Much to the delight of every 80s era Neo-con Reganite who grew up watching Gordon Gecko on “Wallstreet” and to this dismay of those flying the banner of the hammer-and-sickle, I’m going to do the thing where I boil down our hours of existence into a dollar value, because for those of us in the working world that pull down a paycheck either by the hour of via a salary, most of us, at one point, have had it flat out spelled out to us exactly how much our time is “worth”. And, in many cases, that number can be downright disheartening, but perhaps that, in turn, serves as a call to action to either BECOME more valuable or to seek out those who value US as much as we value ourselves. In the case of the latter, we must, in turn, VALUE ourselves enough to believe that we ARE worth more than what others are willing to compensate us for. We necessitate a certain degree of dignity such that we will not debase ourselves for the lowest bidder, and will, instead, perform for adequate compensation. Holy cow, this just became far more political than I intended, but let’s get back to physical transformation here, because many of you out in internet land ARE, in fact, treating yourself like some sort of “Grapes of Wrath” era daylaborer; breaking your backs for inadequate wages that end up putting you further in debt than taking you out of it. And the comedy upon comedies is that many of you have hoodwinked yourselves into thinking you’re somehow being FRUGAL with your approach: MAXIMIZING your worth by minimizing your expenses. Instead, you have fallen victim to the “poverty premium”: the concept where poverty forces you to purchase poor quality goods more frequently than if you had the financial capability to buy higher quality goods at less frequent intervals. You are spending MORE in your attempt to spend less. Allow me to (finally) explain.
And most you will follow this dude's advice because he's a doctor
This is
going to be a two-front assault on your brain here. First, allow me to discuss those who are
unwilling to spend the money to buy the books that are associated with popular
and effective training programs, such as 5/3/1, Tactical Barbell, the
Juggernaut Method, Super Squats, Mass Made Simple, Easy Strength, the Armor
Building Formula, etc. The internet age
has conditioned many people to believe that ALL information should be free, and
that creators should not be compensated for their intellectual property. Typically, the people that feel this way are
CONSUMERS of property rather than creators of it, and ain’t that the damndest
thing (note: I’ve never charged for any of the content I’ve put out, quite
frankly because, if I did and someone were to pirate it, I’d most likely track
them down like Liam Neeson in “Taken”, and I don’t need the inconvenience of a
prison sentence in my life). In turn,
those who are unwilling to pay the cost of these books, instead, turn to the
internet to provide them all the information INSIDE the books. And those who at least have the decency to
not engage in piracy will, instead, simply go to social media and ask questions
(“Does 5/3/1 say to do THIS?”), or download excel spreadsheets that (allegedly)
have the programs prebuilt, or use apps, or read as many free articles as they
can on the subject. And, in truth, of
all those things I mentioned, the excel sheets and the apps tend to beat out the
question asking and the article reading by a LONG shot, because along with being
cheap, these folks are lazy. But again,
I digress (and judge): let’s talk some dollars and cents here.
So, to save
the cost of buying an e-book on a program, you decided to, instead, get all the
information you needed off the internet.
Cool: how LONG did THAT take? How
many hours did you spend scouring the next for information, piecing together
bits and pieces of blog posts, social media responses, articles written in
2010, finding the latest up-to-date spreadsheet and app software, in order to
ensure that your “one piece at a time” training program, ala the Johnny Cash
song, was “just as good” as the real thing (maybe even better than the real
thing, if we’re going U2 instead)? Do
you realize that the Tactical Barbell e-books are literally $10 on kindle? Same with most of the 5/3/1 books. Same with Super Squats and Mass Made
Simple? Even if this took you only an
hour to get done…are you really worth $10 an hour? That’s barely minimum wage in many parts of
the United States, and not even that in other parts. Could you have done more VALUABLE things with
that hour of your life? Imagine if you
just pulled the trigger and bought the book and saved yourself that hour: what
could you have done instead? And now you
actually have ALL of the information you need!
…which leads into the next part of the discussion…
You missed out on many tacopportunities in your quest to save money
Think of the
time you wasted by running your slapped together “just as good” program. And don’t act like it doesn’t happen: just in
Super Squats ALONE I can’t tell you how many times I’ve fielded questions from
trainees who CLEARLY never read the book because they’re NOT taking 3 deep
breaths between every squat AND they’re using weights that are STUPIDLY heavy
on the pullovers and wondering why they’re running into problems achieving
their goals. Or trainees that downloaded
Easy Strength and have no idea what weights they’re supposed to use, because
Dan never SAYS a specific amount in the book.
Or f**k me in all the incredible ways trainees manage to screw up 5/3/1,
despite Jim writing the simplest strength training book ever (here’s a hint: if
you’re running a 5/3/1 program for a year: STOP). Now we’re REALLY getting into the question of
“how much is your time worth”. Once
again, in order to save, at MOST, $40+shipping (looking at you “5/3/1 Forever),
you, instead spent anywhere from 6-52+ weeks RUNNING THE PROGRAM WRONG! You literally wasted, at a minimum, 1008
hours for a 6 week program…to save $40?
This means that an hour of your time is worth approximately…4 cents. For reference, in 1921, White Castle would
sell you one of their slider hamburgers for 5 cents, whereas the current cost
for one of those is $1.35. So an hour of
your time in 2025 isn’t even quite enough to cover the cost of a White Castle
slider in 1921, and to be able to pay for one today, you’d have to give up 27
hours of your life…do you REALLY value yourself so little? Have some dignity: your time is at LEAST
worth a DOUBLE hamburger: easily. STOP
debasing yourself in order to “save money”, you are BLEEDING OUT finances by
wasting so much of your time.
But it doesn’t stop! Irrespective of the cost of education, let’s just talk about how even WHEN we have all the right tools for the right job, we can still squander our time in an attempt to SAVE it! Yes, once again, our attempts at frugality run into the aforementioned poverty premium. Herein I wish to discuss (to the groans of many of my regular readers) the “lean bulk”, and how it's simply wasting your time. The current landscape of physical transformation has impressed upon young trainees a notion that they should ALWAYS be photoshoot ready at a moment’s notice, with razor sharp abs year round and never an ounce of fat to be found on them. That’s all fine and dandy if you’ve given up on progressing (hey, it happens: at one point we can decide that we’ve achieved enough and it’s time to maintain), but if you’re on an honest to goodness muscle building phase of training (like one from the books mentioned previously, ala Super Squats, Mass Made Simple, Tactical Barbell Mass Protocol or the 5/3/1 workouts vectored toward size), then it means we’ve decided to progress in A direction: specifically that of…well…building mass. In previous generations, we UNDERSTOOD that this meant a time of hard training paired with hard eating…but, currently, we seem to not quite understand or appreciate that second part. Instead, trainees believe that they should eat only the BAREST amount necessary to add muscle to the frame without a single added ounce of fat. Squeaking out the smallest possible incremental gain on the scale, and rapidly course correcting if they ever see that number jump beyond the acceptable bound. Why? Well to avoid having to cut, of course! See, this way, the trainee is going to save themselves SO much time on the backend of the program, because whereas all those fools are overeating and having to cut later, THIS super duper intelligent trainee is just going to gain all the way through the program and then just switch to the next program and get those sweet sweet infinite perpetual gains. A lifelong gaining cycle: does life get any sweeter?
Gaze upon the future!
…yeah…about
that. What ends up REALLY
happening? The trainee is so
hyper-focused on not adding any fat that they ALSO don’t add any muscle. Their nutrition was so on the razor’s edge
that they often fell short of whatever nutritional needs they had and, instead,
at BEST, maintained what muscle they had and, quite possibly, lost a little bit
of fat. Which is to say, they WASTED an
entire 6 week (minimum) training block.
They spun their wheels for six weeks, training STUPIDLY hard and getting
nothing to show for it…all in their attempt to save time! The irony!
Because now we’re 6 weeks behind schedule and need to catch up! And herein is when the second hammer blow
hits this trainee: they have absolutely NOT desire to do ANOTHER one of those
training phases right now. If you’ve
ever done 6 weeks of Super Squats, or Mass Made Simple, or the 12 weeks of Deep
Water’s beginner and intermediate program put together, or 5/3/1’s Building the
Monolith, you know that, after those programs are done, you kinda want a little
break. Which, typically, is a FANTASTIC
time to either maintain (diet break) or lose some fat (what the net is calling
a “mini-cut”). Because those with some
time under the bar understand that a cut isn’t something you HAVE to do: it’s
something you EARN. It’s something you
look FORWARD to. Oh my goodness, I
FINALLY don’t need to have a bar on my back for a 4 minute set of squats before
I go an try to eat until my stomach tells my brain it’s beyond capacity just so
I can recover and refuel enough to make it through the next workout: I can,
instead, do Dan John’s “Easy Strength for Fat Loss” which has frickin’ “easy”
IN THE NAME and allows me to just lift some weights, go for a walk, and let the
fat melt off me. I can finally rest my
digestive tract for a minute AND save some money on my food budget (hey, look
at that: saving money!) And then, once
I’ve done enough of this, I’ll be champing at the bit and ready to push the
training and food hard again, because this is cyclical training and periodization,
and it works. No one is in a forever
gaining phase, because “ain’t nobody got time for that”, and if you value your
time, you’ll surely agree. Quit trying
to save yourself from cutting, and, instead, train so hard that you look
FORWARD to that phase, so you can recharge and come back strong.
Your time IS
valuable…so start treating it that way.
Spend money to save money, and INVEST your time instead of wasting it.
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