It’s hard to believe that this summer marks the 10-year anniversary of when I first started lifting weights. I didn’t think I was old enough to have done ANYTHING for 10 years. But lifting has given me some of the most important lessons, closest friends and best experiences of my entire life.
I started lifting during the summer of 2006, shortly after graduating from high school. I was headed off to college and planned to try out for the baseball team, so I knew I needed to get bigger and stronger. I started off training three days a week at the local fitness center. The gym had a circuit of machines and I would do 10 sets of every station, rest a few minutes, then do it all again until I’d done three rounds. It’s pretty funny to look back on that and see the big picture of how far I’ve come.
Once I got to college, I made the baseball team and was given a lifting program from the coach. In hindsight, it was a pretty terrible program, but it got me to use free weights. I was undersized and under-skilled, so I knew I needed to crush it in the weight room to get better. I attacked my workouts with everything I had and saw near-immediate results, as most beginners do. I was completely hooked.
Fast-forward four years and my college baseball career was over. I always knew I’d be a better lifter than a baseball player, so I started training for my first powerlifting meet. If you want a good chuckle (and to see me with hair), watch this:
Fast-forward three more years and I’d finished my Master’s degree in exercise science. Two years later, I completed my internship at Cressey Sports Performance and started working there full-time. Shortly after that, I hit my first elite powerlifting total.
In the moment, I often felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere. Progress seemed painfully slow. But looking back, if you’d told me it would only take 10 years to go from a non-lifter to a strength coach at one of the best facilities in the world, I’d say that sounds just about right.
I’ve amassed some valuable information over a decade under the bar. Here are some of the most important lessons I’ve learned:
1. HARD WORK TRUMPS ALL
A lot of people talk about how passion is the number one ingredient for success, and they’ve got a good argument for that. But in my experience, hard work trumps all.
And not just hard work for the things you’re passionate about, but hard work for EVERYTHING. Hard work for the menial tasks. Hard work for the things you suck at. Hard work for the tasks that help others rather than yourself.
I’ve met plenty of people who are passionate (or rather, they confuse infatuation with passion). But passion doesn’t always lead to action.
Here’s the predictable sequence of events I’ve seen and experienced over and over again (and if you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport):
Hard work –> Skill development –> Passion –> Success
This is a better path than:
Passion –> Lack of skill –> Lack of progress –> Loss of passion
I know tons of people who are passionate about fitness, yet all they do is read books and articles, attend seminars, and debate on Facebook. They train like wimps and have a half-empty client roster. There’s no action to compliment the passion.
I’ve also learned that it’s easy to work your ass off at something you’re good at. I’ve always been a pretty good bench presser, so I have no problem training it like a maniac. Same with the squat. But the deadlift, however, has always given me trouble, and I had to learn to love to train it hard even though it wasn’t my favorite lift. The same goes for assistance exercises like single-leg work, abs, upper back, etc. They’re not much fun, but learning to love working hard at them has made a huge impact on my training success.
Once you learn to work your ass off at the things you suck at, you start to like (or even love) doing those things. That’s where passion is born, and then no one can stop you.
2. PATIENCE IS YOUR GREATEST ASSET
I already mentioned the importance of being patient and seeing the big picture, but it’s worth mentioning again. Fitness is a tremendous test of patience. No doubt so many people fail in their fitness endeavors because they lack patience and give up before they put in the work needed to get where they want to go.
Open up any exercise science textbook and you’ll see information that states it takes about four weeks for strength gains to become noticeable, and 8-12 weeks for gains in muscle size to become noticeable. That’s “too long” for most people to justify the effort needed. And that’s why most people will stay the same forever.
Patience is just as important OUTSIDE the gym. My experience is just one example, but it took me…
- 8 years of lifting before I got a paying personal training job
- 9 years of lifting before I established a profitable online coaching business
- 10 years of lifting before I became an elite-level powerlifter
I’m actually GLAD it took so long, because I had a lot of practical experience by the time fitness became my job. I had developed my own philosophy (which I’ll talk about in a later point) and was better equipped to help my clients.
I’ve learned that the greatest progress is often right around the corner from the greatest struggle. When things get tough, don’t hit the panic button. Stay the course. Good things are soon to come.
3. THE BETTER YOU GET, THE HARDER IT GETS
As if being patient wasn’t hard enough, turns out the better you get at lifting weights, the harder it is to keep getting better.
Your ability to make progress is exponentially better as a beginner. Strength and muscle gains come quickly, but will slow down after the first year or so. It’s a pretty steep drop-off too. This is understandably discouraging, but again, it’s the people who keep pushing that separate themselves from the pack.
The body is a pretty smart organism. Being insanely strong with gigantic muscles isn’t terribly efficient, so the body will constantly resist further change. It takes a ton of work to keep improving, and doing so without hurting yourself can be a challenge. After all, the better you get, the older you get and the heavier the weights you’re handling, which for many can increase the risk of injury over time.
So to keep doing more work over time without getting hurt, it takes a ton of careful planning. Your best bet is to hire a coach. I finally followed my own advice in 2014 and haven’t looked back.
4. YOU MUST DEVELOP YOUR OWN PHILOSOPHY
The fitness world is full of dogma and ambivalence. There are those who are so rigid in their beliefs that they never evolve or learn new things. Then there are those who are so easily influenced by everything they see and hear that they never think for themselves. I’m not sure which is more dangerous.
Some of the best training discoveries you’ll ever make are DURING your training sessions. Reading books will give you ideas, but actually lifting weights will give you the truth. You’ll discover that certain ideas are great in theory but don’t pan out in the real world. You’ll also try new things that go against your beliefs, only to discover that you’ve been wrong all along. Both these scenarios are positive and necessary to keep getting better.
If someone asks you what your training philosophy is, you should have a solid answer, even if it’s, “I’m still working on it.” You can find mine on the Mission page of this website.
5. LIFTING IS CONTINUING EDUCATION
Piggybacking on the last point, I’ve learned that lifting weights is continuing education. The more you train, the more you learn about what works, what doesn’t, and how to apply those truths to the clients you train.
In the aforementioned book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Cal Newport talks about the importance of building “career capital,” which means developing rare and valuable skills needed to do a certain job. I would argue that the things you learn in school or personal training courses (i.e. anatomy, exercise programming, common coaching cues, etc.) are valuable, but not rare.
What’s most rare is the ability to break down complex ideas and communicate them simply to others so they can learn and make progress quickly. You can’t do this unless you’ve experienced these ideas yourself, which gives you the necessary context to coach without overwhelming your client.
For example, there are certain accepted cues for coaching the squat. They include:
- “Chest up”
- “Knees out”
- “Spread the floor”
- “Squat between your knees, not over them”
The list goes on. But what happens when you say these things and your client still doesn’t squat properly? What happens when the squat looks good, but these feel pain in their knees or lower back? You can’t keep saying the same things and expect different results.
It takes a deep, fundamental and PRACTICAL understanding of the squat to teach it to others effectively. If you haven’t done it yourself, you’ll struggle to coach it efficiently, especially when the obvious cues fail.
Under-the-bar experience puts you in the shoes of your clients and athletes. It ultimately gives you an edge over coaches and trainers who’d rather read and theorize than lift and find the truth.
STAY TUNED FOR PART 2
Next time, I’ll cover five more lessons I’ve learned over the past decade. Until then, keep lifting and keep learning.