I HAD IT EASIER

This is the year that I turn 40, and upon that happening I’ll have been training for 26 years, which is longer than some of my readers have been alive, and also marks 13 years of writing this blog (of which, I’ve had many accomplished trainees tell me they loved reading this back when they were starting in high school, which makes me feel REAL old).  I say all this because I’m going to pull my old-man card for this one, and I felt the need to establish my credentials in that regard.  But, in somewhat predicable fashion, I’m going to flip the script here on this rant, because rather than doing the typical old-man thing of telling you how much harder we all had it back in the day compared to you spoiled youngsters, I’m going to cop to the fact that: I had it easier.  No question about it: I am SO thankful I came up in the era I came up in as far as it relates to physical transformation, because I cannot even imagine trying to navigate the current minefield you “in your prime” trainees are having to endure.  No question about it: between you and me, I had it far easier.

 

Yup, it's gonna be a lot of this

This revelation came about as I was contemplating my early years of training, when I put on the majority of my muscle, as is what is SUPPOSED to be the typical fashion when it comes to training.  Those first few years are SUPPOSED to be the most transformative ones, as we receive the biggest return on investment as far as gains per time spent training, after which time diminishing returns kick in and we fight tooth and nail for every last scrap of muscle.  HOWEVER, in modern times, we observe MANY trainees that are on the Starting Strength wagon for YEARS and still haven’t really scratched the surface of significant gains.  These trainees fear “squandering their noobie gains”, wondering if perhaps they are just genetically inferior and destined to be skinny-fat, having already reached 90% of their max potential because they hit the magical “2 years of training” mark, with everything from here on out being just nickels and dimes.  What is it that was different between us?

Here I am, at age 17, wrestling at a massive 158lbs at 5'9, and clearly already bitten by the iron bug

 

For one, starting out, there was zero expectation of me ever being ripped, diced, cut, sliced, etc etc. Primarily because, there was zero expectation for me to be seen without my shirt on, unless I was at a pool or the beach.  And even though I grew up in San Diego, shirtless opportunities were still not plentiful (the Pacific is frickin’ cold, and we get “June Gloom” in the summer).  There was zero social media, the internet itself was archaic (hello dial-up modems), I didn’t have a digital camera until college, and it used FLOPPY DISKS to store the images, which we would then put into a disk drive on the computer in order to download the files, with nowhere to UPLOAD them: at best we could just e-mail them directly to someone.  Because of all of this, I never worried about how I looked with my shirt OFF: I was concerned with how I looked with my shirt ON.  And THAT meant that I needed to build some goddamn muscle!  I didn’t need to concern myself with if I was getting sloppy, losing my abs (what abs?!), not photoshoot ready: etc.  I was concerned with making sure that my arms filled out my shirtsleeves, my pecs protruded tight against my t-shirts (Cody from Final Fight still holds an ideal physique to me) and that my traps were visible from all angles.  I still remember coming home from my first semester of college, during winter break, when I put on 12lbs having gained access to the college dinning hall AND weight room, and two separate individuals made the comment to me “You got shoulders!”, and how genuinely positive it was to receive that recognition.  No one would have cared if I was rocking an 8-pack under that t-shirt: they were agog at the sheer physicals size I possessed.

It helped that my role models were also just beefy, rather than diced

 

Which meant that training and nutrition sorted themselves out incredibly simply during the beginning.  Having no access to social media and limited internet resources in general (I learned a LOT on the Gamefaqs Martial Arts message board of all places), about the only thing I had to learn from was muscle mags and fellow meatheads in the gym.  I distinctly remember picking up a copy of Muscle and Fitness at the airport flying back to college one year and reading an article about how Phil Baroni trained his arms and deciding to create my own bodybuilding split to run upon landing, which I used to STILL get bigger and stronger, despite how “bad” the program was.  And when it came time to eat, I let my appetite determine how MUCH I ate, while WHAT I ate was guided by a very primitive understanding of nutrition.  It was the early 2000s and Atkins was big, so I KNEW that I needed protein if I wanted to grow, so that’s what I ate.  Cheeseburgers with no buns (but with sugary ketchup), Chicken Strips (I didn’t realize that they were breaded meaning…they had bread on them), delimeats and cheese with no bread on sandwich days, peanut butter by the bowlful (I kept getting told it had “the good fats” and was a good source of protein…), chicken wings, the dinning hall breakfast of “egg loaf” (it’s what happens to powdered eggs) and all the bacon and sausage I could ever want, etc etc.  And yeah, looking back on it now, there are SO many things I would have changed and done differently, but at the same time, looking at how it WORKED…maybe I didn’t need to.

mmmm...eggloaf.  But hey, when you're away form home, you'll let ANYONE do the cooking

 

Because I had it so much easier than you do now.  I had SO little noise to deal with, even IF I had so little signal as well.  All I had to do was train hard, and then eat “protein” until I wasn’t hungry, and somehow I kept getting bigger and stronger. I’d go to different gyms that had different equipment and I’d play with them, and the new stimulus would keep me growing.  I spent time between college and home, which periodized my workout for me, forcing me to pick different goals to train for when I was home because I didn’t have the same equipment as I had in college.  I also had even better food there too!  And there was no pressure on me to look like a model 365 days a year: summers would roll around and I’d lean out as I did more activity, and then I’d get back to school in the fall and gain with the dinning hall, cold weather, and big iron.

 

YOU have it SO much harder these days.  You’re convinced that EVERYONE is walking around at 4% bodyfat year round, because of the bevy of fitness influencers out there that refuse to put on an ounce of bodyfat for fear that they’ll lose the majority of their subscribers.  Hell, these tricks aren’t new: there were bodybuilders in the 70s that would get contest ready and take THOUSANDS of photos and then slowly trickle them out to magazines over the months to create the ILLUSION that they were year-round ripped, and they did this SPECIFICALLY to mindf**k their opponents into staying TOO lean during the off season while they focused on growing and gaining to come in looking even better.  Now the malice behind the sabotage has a different flavor: they’re not sabotaging you to make THEM look better, but to make themselves richer!  But either way, you pay the price with your gains.  If you’d just be comfortable NOT having your shirt off all the time, maybe you could focus on just getting jacked and huge for a bit and THEN spend some time leaning out.  Actually have a slab of marble to chisel away at before you try to build a sculpture.

Like so

 

And how are you going to carve that sculpture anyway?  Oh my goodness, you have SO many training approaches to choose from, and all of them are wrong AND right at the exact same time, and everyone has the best method and every other method is garbage.  One of the biggest issues is the binary and hyperbolic nature of the dialog around training: things are either awesome or they suck.  There’s no acceptable middleground of “this training program will be good enough”, because we don’t like having moderation and civility on the internet.  Everything HAS to be polarized, all decisions HAVE to be crucial and we all must belong to certain camps.  And again, I wasn’t immune to this growing up: we just did this stupid crap over video game systems.  You were either a Nintendo fan or a Sega fan, or you were rich and had both, but OTHERWISE, you had to make sure that YOUR system was the absolute best and the other one was total garbage, because how else could you placate yourself over your purchase decision?  The only way to ward off that buyer’s remorse was to trash the other system, and that’s exactly what we see in the realm of training.  It’s FOMO (fear of missing out) taken to its inevitable extreme of lashing out AGAINST anything that could possibly contradict your own methodology, because we HAD to have selected the absolute best method for physical transformation.  Meanwhile, I was picking up bodybuilding tips from a not-awesome MMA fighter…

 

And oh my goodness, everything I said about training applies doubly to nutrition.  Nutrition is effectively religion: and if you speak out against someone’s faith, you’re going to be in for an earful.  I was ALREADY fringe for “following” Atkin’s in the late 90s/early 2000s, which really just boiled down to not eating bread or sugar (Vinnie Tortorich’s “No Sugar/No Grain” really needed to be bigger then).  Now, I’m of course a lunatic for eating carnivore, but I’m among other fellow lunatics with keto, vegan, Mediterranean, IIFYM, Vertical Diet, Dukan Diet, Zone Diet, pescatarian, gluten free, etc etc.  We just had to deal with the constant fluctuation on if eggs were good for us or bad for us every few months: YOU have “keto bread”, of all things, and “protein donuts” and all sorts of charlatans looking to make a buck off your gullibility.  How do you know what to eat for breakfast?  Do you even eat breakfast?  Aren’t you doing intermittent fasting?  Or are you supposed to eat every 3 hours? 

Honestly, I should have listened to more cartoons growing up...

 

Allow me to even touch on supplements here.  You may THINK you actually have it better, because you have access to a WIDE variety of protein powders that DON’T taste like wallpaper paste (I grew up with 2 flavors: vanilla and chocolate, which meant I grew up with ONE flavor, because NO ONE liked the vanilla flavor), but honestly: this sucks for you.  Because now you have to contend with the TEMPTATION behind all these wonderfully artificially flavored concoctions that are out there.  The temptation to not eat actual real honest to goodness whole food and just drink your yummy fruity pebbles flavored protein powder that is fortified with all sorts of vitamins and minerals (and a graduate thesis worth of other ingredients) has got to be overwhelming and, in turn, prevents you from eating those things that may actually make you grow!  A thick steak, with some animal fat attached to it, is going to have so much more going for it than a few scoops of whey mixed in water when it comes to transforming yourself.  Our protein supplements were so unenjoyable that we ONLY ever considered drinking them after a workout, and that was because we had been hoodwinked since the 60s to believe in the “anabolic window” (which is why I ate sweet tarts with my protein shake: because the dextrose and maltodextrin was going to drive that protein RIGHT into my muscles).  Otherwise, it was unfathomable to miss a meal and just have a shake or a bar (oh my goodness protein bars were horrible back then).  Now?  Now you HAVE to have discipline in order to not live in a Soylent Green universe where all food you consume is just hyperprocessed crap because “it’s got good macros”.

I'm not even going to touch pre-workouts...

 

Young, current trainees, YOU, my friends, have got it rough.  YOU are the ones that get to tell me that you had to walk uphill in the snow both ways in order to get the gains.  You have SO much more to deal with that is taking you off course and sapping your growth.  But perhaps all is not lost!  Perhaps you can take these lessons from the past in order to secure your future!  Much like how Super Squats guided me in my senior year of college to learn how to push hard and drink my gallon of milk a day, perhaps you can shut off the social media, tune out the noise, and rock it 90s, 80s, 70s and 60s style: growing big and strong and eating well.  Perhaps we can just go back to a simpler time and leave all that complexity for those that are pre-occupied with being “optimal” to the point that they’re watching their best training years completely pass them by.  Perhaps YOU can have it easier too!