I have been on these fitness journey/lifestyle for years now (which weirdly feels like yesterday). Along the way, I had no shortage of mistakes and misconceptions from which lessons were extracted. Looking back, it’s a lot easier to point out why “that” didn’t work or how “that” was the perfect decision I took then. It’s just like Steve Jobs said, “you can only connect the dots looking backwards”. So I’ll like to share what I’ve learned from my fitness journey so you don’t have to fall in the same pits I did. These insight will serve as a catalyst to skyrocket your progress. Thus, given you a more efficient and graceful ascension than mine. With no further ado, here are 6 things I wish I knew before I kicked of my fitness journey:
1. Pace yourself
Going down memory lane, just right when I was pivoting into my first breakthrough. It was my sophomore year. I had finally gotten a plan that worked and I was going to the gym consistently more than ever. I can remember feeling alive. Life felt exciting & fulfilling. Everything was going great. But then I started to notice something unusual. I mean I looked the biggest I’ve ever been but I felt different and not in a good sense. Don’t get me wrong I was killing it, but I felt exhausted most of the time and lethargic. I didn’t pay much mind to it. This happen to be around the time for the routine annual medical check-up for school.
Thus, I went and did the test with no qualms because I know I was a walking specimen (so I thought). But when I went back to grab my results, I was shaken. The doctor called me with that “we need to talk” face. He informed me that my heart is under a lot of pressure. My heart is overworking and it’s hinting of a possible medical issue. He even went forward to recommend that I switch to a slower paced sport in college. Hearing this gripped my attention really quickly. That’s when I acknowledged to myself that I had been doing a lot lately. At the time I played basketball in college twice a week. I was part of the school gymnastic team having rehearsals 3x a week. And to top it all off, I go to the gym 6x a week doing hypotrophy training back-to-back.
So a typical Tuesday would be going to the gym in the morning (because I have classes later that day). Then on coming back I’ll go straight into the school gym for a 2 hour basket ball practice. Then go home shower, get something to eat, and go to school. I’ll finish class around 6:20pm which is about the time for my 3 hour gymnastic rehearsals. So you could say I was working 3 shifts on my body lol.
Afterwards, I’ll get back to my dorm around 10pm, by the time I prepare supper and eat, it’s almost midnight. And I’ll get up in the morning just to do it all over again. Thus, In retrospect I now see how crazy and intense I was moving. But at the time I was just having fun and being “productive”. If not for the medical scare, I don’t know what I might have ended up doing to my body (just over clocking it everyday).
However excited you are in your fitness journey, you shouldn’t forget about the fact that you’re still human. Your body needs rest and you need to pace your progress accordingly.
2. Get Your Diet on point
Honestly out of the core fundamentals of bodybuilding (workout, diet and rest), this is the OG of them all. Even if you’re not going to the gym, just eating right does tremendous wonders for your overall well-being. Nutrition is the foundation and the element that glues the other pillars together. And unfortunately, it turned out to be my weakness.
I remember back then, prior to ever stepping a foot in any gym, I used to have a morning routine. Every morning I’ll wake up, get in my track suit (with an empty stomach) and run 12 laps around the neighborhood’s football field. I’ll come back home all drenched in sweat and out of breath but proud of my feat. It’s bananas now looking back at what my younger self was doing to “get big and build muscles”.
First of all I was doing the wrong type of exercise for my goal. Doing cardio is no formula for anyone trying to gain weight. Secondly, that was the only thing I was doing. I completely paid no mind to how much I was eating let alone what I was eating. Diet is bodybuilding 101 which I had no understanding of then.
Fast track to today, even though I understand this I still have hiccups in keeping up. I got no problem with just getting ready and hitting the gym. That’s esctacy to me. But just sitting down and getting my daily calories in, that’s where I fall apart. But the moment I start doing what I need to be doing, I notice an exponential improvement. I started to flourish not just in my energy & strength during workouts but the results were also physically apparent. You’d be dazed by what a good streak of eating well for just a month can amount to.
So you cannot short-leg this. You need to get your diet right, not just what youโre eating but also how much you’re eating. Just as you had made the gym a priority, you have to put this on that priority list too.
Plan out what you are gonna eat, when you are gonna eat, and how much you are gonna eat to satisfy your daily caloric intake. Always make your meal preps ahead of time, it will make dieting effortless.
If you get this right, you will unlock a mode that you have no utter explanation for.
3. Switch it up in the Gym
Our greatest capability as human is our ability to adapt to any situation or change. This is both a blessing and a curse. And I saw this play out first hand in my bodybuilding journey.
After successfully cracking the code; knowing how to eat right to maximize gains and working out at the gym on the regular, I hit a plateau. It was apparent that I had grown, but I couldn’t grow any bigger. The scale wasn’t moving at all. Having being stuck at the same weight for weeks, I decided to do something unconventional. I decided to experimentally tamper with my “tried and trusted” workout plan. I never thought of changing it because it was the same workout plan that got me buff in the first place. And it’s like “if it ain’t broken, don’t change it” right? Except now it’s no longer working.
It turned out my body has adapted and got used to the exercises I was doing, thus, it stoped growing. I was only able to break this curse when I switch it up and did a complete 180. I started moving away from the hypotrophy I had grown on to strength training. So I was doing lower reps but lifting heavier loads. And even cut down my work-out schedule from 6x/week to 4x/week! which felt wrong at the time.
This was a big leap for me because one of the core foundations of my belief was generally the more you do, the more you gain. But astonishingly by changing this paradigm I was finally able to break the curse. I was getting stronger and growing bigger than ever before by doing less. And besides reducing the volume I was ironically cutting back on the variety of fancy workouts I was doing. I had just enough variety to hit each motor unit. So I was focusing on the basic foundational exercises (a trick I learned from a friend/trainer at the gym).
Thus, I realized that the body’s ability to adapt to our action and routines is simply outstanding. The whole philosophy around getting massive is subjecting the body to experiences which force the body to change in response in order to adapt to the new conditions. But if we stop subjecting the body to new experiences, it catches up & adapts to the established stimulus. And that is how we plateau.
If you’re currently deadlifting x kg (which you find intense), in time that x kg will no longer feel intense. Your body would have adapted (grown) and mastered that weight. For your body to keep growing, you have to increase the intensity or change techniques to keep stimulating it. We have to keep the body stimulated with new experiences every now and then for it to keep evolving.
Thus, switching up your routines and workouts every now and then. This will keep your body in that “growth” zone and keep you elevating to higher heights. So make sure to constantly keep switching it up in the Gym.
4. Wake up at the same hour
Hear me out before you tuck this in with the rest of the clichรฉs. I mean we have all heard this drummed into us, “early to bed, early to rise”. “The early bird gets the warm”. “Rise with the sun”. “Wake up early to tackle the day before it tackles you”. “Lose an hour in the morning, and you will spend all day hunting for it” etc. And as trite as these might sound, all clichรฉs exist for a reason. If they didn’t hold any weight they wouldn’t be so popular. There is an element to not just waking up early but more accurately going to bed and waking up at the same time every day.
For one, it gives your body a healthy rhythm, a sense of control. The consciousness that irrespective of what might be happening around you, this is the hour you’ve decided to rise. As a result, a seed of discipline will sprout extending routes to every corner of your life. I Challenge you, make a decision to wake up consistently at a chosen time decreed by yourself for a month and see the calibre of person that will arise.
Obviously waking up early means you can achieve more in the day. Especially when it comes to dieting which is crucial for bulking. By starting your day early you get to fit in all your meals comfortably through the day. Thus, hitting yours daily caloric surplus with ease. Because after sleeping/fasting, you have to be eating enough during the day to hit your caloric goal for growth. And trying to squeeze 4-6 meals because you don’t have time on your side isn’t ideal. Besides being draining, its unsustainable.
So build a habit of waking up at the same time everyday.
5. This is a Marathon not a sprint
When I embarked on this journey, I was so hyped to start gaining muscle. I had a number in mind and decided there was nothing on earth that’s going to stop me from hitting my “dream weight”. I did a lot of counter intuitive and reckless stuff (as mentioned from my day ones) to get to my goal. Some days I will catch myself on the verge of burning out but I’ll console myself, “It’s not going to be like this forever, as soon as we get attain our dream weight, we can just tune it all down”. As if gaining weight was a power up you attain and get to keep after completing missions in a game. But what I didn’t understand was that, nothing in life is free, neither the price for success or success it self after achieving it.
And once you get it, it does not mean you can just rest on your laurels and stop making effort. An artist that create masterpieces still has to keep practicing his craft to keep the magic. Usain Bolt didn’t stop training after he won he’s first gold medal like “yeah I made it, its all gonning be a cup of tea now”. As if to say he has done it once and thus it’s all going to be easy peasy henceforth. No, every Master remains loyal to his/her craft. Their craft becomes their way of life. And that’s what it should be, a lifestyle!
Don’t look at it as “damn this is a never ending process”. But be happy that this is a lifelong journey. After-all, it’s the things that are worthwhile that take time. And because it’s a lifelong journey, it means you got time on your side, you are not in a rush. And with this clarity you’ll begin to enjoy the process, which is how it should be. With that attitude, by default you’re going to outlast and supersede whose ever sole motivation is just the finish line.
There are people who start working out to get their “summer body”. But a lot of them don’t stick with it long enough to see it. And even if they do get some results, they lose it almost immediately as soon as summer leaves. Because that was the goal, now that summer’s over there’s no longer any motivation/reason to continue working-out.
Where-as, for somebody that says “this is who I am now, this is my life”, it becomes an identity. It’s no longer about looking good for the summer, but rather an embodiment of their lifestyle. These are the ones who attain a “summer physique” come winter, come spring, come autumn and many-many years later.
Thus, you have to switch your attitude toward the process and calibrate your mentality. Because you are doing this for real and you are doing it for keeps ๐ฏ (not just for the summer). Don’t get me wrong, goals are important to have, but they should not be the focus. A goal is just there to help you establish a path. Your focus should be on your system. That is: your diet, your daily reps and not stepping on the scale everytime after a workout to see whether you’re there yet.
Look up, see where you want to be (i.e. goal),and just put your head down and keep working the path.
Believe in yourself, trust the process (system), and the rest will take care of itself. Don’t be suprised to wake up one day and just realized you have exceeded your once proclaimed targets (speaking from experience here). Thus, once you have pin pointed your north star, it’s time to put your head down, put your reps in and nothing more. It’s a marathon not a sprint.
And there you have it, 6 lessons I learned from my mistakes so you don’t have to repeat them yourself. Things that if implemented, without an atom of doubt, will elevate your fitness game ๐ฏ. Like, Share and Comment down below your thoughts.