MUSCLE CHURCH: Our Father, the Iron

Did you make it or did you give up? Blogs and self-help gurus abound with talk of defining your own success and what that means, and most of it is good advice. We should be looking inward, not outward, to determine what success is and what it means to us, individually, to consider ourselves a success. Sometimes I worry though, that defining your own success can easily just become a way of moving the goal posts to make it easier for you to stop pushing. Consider the person who wants to lose 50 pounds. They map out their plan, the do the work and they stay honest about all of it, but when the last two or three pounds don’t come off, suddenly the fervor to lose 50 pounds turns into the complacency of losing 47. The rationalization begins with, “well, close enough, right?” Then you start to dismantle why you wanted to lose 50 to begin with. This monolithic number, suddenly becomes just a silly little round number that doesn’t mean anything because you lost a ...

I won’t ever try to pass myself off as an expert in anything other than myself, but I want to share some of the wisdom I’ve learned along the way and hopefully from my lifetime of failing some of you can glean something useful. I don’t mind saying that I am a person who has failed in life repeatedly and will continue to do so, because so much more is learned from failure than from success. At all levels, in any industry, failure is the driving force behind evolution and refinement but in our society we still demonize failing and my belief is that the constant barrage of “perfect” people on social media further eats away at those who are just trying to do a little bit better. There is a cost for success, but not every failure is a true setback-I contend that most are not. Let us take a trip back in the time machine to me in the ninth grade. I was then a doughy 260-270 pounds without an ounce of knowledge about training or nutrition, but I was in weight lifting class because I...

--> Some thoughts on setting yourself up for success and avoiding some major markers for failure. There are much more complex and complicated things at play these days compared to the dingy weight room of my rural high school in 1997. Social media is awesome, but so many people, myself included, don’t seem to figure out the negative effects of it until it’s too late. Aside from the constant desire to remain connected and the endless battles with trolls, we get exposed to so many messages and that alone can skew our perception of what we want and who we are. Instagram is the de facto social network for fitness and training, but it’s easy to forget that most of the major players in that realm do that for work, because their job is to be models and spokespersons for products. I’m sure that many of them would love for you to achieve your goals, but at the end of the day they need followers and engagement in order to make a buck. These perfect bodies performing incred...