Lessons Learned With a Bar in My Hands

As I went about my daily chores this morning I found myself thinking; “what the fuck do I stand for?” When you have children, these strange introspective thoughts tend to pop into your head every once in a while. “What do I stand for?” that’s an easy question for me to answer because I live my life by what I call the “man code”. It’s very simple by design; “A man lives a life of integrity and cares for & protects his family”. That’s what I stand for. If what I’m doing doesn’t support this simple code, then it’s fucking wrong…period. My son knows and understands the “man code”. Now that’s all fine and dandy, but it doesn’t exactly lay out a road map to living a successful life for him now does it? As I pondered this idea, my mind kept coming back to training and how the lessons learned in training all cross over into my life. So, in no particular order…here goes.

1. Small goals

Dreams are great and dreams are the foundation of goals, but the goals are the meat and potatoes. You want to live a jet set lifestyle, have a fat pad in the Hamptons and bang supermodels every night? That’s great kid, but maybe you should be focused on learning this math first. You want to be a world record powerlifter and you dream of standing on that platform with your arms raised in front of 3 white lights? That’s great, but maybe you should be focused on adding 5 more pounds to your squat this month. The small stuff isn’t fun and it’s not sexy, but achieving all of those small goals will eventually add up to a tsunami of success in the long run. There are no short cuts in lifting or in life.

2. Compound movements.

To be effective in life, you need to really focus on the big and important stuff. You cannot allow yourself to get wrapped up in the minutia of life. You should spend the majority of your time doing the boring stuff, the hard stuff and the shit that really matters. If you’re hosting a barbeque, “maybe you should cut that knee high grass first…Slick, and make that beer run later”. Same goes for getting stronger; you need to focus on the stuff that really matters.  Build strength and mass with a shit ton of heavy squatting, pulling and pressing, and do some detail work later, as time/energy permits. That’s where it’s at.

3. Consistency

Consistency over time is king. You’re going to have some good and some bad days, but 90% of your days will be boring and average. Whatever life hands you, you’ve got to keep punching that clock. Don’t get down though, because when you string all of those boring and average days together over time, it’ll add up to a shitload of progress. Adding 5 pounds per month to your squat is boring as hell, but if you keep punching that clock, you’ll have added 60 pounds in a year’s time. That’s a solid gain and that’s the power of consistency. Again, there are no shortcuts here; in life and in lifting. Be there for your family, show up on time, finish what you start; be consistent every day. You really can’t make up for lost time.

4. Specialization

We only have so much time and energy; and you can either half ass a lot of things or be really great at a few things. You have to decide what is most important to you and then really get after it. In life and in lifting, you need to balance what you want and understand that it’s a sliding scale. If one thing goes up, another thing will probably go down. You’re getting bigger and stronger…well; you’re probably running slower and putting on some fat. Your squat and bench are going up…well; your deadlift is probably in the toilet right now. Career’s going great and your making money hand over fist…well; you’re probably not spending a lot of quality time with your family these days. Understand? There is nothing wrong with this, and you can “balance” it, but if you want to be really, really awesome at one aspect of your life, then another aspect will suffer.

5. Sometimes, you just need to do some stupid shit

You’ll never really know what you are capable of until you’ve done some stupid pointless shit. My first triathlon was by far the hardest race I’ve ever done. At that point in my life, I had never competed in anything like that…not even a 5k fun run. I signed up for the race about 2 months out and proceeded train, I had to learn to swim first…stupid right! I didn’t get a wink of sleep and the race took about 3 hours to complete, and it took everything I had to will myself to the finish line. The mental toughness that this stupid shit builds, will bleed into the rest of your life. So last month my wife called me and said that the car overheated and she was about 2 miles from the house. It’d been a solid 6 months since I did more than a brisk walk, but “hell it’s only 2 miles”. I dropped the phone and took off running and I was there in less than 15 minutes. There is no doubt in my mind that I could blast out 10 miles to get to my family if I had to. That’s confidence built through stupidity right there.

Every challenge that life throws you is an opportunity to grow, to develop that mental toughness that will serve you for the rest of your life. You should seek it out in my opinion. So work 2 jobs and attend school full time when you’re young. One job and a family will be a piece of cake down the road. Join the Marines and endure boot camp…hell, try out for the Special Forces while you’re at it. A few sleepless nights with a new baby will be a piece of cake after that shit. Go out and do some hard shit, son.  

Undisciplined (or) not Disciplined?

Discipline…this is a huge buzzword around here. “We’re not disciplined.” “They are not disciplined.” “Drivers lack discipline.” Blah, blah, blah….

I have the grave misfortune of being forced to take a class called “Moral Recovery and Restoration”. School has been in session for a month and we just had our first class last week. This is totally normal at my school by the way, and as it turns out, class is cancelled this week too. As it was explained to me, this is a class designed to restore the moral values of the country (AND) wait for it…the discipline. True to the school’s mission statement, this is a class designed to develop “responsible, patriotic and noble Filipinos”.

What they mean by “discipline” is someone’s willingness to follow rules. This got me thinking about the school’s soft approach regarding discipline. They go out of their way to have a full blown class to tell students that they should follow rules, when in fact; all they need to do to accomplish their goal is to…wait for it…..actually enforce the rules they already have.

So what I’m saying is this: if you want disciplined students, then you need to quit treating your rules like guidelines, and actually discipline your students. This is pretty simple.

I honestly believe that the root of the “discipline” problem is that people don’t know which rules are important and which ones are not. Some people are just dishonest and self-centered, but the majority of folks want to do what is right. A lot of this stuff seems like common sense to an outsider; like not cutting in line, not cheating, etc. But you have to keep in mind that you likely came from an environment that actually enforced these rules/norms, and you were conditioned for years and years to conform, so now deviation makes you feel “strange”.

I’ll use myself as an example. There are signs in classrooms that read “no eating, drinking, or smoking”, but I carry a water bottle with me everywhere and drink it all day long.  I consider that rule to be more of a guideline and I’ve justified this “rule breaking” in my mind. “It’s just water, blah, blah, blah”. I’ve justified my behavior in my own mind and no one seems to give two shits about it, so I don’t either. Does that make me an undisciplined person?  That’s a grey area, and the answer depends on perspective.

So here I sit in a college full of “adults” that can’t seem to follow even the basics of social consideration; like waiting your turn in line or not talking at 100 decibels in the library. This basic stuff is rarely enforced via institution or by individuals. Therefore, these self-centered individuals just do whatever the hell they want, as the school sits around TALKING big with no real action.  

Then you have the important stuff. I was in a class where the cheating during an exam was so bad that I literally couldn’t concentrate and I requested to take my exam in another room. The students were talking throughout and exchanging papers and the teacher didn’t say shit. Do you see my point? These students are undisciplined BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT BEING DISCIPLINED. If the institution actually cared about their own mission statement, they would have enforced their own rule and suspended the entire class.

So the message that they are sending with these contradictions is that you will leave this institution as a “responsible and noble Filipino” but cheating is okay. The message is that cheating is a grey area, just like my water bottle example. “Rules are merely guidelines, so justify cheating, plagiarism, and generally rude behavior anyway you see fit, young noble.”