Category: General

One of the most powerful sources of power we have is our ability to see in our mind’s eye what we want. There are times when lying quietly on your back with your eyes closed that you can bring your dream into sharp focus. It’s so real you can touch it, taste it, experience it…..I dare say that is at these moments when what we want is solidified. All greatness begins in the deep recesses of hearts and minds. This perfect realization and clarification is often all it takes to get us to lust and thirst after a goal.

Next, in order to stay focused on the journey we/you have to make a way forward that leads to success. We cannot leave anything to chance if we are to win. I call this type of focus, “ASYMMETRICAL LIVING!”.….In order to win we have to choose a path that excludes the notion that “all will be well if we just invoke the “YING AND YANG.” Experience has taught all of us that winning takes a singular mind and the only thing that is balanced in any way is the type, sequence, and organization of our training regimen. The journey truly starts here. You’re organized, you have a plan, so get going.

Thirdly, in an effort to stay focused on your journey to greatness, you need to be absolutely sure that you know what success looks like to you. There’s an old saying, “HE WHO AIMS FOR NOTHING HITS IT EVERYTIME!” Tons of time and attention has to be be paid to get this right. Remember, some people have an attitude that they play the game “NOT TO LOSE” rather than to play to win. To avoid this quandary we have to sharply clarify where we are going and why. If the target is clear, you tend to not take your eye off the bullseye.

Finally, in bodybuilding we muscle heads learn that focus, motivation, discipline, and a self motivational “MANTRA” must be in place during every rep, every workout, always on our minds to keep us going in the right direction and why. I repeat my “MANTRA” with each rep, Is under my breath, “DO THE WORK!” It serves as a constant whip to get me to engage and stay engaged. Ever focusing on “MY JOURNEY TO GREATNESS.”

In Closing: Develop an acute attitude if “SITUATIONAL AWARENESS.” Know where you are going at all times. Know how you’re going to get there. Know what it’s going to take in terms of sacrifice and effort. This will keep you focused on your journey to GREATNESS! Never stop! Never look back. Do it alone! Hear the words of a fellow iron worker because they are true. The journey to GREATNESS will appear and will never disappear. It’s up to you!

Now this is a scenario worth watching….I or you or some other dude actually sits down with a blank sheet of paper his journal and begins writing. He first attacks his master plan to be absolutely broke and penniless. He imagines as he writes just how crummy life will be and he gets excited. Nothing is worse than being a pauper but to this fella being a victim of abject poverty is his life’s goal. His fantasy world is alive! Next, he carefully constructs a plan to do no physical activity. His goal is double his high school weight within a year. He marks this milestone down on his paper. He transfers his objective to his calendar and prints it in bold print and changes the color to red…so he won’t possibly forget that his fat ass has now doubled in size in the last year. He relishes the thought of being a self-made toad via total neglect. Thirdly, he goes through a few minutes of reflection and decides that he will volunteer for nothing, he will endeavor to lead a pointless life with nothing to move him off the couch. No work today or ever! Lastly, as they say, you cannot fix stupid. Stupid is a byproduct of willfully ejecting your agency and/or your will in order to do that which you know is false or to destroy oneself on purpose. This is the road of self annihilation self inflicted serfdom .

BUT!!!! This self inflicted plan of death cannot and must not occur. Sure we will go through times that are not so good. But, we first must develop a plan to countermand the inertia that so naturally drags us to an early grave with little to show for it. Let’s begin and let’s follow a very simple yet daily and rigid plan: First, We have to get job skills such that we can support ourselves. Maybe our education or our job skills will be good enough to support a family, buy a home, raise some kids, someday send them to college. I submit that if we do this one thing we will not be fat, we will not be lazy, and certainly we will not be stupid.

In bodybuilding as in life, if you don’t put out the effort then all that we do not want for ourselves will kill us. We have to learn at the feet of other bodybuilders who can share and teach us how to do it right. We have to never let a day go by that is aimed at our body weight, it’s appearance. We are not stupid if we do what is demanded of us. There are no shortcuts unless we follow the road of total intellectual, physical, and spiritual neglect.

Bottom Line: If you want nothing, aim for nothing and you’ll hit it everytime. If you want to be better make a plan. Fix your goal in your mind. Start! Never look back. Ignore anybody who tells you to stop or makes fun of you for trying. Small mindedness never wins anything!

WOW! I could write a New York Times Best Seller bout this...Just think of the many ass kickings we’ve taken over our lifetimes. Think of each one and remember how lonely you were and how you could not seem to see a way out or a way forward. Maybe you can recall the long walk home, numbed to the bone and the tears hitting your sleeve like huge raindrops. Maybe you think back on the hours alone on your bed reliving the pain of the current failure, then fretting over how you will face all those that had faith in you but re no disappointed with your loss. Holy Moly! I am sitting here writing this with tons of regret and emotional pain. Ouch!

The lesson that is so obvious is that we have to learn on the job. We can’t change a thing but we can learn to resolve that we are going to stand up, take a deep breath, pull off our dirty clothes, take a shower and generate the energy and determination to kick the door down and get back out there and win. If we stay down we are defeated. So! Get your asses up and figure it out. It won’t come in a flash but you and your warrior personality will match the pain of the most recent debacle with focus, drive, and a gigantic push. We have to regain the “full tank of want to” as fast as we can.

I hate getting crushed. I hate worse to feel totally sideline, marginalized, and out of the race. We have to learn hatred! We have to hate being down. We can’t avoid it but we can get up via sheer will if we have the guts to do it.

My last time out on stage I got killed. I could not hide my half assed effort from the judges. Down I went. Now! since facing my idiocy and my public demise I have determined, “This will never happen again!” I’m off the undo the results of a self-inflicted wound.

Bottom Line: If you want to win you must choose to be better in the face of overwhelming down inertia after defeat. To not rise to the occasion tells you a story of a soul who has settled at a much lower station in life than is possible. DON’T DO IT! Thinking you are beaten is a trap from which nobody ever returns…..Like the “EVERY MAN STORY”…..we must win (get up) and return home victorious. There is the only satisfying ending to defeat…..See you at the WINNER’S CIRCLE!

We are all familiar with the saying, “We do not want to play to lose!” Sometimes we are so daunted by the competition or the task at hand we become doubtful that we have what it takes to win. So, we defer to just being happy being on the playing field rather than being stoked to win at any cost. In my estimation there is nothing worse than playing for a “PARTICIPATION TROPHY!” I can recall while playing high school football that we were going to play the #1 Team in the state. I’ll be damned if our coaching staff told us to “just do your best!” That little pep talk or lack thereof sucked the wind right out of the room. We almost felt like we ought to not even play the game. The primary source of our motivation to win had just told us that they did not believe in us…..We got killed! The rest of the season we never lost a game. We dug deep and found out something about us that was priceless. We could win even when the world didn’t think we had a chance. This little lesson has served me well throughout my life. The mantra goes something like this, “Do the work!” — “Nobody outworks me!” I have developed a philosophy that says, “you can lift more than me but in the end you will never be able to keep up with me.” Sure, I’ve gotten my butt kicked on stage and it’s no fun. But, in the end I have to determine to be better next time. I return to the basics of never being outworked and allowing no room to entertain failure in my mind. Every ritual revolves around be the best despite feeling alone and beaten. Persistence is nothing more than developing habits that project yourself as a winner. When you are beaten you have to shift your thinking to determine that being beaten is temporary and my hard work will reflect my persistence to win.

Bottom Line: To be the best you have to know that failure is not forever….Get up and keep going despite the pain…..

Try to imagine being beaten so badly at something that you could never even think of coming back. Never in a million years would you again subject yourself to such pain, such humiliation, such personal debasement. The beating was so bad that each thought associated with the defeat creates nightmares. The nightmares give way to being haunted by temptations to end it all.

We have all been here. That last bodybuilding show when we were handed our heads on a platter. Our egos were crushed and all we could hear in our heads was the drum beat of criticism and taunts. It is here that all of us who eventually won and became more than we ever imagined started…..at the bottom. Like somebody once said, “When you are the deep end and our knees hit the bottom, it is here that we gather ourselves and push hard off the bottom to the surface.” This is our reality in bodybuilding and life. There will be things that will crush our very spirits if we let it happen.

It’s easy to ride high on success. It’s easy to be a fair weather hero. It’s easy to pump our fist in the air in victory when it’s happening. But! In order to get to the top AND STAY THERE we have to endure the worst of times. We have to overcome the worst of times. We have to literally, turn the night into day when we have been written off and often when we have written ourselves off.

There is no magic formula….Like Muhamad Ali Said, “Your will has to exceed your skill!” We have to have a gigantic store house of “WANT TO” and ‘SELF MASTERY” or all the skill and talent in the world will be useless to be our best. The greatest question we must face in my estimation is, “WHEN DARKNESS COMES WHAT WILL YOU DO?” Being our best will be determined by our ability to handle the worst. Every bodybuilder I know who has had any degree of success knows this to be true.

Bottom Line: Experiencing the worst is the beginning of being the best.

My Father-in-Law, Congressman David S. King, D. Utah said often, “The hardest but best lessons I ever learned came when I failed miserably.” These lessons that are gotten under the worst of situations and through the hardest experiences —-never leave us and are forever drawn upon to guide us.

On a practical note, when we are training and things are either super boring or we are distracted by other things that are bugging us, we have to reach deep. Block out the badness until we finish and then go take care of the personal business. Then, there are other times when we get injured (arm, leg, shoulder, hips, knee) somewhere and life in the gym becomes much different for awhile. The pain that we have to fight through is often “deafening” and discouraging. I have a basic principle that I use because I am notorious for “over training” and I’m always in danger of a major injury. I use the mantras, “Do the work!” as I train. and then if I get injured, I plug in the next mantra, “Work Around it!” Emotional distraction or injury requires us to find another way to get the job done without stopping the progress. Let me reiterate, that these moments or times of great pain and discouragement teach us tons about ourselves and how to be better despite the pain.

Stay the course no matter what. But! Do take the time to learn from the harshness that life will deal to us. It doesn’t matter if the pain we go through is fair or not. What matters is that we learn how to win despite the pain. It’s also interesting that there are particular challenges involving pain that can only teach us what we need to know. For instance. If our coach has been telling us to do things a certain way, or at a particular time, or for a certain number of repetitions and we ignore the coach we suffer a set back of epic proportions—-We finally get the message. The suffering we caused ourselves is more than we can handle. We change. We progress. We please our coach and ourselves. We win.

In closing: I have a T-Shirt from Branch Warren that says, “Suffering Leads to Greatness!” In summary, this is the essence of learning our BEST LESSONS through pain……See all of you in the crucible of pain that teaches….

This is an indictment that all of us should integrate and allow it to penetrate all the way down to our bones. After we have cleared the gang of opposition that always presents itself to us when we want to accomplish a goal, there are a precious few of our friends, family, and associates that remain. This group believes in us. They go so far as to say it out loud and to tell us to our faces that they want us to do well and that they are pulling for us.

This group of people that truly believe in us demands that we crank up our dedication and our efforts. These friends deserve to be shown that their belief in is not wasted. They need to know that you are living up to your own expectations which serves as a great foundation for our fans to continue investing in their support for our endeavor.

I always point out the various bands and groups that perform in front of thousands of their faithful fans and how they dress like slovenly, dirty, bums as they play the best music in the world. To me these self absorbed little punks display the greatest disdain for the public that pays their salaries. It’s total disrespect for the people that truly love their music. The paying public deserves to be counted as worthy and appreciated. Nobody is arguing that they are bad musicians. We just think they need to act like professionals

When it comes to us, we have to have a sense honor and respect for all those that have invested themselves in our support. Demonstrate to them that they are important and that we truly care about making them happy since they have become our partners in success.

Bottom Line: We dare not insult those that believe in us by not dedicating ourselves to winning. They have given of themselves and we dare not let our dedication decrease. We may never get this sort of personal endorsement back if we denigrate our closest fans belief in us. They deserve our best so never give it away…..This is a very hard life lesson—so let’s learn it well….

Someone has said, “You begin where you are.” Very pithy but it’s true….In a mathematical sense a VECTOR has Magnitude and Direction. But, in order to have a VECTOR there has to be a starting point. Basic to all experience in our world is that we have to start somewhere and we have to have a plan to get somewhere else. In each of our worlds there is a desire to be successful or accomplished at something. So, we take stock of who we are, what or who we want to become, and where these things are located. We lay out the plan to move toward our own personal definition/description of success. We begin the journey. Simple enough.

The part that we rarely prepare for or even anticipate is the opinions of others about our definition of success. As soon as we begin talking about our plans, the posse of naysayers and doubters always appears. All of them want a piece of our vision to dismantle, to tear up, to ridicule and to destroy. This is a reality of the world that we do not address nor do we have the tools to combat and turn back. Without a proper internal and personal response we are doomed to believe the mob and tear up our dream. But, if we believe in what we want then we will devise a way to win despite the self-appointed opposition.

The TEST for us is whether we can side step the verbal barbs of doubt and ridicule to continue on toward the goal and the win. I would say that 90% of all announcements to others about our plans to win are met with scorn with resultant discouragement.

Do you remember when you first decided to compete on stage as a bodybuilder? WOW! You had just as well told your closest (alleged) friends that you were going to drive a VW to the Austrian Alps from Colorado, Ocean not withstanding. The chuckling, the dramatic physical taunting (Archer Pose) was unending. But, we somehow, pushed ahead out of their sight and began the journey.

The TEST is whether you really believe that you can win despite all the opposition. Herein lies the secret of winning. Discipline does not care whether you are discouraged, whether you are tired, whether you don’t feel like doing it…..You do it anyway. To get over the doubts of others, and the TESTING we have to shut off all feelings and do the work no matter what.

Bottom Line: If you want to win, you have to prepare to win and be willing to withstand doubt and to endure the testing that will inevitably come. This is our challenge: We have to overcome doubt and testing to have that which we seek!

There are times in our lives when we wish things were different—-somehow. Things are either so boring and predictable that motivation has taken a vacation or things are soooo cataclysmically bad that the pain and suffering has to go away or we just know we will die. In either case we have decided to separate ourselves from the humdrum or the pain and be better.

Change is hard! The first thing we have to do is decide what we want to change to. Basic underpinning philosophy is that no matter where we are, change is absolutely necessary if we are to progress and move on to be a winner. I hate it when I finally realize that what I am doing is no longer working. But, it’s here that I scan the horizon for that new “thing’ that will get me to where I want to go. Again! Change is hard. We get so accustomed to doing something suboptimally ore badly that we cannot imagine doing it differently. Take for instance training. Somebody taught us a particular methodology and for a long time it worked. Now, however, it has become boring and the gains are not coming quite so fast.

First step is to decide that a change is needed. Get alone like you did in the beginning and come to the realization that nothing good is going to occur unless we make a switch. Secondly, we have to devise a new way of doing things. We read, we talk to training partners, our coach, other competitors and we arrange a new path forward based on tons of thinking and research. Thirdly, we attack our new regimen with a vengeance! Push, Pull, Lift, and suffer the many new changes that have to be put into place. Do not look back….The old way is gone forever. This new road is your way of showing others and yourself that we have the “STRENGTH” to change when our reality was not good and it was going nowhere fast.

Lastly, know that your change is the bedrock that you will build a much more secure and happier future. This change will reinforce in you that we are capable of doing things differently when chage is required.

Bottom Line: Change is hard. But by sheer force of character, will, and personal strength we can win. We love a routine but there will come a time when our old routine will never serve us well again. Reach deep and apply the inner strength needed to change. This is our calling to be better and to win

There are times when we feel like tomorrow will never come. I/we feel stuck in the moment and there just is not a clear path forward. Regretfully, all of us tend to live down to this mindset rather than rise above it. The response for most of us is short lived but it still happens. We mope around, mad at the world, believing we are defeated etc. What a sucky place to be. But, there is another way to see ourselves and it takes a little effort to get beyond the current self-annihilation perspective. Let me explain the obvious.

First, especially if you are a bodybuilder, we understand intuitively and experientially, that there are days and sometimes (rarely) weeks where nothing goes right. An injury, a relationship that goes out the window, people who say that they are our friends begin to say bad things about us. A death in the family, a sick child, a personal spiritual crisis. All of these things take their toll on our self-confidence and they tend to derail us, our direction, and our forward movement. Again, these things suck big time. I don’t have a “quick fix” for any of this stuff, but in order to get to our “FINAL DESTINATION” which we alone define, we have to get over the hump.’

For me personally, I try not to define myself by today’s standards or problems. I try to lift up my mind high enough to remember who I am and where I’m going. This effort is Herculean but it is the only remedy for self doubt and a resulting poor self image. Sadly, as we go through these times of darkness others begin to see the downward spiral. Ouch! Let’s not belabor all this.

It is here that we have to remember a few things: 1.). Why you started 2.) What it’s taken to get to where you are 3.) What the plan has been to get to our “FINAL DESTINATION” 4.) Remember where you want to go. Starkly, in writing if necessary, state our own definition of our “FINAL DESTINATION.”

Lastly, never let anybody else define our “FINAL DESTINATION” by where we are at the moment. This is OUR BUSINESS and it is sacred work. Guard your heart with all diligence and let nobody define you by where you are this moment. Bodybuilders are special because we express the journey in ways nobody else will ever understand. Keep at it! I’ll see your at “YOUR FINAL DESTINATION!”-–Call me when you arrive…..LOL