I confess that I contributed to the meathead stereotype today.
There I am, at the Sam’s Club 1 day sale. I worked from 2200-0600, slept until noon, ate a Red Robin Monster Burger for breakfast lunch aka: meal 2, and I’ve had enough caffeine over the span of 24 hours to kill a hummingbird. So you could say I’m feeling pretty good.
I just finished evaluating if a pair of waterproof cold weather boots would fit my feet by holding them up to the light and throwing a pair of “Axel stretch jeans” into my cart because they have “axel” in the name, even if it’s not quite “axle”, when suddenly an employee says “Hey man, what exercises do you do to get that definition?” while gesturing to his pec/delt tie in area.
I’m wearing my PlayStation t-shirt that I got for $10 at Kohls, so I’m looking good today, and I just look at him blankly and wonder “What kind of meaningful answer could I give this guy in the 7 seconds I want to spend interacting with him?”
My reply was “a lot of them”
…
Thankfully, my wife was there to witness the entire thing, at which point she promptly apologized for accidentally subjecting me to humanity once again while I slunk away, still frazzled from the entire experience.
That was legitimately the second thing I was going to do if he pressed me. He relayed to me that he was using free weights while watching TV and that his diet wasn’t great, and it was just a situation where there was so much work that needed doing that it wasn’t worth trying to seriously tackle the subject.
I did think it was a rather telling interaction of where most people fail with fitness. Everyone is fixated on “what are the things I need to do”, when it’s really “what are the things I need to STOP doing” that make the big difference. If someone STOPS eating like crap, they’ll have a much bigger impact vs if they start doing incline bench AND decline bench.
Had a mate ask me about getting strong after I did the powerlifting comp a few weeks back. He said “do you do lots of forced reps?”. My answer was simply “no I don’t do any”, to which he responded “don’t you have to forced reps to make the muscle stronger”. At this point I am thinking of a quick and easy way to describe block periodisation but decided there wasn’t one. I just replayed “they don’t work that well for me!”
I just give a “yes” to every question that begin with “do/don’t you”. It’s just so much easier and the likelihood the person is asking for information they intend to use rather than to establish some weird knowledge dominance is almost always close to zero.
It’s funny, because I’m big on saying “this stuff isn’t that complicated”, but it IS going to need to take more than a driveby conversation to get the basics down. Does this happen with other sports?
@The_Myth you ever get guys wanting a 10 second tip that will drastically improve their golf swing?
Anything that styles itself as “the BLANK industry” has a vested interest in making whatever it is they do/sell complicated. I can’t fault that. Poor business strategy to go “Oh no no, you don’t need my help at all”
But that said, if I have to explain to someone that you can’t get results by eating junk and doing curls while watching TV, apparently there is a level I’m not even aware of…
Not for the first time this makes me think of lifting much like the trade I’m learning. Seems simple until you start. Then realise it isn’t simple at all and for a fair while it’s pretty complicated and you need a ton of help to get anywhere. Then you get better at it, and eventually it becomes simple again.
I have WAYY too much free time right now and I waste it worrying about the future:
Case in point: I spent a good hour scouring Costco online and Giant Eagle online in attempt to plan out my budget for next year (inspired by my grocery shopping trip this morning)
I am an expensive kid- My lowest estimate is 320 a month
