Bodybuilding is a fascinating sport.
It is absolutely spellbinding, the way your body responds to sweaty physical training. It is simply incredible the way your muscles absorb and handle hard work. The way your body decides how and when to recover.
Truth be told, there is nothing new in bodybuilding and the principals building muscle are not complicated. They are very simple.
You pick up a heavy object. You put it down.
You pick it up. You put it down.
You hang on long enough to repeat that motion several times, until your muscles grow wobbly and tired.
When you are finished, you need to feed your body good protein and fulfill all the other nutritional needs. Give the muscle a lot of rest. Wait and repeat the exercise twice a week. With enough time, over a period of months and years, your muscles will grow.
Your body will noticeably change.
Simple. Yet, without one insight, it becomes complicated.
Bodybuilding takes a lot of time and long term commitment. A lot of it. But even with a strong sense of will, tenacity, and pure determination, very little happens, unless you learn to push through the pain.
Nothing ever happens until you learn to drive through the signals of pain, and overcome your inclination to quit.
Nothing short of everything will be enough.
You see, you are renting a very smart machine. Your human body would rather not go through the experience of tearing itself down, so it has to build itself back up.
Who does?
Which is why we search out comfort, stability, and are obedient to conform.
Weight training or happiness for that matter, takes a lot work. They take some time.
Your brain will try to dissuade you and convince you to quit. It shows you grand vision of immediate joy and rest if you do. Why? Because if things remain the same, if you don’t push boundaries, there is nothing to do. Nothing to repair. Nothing to build.
High fives all around.
We know without any doubt that our biceps or glutes grow when the individual muscle fibers in our muscles are torn, and they are tough. They don’t tare easy.
You need a whole lotta weight. A whole lotta reps. A whole lotta love, and then, in that very last movement, when you’ve fought through the pain and mental static to stop, you finally rip them, and you leave your body no other choice but to recreate itself. To build something better.
A journalist once asked Muhammad Ali how many sit ups he did to stay in such great shape. He replied that he didn’t know. He doesn’t start counting, until it starts hurting.
So, learn your lesson and don’t start counting, until it starts hurting.
Our success, our happiness, our dreams, and our muscle work on the same principals.
Too many times, we quit too soon. We quit too often.
We stop several meters before we should. We run a good race. We work hard, but we never finish. We take the wrong advice at the wrong moment from ourselves. We must hold fast and remember to only start counting, when it starts hurting.
We must tear our success fibers. We must tire out our dreams.
These little vignettes of thought that I write every morning, here at tenminas.ca are new to me.
I have no idea where this is going. I have no idea what it all means. I do trust somehow, that what I am trying to do here will last, that deep down, I am building something. I have committed myself to the task of being a professional writer. My job is to write. I write every day, and hope that in time my mind will rebuild itself into something I cannot see. Into something I could have never imagined.
So, get back to working hard.
Or, don’t ever stop, when you get tired.
Don’t tear yourself down. Stop saying mean things about yourself.
Focus instead on your success muscle.
Work it. Grind it out.
Keep digging.
Until you’ve arrived on the other side.
