’s NEVER going to enter into my calculations.

"I'm just saying, let's give his ideas a fair listen..."

This requires an absence of fear of the unknown…which is the very thing that keeps people in the status quo.  I’ve written a ton about never asking for permission, not seeking reassurance, “take chances, make mistakes, get messy”, and here it is again.  You’re not going to FIND research and studies, you’re not going to find a message board post about it, you’re not going to find a fitness influencer’s review, and if you ask into the void if it’s a good idea, they’re going to say “No”.  That’s exactly what you want!  You already KNOW the results of doing what everyone else is doing: it’s the exact reason you’re seeking something else.  In turn, you want “unproven” methods: within that unknown exists the potential for greatness!  You could sail off the edge of the world OR perhaps discover El Dorado, but at least you will have a DIFFERENT fate.

No, not fear of the unknown, but the opposite: joy!  Folks, after 22 years of training, do you know how excited I get when I see or hear of something I’ve never thought of?  Something “so crazy it just might work”?  I’m so exhausted with the trite “keep a rep in reserve and eat 500 calories over maintenance” gameplan that everyone is running that seeing ANYTHING that deviates from the norm excites me.  At least SOME folks are out there STILL trying to be different.  SOME folks are out there still wanting to be greater than average.  You can join their ranks.  You already KNOW how to be like everyone else: if your goal is to be unlike them, you need to DO unlike them.