ON WEIRDNESS: A STEP SIDEWAYS IS A STEP FORWARD IF YOU CHANGE YOUR PERSPECTIVE

Recently, my post “What Have You Done To The Farmer’s Walk” was posted on a thread on the fitness subreddit, wherein many posters took exception to me having written about how the average person is en route to being average, and emulating them is how you end up being average.  This was taken as elitism, denigrating average people, and hipsterism purely for the sake of counter-culturalism.  I make no apologies for what I think or write in that regard, but moreso I feel a need to elaborate further on this, as it seems worth further elaboration.  The fact of the matter is that it is simply the truth that, if you do what everyone else does, you will get the results everyone else is getting.  To expect otherwise is simply madness.  What this, in turn, speaks to is the value of being different simply for the sake of being different.  People demean this concept and talk to “special snowflakes” and all other demeaning names, but again, consider the reality of it. Doing what average people do makes you average.  Doing what average people don’t do makes you NOT average, and maybe it won’t be greater than average necessarily, but it will be DIFFERENT than average, and different from average is at least A step closer to greater than average.  You may not always be stepping forward, but sometimes a step sideways is a step forward when viewed from a different perspective.

Trust me: it's going to get worse

I’ll level with you right now and tell you I have no idea where I’m going with this and that this piece is a total stream of consciousness, but join me for the ride will you?  It’s no secret that I’m a misanthrope.  I am a major non-fan of humanity.  I have said that Thanos lacked ambition, and I apologize if I managed to spoil an old comic book storyline for you with that last bit, but you get the picture.  Of course, misanthropy tends to be, like most prejudices, based off of stereotypes that are amalgamated regarding the majority of a demographic.  And quite frankly, the majority of humans are lacking.  That’s what makes them the majority.  It is what makes them average.  In turn, emulating them is hoping to be them, and this, in turn, is hoping to be something very uninspiring.  And I assume, dear reader, that if you read a blog tangentially based around training to become bigger and stronger, you have a vested interest in becoming bigger and stronger, both compared to your current self AND compared to the average baseline of humanity.  So, once again, why do what everyone else is doing if you hope to be different from everyone else?

And that’s the word we focus on here: different, not necessarily better.  Bigger and stronger is an outlier, as is smaller and weaker.  In both instances, you find yourself in that 10% part of the bell curve on either end, which is, at least, DIFFERENT than average.  To be different than average, one must do the things that are different than average.  Quite simply, one must be “weird”.  They must be off-beat, counter cultural, different, barbaric, alien, foreign, strange, etc, because all of these things are DIFFERENT than average, which in turn promotes a possibility of being GREATER than average.  If you simply do what the average person does, you have a 100% chance of being average.  If you do something that is DIFFERENT than average, you now stand a 50/50 shot of being greater than average, with the other possibility being to be less than average.  But hell, given a 50% chance of failure vs 100% failure, what odds would you take?

Although this is that 50% chance that will 100% of the time result in failure

What are the ramifications of this thought process?  It means you need to start listening, paying attention, and observing the trends around you.  And when you start hearing the same things repeated over and over, ad naseum, it’s time to start doing something OTHER than that.  This is legitimately how I achieved the best results I’ve managed.  Need to give muscles 48-72 hours to rest?  Time to start training everyday.  Need to eat carbs to grow?  Time to cut them out.  Deads have to be deadstop?  Touch and go only for years.  Need to stretch and do mobility work?  Time to cut out the warm ups.  Cardio kills gains?  Up the cardio.  Take time off for injuries?  Train 2 days post surgery.  The advice you hear the most frequently and with the greatest volume is the advice that resonates the greatest with the majority and, in turn, the advice that, if followed, will make you average.

Think of how often a superior trainee puts on a superior display and the majority rushes to rationalize it to fit within their paradigm to avoid cognitive dissonance.  “Oh, that trainee can only do those things because they are the genetic elite/on steroids/lucky/going to get injured ANY day now/fake plates/photoshop/actually a government engineered superhuman powered by the earth’s sun/Mariusz Pudzianowski (wait, I already said superhuman, crap), etc.”  Perhaps, instead, we should consider that MAYBE we observe those that are greater than average doing things DIFFERENT than the average trainee because these differences are HOW one becomes greater.  We see the “cheating” technique on lifts and say it’s something they can “get away with”, NOT considering that MAYBE it’s the thing that helped MAKE the difference.  Instead of diligently running the party program with the party technique, these individuals BECAME individuals, established themselves as different from the pack, and parlayed that difference into greatness.

*Psh* Everyone knows you have to be fat, tall and slow to be a strongman

This is NOT a call for you to go onto some poor forum and inflict yourself upon them, asking them to tailor make a program specifically to your needs.  That’s not being different: that is asking for the MAJORITY to help tailor the knowledge of the majority specifically to you in order to become a paragon OF the majority.  This is a call for you to find those things that no one else is doing and go do them, in the pursuit of getting results that are in any way DIFFERENT from the results everyone else is getting.  Maybe, sometimes, those results will be worse and you’ll have to start over.  But maybe, sometimes, they’ll be better than what everyone else is getting.  Either way, you’ll be on your way to getting different results, and that is the first step on the path to making yourself different from the norm.  If that means you end up better than the norm, that’s just swell.