BLESSED ARE THE GEEK: THE BENEFITS OF EXISTING ON THE FRINGE

I have never been cool.  I grew up a fat kid, from day 1, which I most recently learned was primarily because my parents followed the conventional wisdom at the time of the 80s to put cereal in our bottles so that we’d fatten up and sleep through the night faster, which meant I quite literally never had a chance, and from the first day of school I was an obvious target.  My family was also not particularly high income, so most of my clothes were hand me downs from my brother, Walmart specials my grandmother got me for Christmas, “Payless” brand shoes, etc.  From there, I also had nerdy hobbies: I loved video games, martial arts (they were NOT cool back then: this wasn’t MMA), Magic The Gathering, Pokemon, comic books and their trading cards, etc, and I shunned most sports, primarily because I was bad at them (but, keep in mind, this was 30+ years ago, so I still PLAYED a bunch of them growing up compared to today’s perpetual inside kids).  Even when I lost the weight in high school and got into lifting, it didn’t suddenly make me cool, despite what a lot of young trainees HOPE will happen when they start lifting: I was now just the nerdy kid that lifted weights.  After graduating from college at age 21, I married my college sweetheart (who is still with me to this day: I really struck gold), and my first car as a minivan…we had no kids…and I loved that van and drove it for 13 years.  And as a married man with a minivan, you can surmise that I did NOT spent my early 20s partying…especially as a non-drinker, smoker, or recreational drug user.  I say none of this seeking your sympathy: the opposite in fact.  I say all of this to establish what an INCREDIBLE advantage I had with this upbringing.  I’ve NEVER been cool so, in turn, I’ve never been in any sort of rush to conform or comply with what IS cool.  I’ve ALWAYS existed on the fringe, which has, in turn, given me access to SO many more opportunities compared to those that ONLY know the straight and narrow party-approved methods and ways forward.

Wisecracking smart aleck nerdy strong dude: there's a reason I resonate so well with this character

In point of fact, upon my own self-examination, it would appear that my lifetime perpetual uncoolness has resulted in me simply having my OWN bias that just so happens to REJECT the mainstream vs seek it: counter-culture purely for its own sake, which is trite and tedious in of itself on a social level (going back to my own 90s roots, the goth kids hanging out at Hot Topic just to form their own bizarro reverse-cliques) BUT, as it relates to physical transformation, has been a boon.  Holy cow that was a crazy run-on sentence.  But harken back to a key point I’ve made time and again: if you keep doing what everyone else is doing, you’re going to get the results that everyone else is getting.  In order to BE different, one must ACT differently, and this relates to methods and methodology employed in the pursuit of physical transformation.  One does not necessarily guarantee BETTER results, but they will at LEAST be different results, and those of us perpetually uncool individuals are VERY familiar and downright comfortable with being different.

 

This lifetime existence on the fringe made it that the idea of 20 breathing squats followed by pullovers to expand my ribcage and a gallon of milk a day made SO much sense to me, despite, to this day, having young trainees STILL try to inform me that you need more volume than that, squats don’t build the upper body, you can’t expand your ribcage, a gallon of milk a day will only make you fat and give you diabetes, and you can only gain .5lbs of muscle a week and anything after that is 100% pure fat.  Even IF all of that was true, one CANNOT account for the intangible benefits that came with my pursuit of Super Squats early in my lifting journey (but not early enough, because god DAMN do I wish this was my first ever program): I learned how to push myself STUPIDLY hard in the weight room AND in the dinning room, how to OBSESS over progress, and how to eat, live and breathe training: a skillset that was INVALUABLE in my pursuit of physical transformation, and came into play when I pursued ANOTHER fringe program by way of Jon Andersen’s Deep Water program.  Wherein, once again, the training AND the nutrition contained within it completely violated all semblance of what was “cool” and, once again, by following the protocol, I unlocked SO much inside of myself that simply could not be done if I stuck with the mundane 3-5 sets of 8-12 reps for 2-4 exercises per muscle group that all the cool kids did while they calculated their macros based off their TDEE with the ideal macro spread of chicken, rice and broccoli. 

In a world where "chicken, rice and broccoli" is somehow cool, be uncool and eat steak and eggs

 

My mind simply cannot be satisfied or placated by coolness, for I interpret it as “mundaneness” and, ultimately, ineffectiveness.  A program that is based around balance and gradual returns simply will not satisfy me: I need stupid gimmicks and hooks that fly in the face of all accepted conventions.  It’s honestly amazing I never got into HIT honestly, but maybe that’s because I somehow KNEW there was going to be a resurgence of it thanks to Tik Tok and it would one day become cool again, so I headed that off at the past.  And my nutrition has been this way as well: I was low-carb BEFORE it was cool, which, of course, meant I had to go take it in an even stupider direction once that got tired out and ended up becoming Captain Carnivore while the rest of the community derided it.  I honestly wouldn’t know how to function if I wasn’t getting made fun of for the way I do things: it’s literally the ONLY way I’ve ever known how to live.  And again: I don’t say this to lament my upbringing, but simply to highlight it.  There’s this mythos that those who get bullied take up lifting weights in order to create “armor” to protect themselves and that they grow stronger as a form of overcompensation, but perhaps what we’re instead observing is the instance wherein a lifetime of existing on the fringe sets one up to select the methods that are going to ensure a different outcome on the quest for physical transformation compared to what the majority will experience. 

Although if you ARE going to get revenge on bullies, this is MUCH better material than "bully beatdown"

 

Those that have existed on the fringe in perpetuity will be the ones who end up becoming the outliers as a result of fringe methods producing fringe results.