I have to start out today's post with a quote from Coach Zach Even-Esh. I've always loved Zach's work and highly recommend his books and programs Today he started off his with this little gem:
"As always, I will be honest with you AND I will push you. This is the ONLY way we will
grow and evolve as humans.
If I don't push you towards the greater YOU, then I am wasting your time.
If I am not honest with you, then you can't trust me.
... If I am sharing something with you, the goal is because I know it will make you a stronger person,
mentally, physically and hopefully, spiritually."
--Zach Even-Esh, Underground Strength Coach
Anyway, on to today's post:
I may be able to load the gun for you, but only you can pull the trigger. And you won't get anything if you don't pull that trigger.
A few years back I had one of my collegiate athletes come to me looking to gain some muscle mass. He and I had worked together on making him a successful athlete on the international scene in sport Karate, as well as on the collegiate level as a tennis player, and we worked very well together. It was the start of summer break and his girlfriend was going to be on vacation with her family for about 3 weeks. He wanted to see how much he could change his body in that time. I put him on a solid mass building program and sure enough by the end of the three weeks, he had gained 15 pounds of muscle. He now had well built arms and shoulders, a thickly muscled back, solid pecs, and impressive thighs to go along with his already chiseled abs. Not only was he impressed, but his older brother was blown away. When his girlfriend returned from her trip, she was impressed beyond belief. It was definitly a great success.
Last August, I decided to have a go at a similar mass building routine. I figured that at my age and with my fitness levels and experience I'd be really lucky to gain somewhere between 5 and 7 pounds. However, using a similar routine to what I had given my athlete a few years earlier, I managed to gain 22 pounds of muscle in 4 weeks. I was more than blown away, as was my awesome bride. This type of routine had really proven itself to me in both instances.
So, last September when I had a 17 year old come to see me that wanted to gain some muscle mass I was excited. Here was someone that was a total beginner (of course beginner's tend to make much more impressive gains than intermediate or advanced trainees), he was at a time in his life where his hormones were already off the walls (making it much easier to make the gains he wanted), and he seemed hungry to make those gains. I gave him his exercise and eating program, taught him how to properly do each exercise, and sent him on his way (my mistake, I should have made sure that he continued to work with me for each session) confident that in the next 6 weeks he could easily gain 10, 20, 30 or more pounds of quality muscle mass.
What happened? Nothing. He never pulled the trigger. He never completed a single one of the workouts that I had given him, never followed a single eating principal, and he'd never even given one ounce of sweat in the gym. Of course he had excuses galore, "Breathing Squats are too hard," "My parents told me that heavy weights were bad for me," "Bent rows and Benching made me sore," etc. But the truth was this, he never gave one thought to a simple fact, that the only way to achieve anything is through busting your ass and putting your all into your exercise and eating programs!
As Coach Pavel Tsatsouline once said, "The body doesn't want to change for the better. You cannot seduce it, cajole it, or sweet talk it into changing. Ask anybody that's ever tried to either gain muscle or lose fat. Changing your body is hard, and the only way to do it is through hard work. Giving it a stimulus strong enough to force an adaptation." I might be paraphrasing there, but it was something like that.
The moral, no matter how great of a program that you have, you'll never get any results if you never put that program into practice and give it your all. So go out there and take your program by the balls and work it into the ground. Really go for it, follow it and push it as hard as you can.
I'll talk with you more later. If your train today, train hard and smart and really kick ass!
Yours in strength and health,
Brett
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