MORE TROUBLE THAN YOU’RE WORTH

My regular readers are probably aware of those, but for those that aren’t, lifting wasn’t actually my first passion.  Sure, I wanted to be big and strong ever since I can remember, but competing in powerlifting or strongman wasn’t what I envisioned: I wanted to fight.  I started in martial arts at the age of 6, doing YMCA Karate (pronounced “krotty”) before enrolling in Tae Kwon Do from age 8-17 and earning my First Degree Black Belt (which, if you know anything about TKD, you know it doesn’t mean much).  I started wrestling in High School my sophomore year and did it through senior year.  MMA was getting big when I graduated and I decided I wanted to learn how to really fight, so I took up boxing, Muay Thai and BJJ/submission grappling.  I did this all through college, then I got married right out of college and was forced to make a decision.  If you’ve ever trained to fight, you know it’s a big time commitment.  2-3 hours of training about 4-5 times a week is about standard if you want to be any good at it.  That was cool when I was single, but having a wife that wanted to spend time with me, I realized it was too big of a time sink, ESPECIALLY since I was trying to lift on top of all that.  I loved fighting, and I loved the confidence it gave me, knowing I could defend myself and my family, but I had to think about what the tradeoff was.  When forced to pick between lifting and fighting, I settled on lifting, because I realized it could still provide me some of that self-defense benefit I wanted, but in a different way.  Instead of being a guy that knew how to fight and could fight if a fight happened, I figured I’d turn myself into a guy who quite simply looked like he was more trouble than he was worth. 

It most likely surprises no one that I bought this at Hot Topic

Whew, long intro on that one, but let me continue to explain.  Lifting and fighting are two different activities, and though my lifting was helping to augment my fighting (as I had started lifting at 14), I was reaching a point where getting better at one was taking away from the other.  Whenever I got super into my fight training, I’d start dropping weight fast, and with that I’d lose some muscle.  When I got super into my lifting, I’d put the muscle back on, but my fighting skills would drop off since I wasn’t giving as much attention to them in order to allow for recovery.  Now, I realize that everyone on the internet apparently knows that size doesn’t mean anything in a fight, but for some reason, out in reality, people still think that a big strong dude can do some damage in a scrap.  Weird.  Anyway, being fully aware of this, it dawned on me that, if my concern is really about being able to defend myself and my family, being big enough that people simply don’t want to attack me is a far better defense than being really good at fighting so that, when I DO get attacked, I can defend myself.

But being “more trouble than you are worth” speaks to something even more significant than this notion; it’s the idea that, even in failure, you’re still a threat.  People like soft, easy targets.  They like a sure victory.  They like to go into a battle knowing they’re going to come out clean and unharmed.  What they DON’T want is to end up getting locked into some brutal war of attrition with some psychopath who isn’t there to win; he just wants to make you hurt.  And this was my goal in lifting as a means of self-defense; to appear strong enough that, even if I’m outnumbered, outmatched, unarmed, etc, whoever is looking to make me a victim has to REALLY consider if it’s worth it.  Is it really worth a broken nose or ribs, losing teeth or an eye, a concussion, etc etc, or should they maybe just move on to an easier, sure victory?  This is being “more trouble than you are worth.”

...yup

And you can be “more trouble than you are worth” outside of being attacked; you can simply BE “more trouble than you are worth”.  You might not be the best competitor overall the day you show up, but you can still be the guy that shows up so well conditioned that people just give up rather than try to beat your time in a medley.  You can have a deadlift that is so nuts that it’s simply a race for second place amongst the other competitors.  You can have a will that is so strong that all attempts to break it leave others broken.  Even when outmatched, outclassed, outmuscled and outskilled, you can STILL be more trouble than you are worth.  You can make it that beating you just isn’t worth the reward.

What is the value here?  It’s accepting that there are going to be risks, and you can’t be prepared to defeat them all, but by playing to your strengths you can turn yourself into something so fearsome that you won’t have to.  You can find what you have that makes you “dangerous” and ride it out as far and as hard as you can to the point that, even if you can be beat, people won’t want to beat you.  Though you can be overcome, no one wants to take the risks and suffer the consequences of doing so.  You can simply be more trouble than you are worth.

This guy gets it

Make no mistake; this isn’t about “winning fights.”  This is a strategy for winning them before they begin, but when that fails, you’re at the mercy of the fight.  Sometimes your strengths will carry you through and you’ll be victorious, and sometimes your lack of skill will show and you’ll take a loss.  But take heart in knowing that whoever beat you suffered in doing so.  They limp away the winner, nursing their wounds and examining their new scars and wondering if it was really worth it.  Thinking to themselves “I am NOT doing that again.”  You become so strong in WHATEVER your strength is that even winning against you means taking a loss in some way.

Endeavor to be more trouble than you are worth, whatever it means to you.  Endeavor to be the strongest, or the fastest, or the most skilled, or the strongest willed.  Hope to one day be the best in everything, sure, but en route to that path, endeavor to make it so that, even if you aren’t, no one wants to risk finding out for sure.