 You are watching the fastest growing fitness, health, and entertainment podcast on YouTube. This is Mind Pump. Now, in today's episode, we talk about life lessons. 10 life lessons you learn from lifting weights. You thought you were just developing your body. No, you're getting better at life. That's what you can get from this episode. By the way, make sure you subscribe to this channel, like this video, share it, turn on your notifications, and also comment underneath. If you're one of the first 30 commenters, you may get picked to win a beautiful Mind Pump t-shirt. We'll send it right to your house. These shirts add 10 inches to your biceps, making that up. You don't actually get 10. But they are pretty attractive, and you will get a free shirt. Again, you have to be one of the first 30 commenters underneath this video. One last thing. This month, we have a promotion. It's called the Phase 2 Bundles, where we combine two of our more popular programs. Maps Performance. This is an athletic-based workout program. Maps Aesthetic, which is a bodybuilder-based workout program. Combine them both. You get the best of both worlds. They both retail at over $250. But this bundle, get them both, $79.99. All you got to do is go check them out and sign up. Go to mapsfebruary.com. M-A-P-S-F-E-B-R-U-A-R-Y dot com. What age did you guys start working at? Lifting weights consistently? What age? I would say probably 16. 16? Okay. That gives you a lot. How many years is that? It's 24, 25 years, just like that. What about you, Adam? So, consistently, I would say more like 19. I was training at 17, but 17 to 19 was very sporadic in my buddy's garage. Not very consistent. Just doing the arm pump to look cool for the high school chicks. Real consistent training happened. 19, when I was out of my own, going to junior college. Got my first real gym membership from that point until pretty much now. And I turned 40 this year, right? So 21 years. 21 years. Yeah. Yeah. For me, 28, I started at 14. So we've been doing it for a long time. And so, yeah, I just, my birthday was today, right? So I was thinking about, you know, how old I am or whatever, and when I started working out. And I was thinking of all the things that I learned from lifting weights or the value, I should say, the things that I got of most value from lifting weights. Yes. Well, that's what it is. The value I got from lifting weights, really the top values had nothing to do with the fitness, the mobility, the strength, the muscle, the health benefits, the physical health benefits. Although those are great. So I'm not saying that I don't appreciate those. I love those. But the lessons I got from it, the value I got from it, really had almost nothing to do with my physical body. Oh, I would agree with that. But I would also say that it takes a good five plus years before that kicks in. Totally. Right. The life lessons and the connections that you start to make with other things other than the way you look and feel and how strong you are. That takes a long time. It's very similar to like how we talk about nutrition with people, right? Like once you start to connect the dots with the way you feed your body, changes the way your hair feels, your skin feels, your energy, your mood, your sleep, when you start, it takes a lot of consistency of applying discipline towards that for you to start to notice how much it bleeds into other aspects of your life. So probably when I was 17 to 25, what all the lessons we're going to talk about, I'm not sure if I had made the connections yet then. Now as an almost 40 year old looking back, I can list all kinds of things now that I know like, wow, that really, I wasn't as aware of them as I was going through them as I am now. And that's something that I had a conversation recently with my sister-in-law because she knows what I do for a living or at least what I used to do for a living, which, you know, training people, trying to describe that to somebody. Like typically the thought is like, well, you're just manipulating their way. You're trying to get them to lose weight or lose body fat or it's very surface sort of goals. And, you know, to try and explain all these other values and lessons and all these other things attached to it, it took me a while to figure out. Well, you said something interesting. You said, I wasn't really aware of the stuff that I was learning. I think this is what makes fitness so powerful because it's like, I used to love training. There are certain demographics I love to train, right? I love training people in advanced age. I love their wisdom. I like to learn from them. It was really fun. But I also love to train kids. Now, the reason why I love to train kids wasn't because I love the actual session. To be quite honest, training a kid is actually a pain in the ass. If you're a trainer and you've ever trained somebody under the age of 15 or 16, you know how challenging it is. It's challenging because they don't have very good stability. They get bored. It's not fun. You know, it's so, it can be very challenging. But the reason why I enjoyed it so much wasn't because of the watching their body change or see them getting stronger. That would definitely happen. But rather, I would, because it was always the parents that was hiring me, right? They didn't do it themselves. Their parents would hire me. Their parents would come to me after a couple months and they would remark on things like, you know, John is, he's doing better in school or, you know, Susie's more confident. Like she talks more at the dinner table. And I started to realize that they were, this was a result of the growth process that happens when you work out. Fitness is one of the best, easiest ways to enter into personal growth. And the reason why it's one of the easiest ways to enter into it is because you oftentimes don't enter it thinking personal growth. Like if I, if someone came to hire me as a trainer and I said to them, oh, you know, and they were like, you know, how much do you charge or what? I'm like, well, you know, I charged this much. And what we're going to do is we're going to work on life growth and personal growth. They're going to be like, I'm going to the next train. I just want to lose 10 pounds, right? So because it's so unassuming and people often enter in not realizing the lessons they're going to get, they're more open to them. They're not aware. And they just start to happen because you're working out. In fact, we all started working out at it because of vanity. I did not think to myself, I'm lifting weights for personal growth. I think most people, I mean, there's, there's a small percentage maybe out there that are, that are getting into it for health and better and mental. But most people, what drives you, what gets you off the couch to show up to a gym and get a membership is normally you're not feeling good about yourself. Well, it's usually due to a crisis or, you know, something where intervention is necessary. Like I need to like take control of my health or doctor told you something, some circumstance like that where it draws you back in. But typically, you know, like if you're young and this is something that you're driven towards, it's usually like surface. Well, I mean, okay. And of all, we, all of us combined to train thousands of people and by proxy more because we've had trainers work for us and manage gyms. What percentage of people would you say higher trainers or even just work out in gyms, just cause they don't want to change how they look? Yeah. How high a majority? Most, right? 90% plus probably? It's like vanity. Well, I would say a good portion of our, our careers towards the back half was spent on selling clients on these ideas. Totally. Right? Like once we started or once I started to piece this together as a trainer, like how much all these other things about working out affected my life. I knew that that was the secret like, Oh, this, I just got to get this client to feel that, see that or no notice that because once they make that connection, it's what's going to keep them going to eventually reach the reason why they showed up here. They showed up here because they want to lose some crazy amount of weight or they want to look like a cover of a magazine or whatever it is, which is a pretty big goal. But if I can get them to connect the dots to all these other aspects that it's going to improve their life and stop focusing so much on the end goal, even though they're hiring me for that, I know I want to get them there. I got to sell them on the idea of all these other things because they can start to see that immediately. Yes. And it's a process, right? It's not like you tell them that on day one, but as you're training them, this is kind of what you're coaching. You know, when you think of like personal growth methods, they tend to be polarizing. So for example, if you say to, you know, if somebody, you tell them, Hey, try this religion or the spiritual practice or read this book by this motivational person or whatever, very polarizing. Sometimes they'll be like, yeah, I want to do that. And other times like, no, I don't want to, I don't want to do that. Personal growth is tough. I don't really feel like doing that or I don't believe in that or maybe a political reason. Fitness spans across everybody. I had everybody working out my gym. I had Republicans, Democrats, I had, you know, Christians and Jewish people and people who were atheists, I had people and all of them were there usually because they want to change how they look, but not realizing that if they stick to it long enough and they're sincere with it, that they're embarking on a personal growth journey. And you know, that's what a fitness does. That's what lifting weights does. In fact, statistically, you can actually look this up. Statistically speaking, people who work out as part of their life, they have higher life satisfaction. This is a fact. They can handle challenges better. They actually do studies on this and people who work out regularly when they have life challenges that we're all going to have, whether it's a death in the family or illness or you lose your job or whatever, they tend to handle those challenges better. They tend to see challenges as valuable more often than people who don't work out and especially don't lift weights and will make the argument why later in the episode, they're more resilient to change. Again, you can look this all up. They tend to also be more successful in all categories. In fact, in business, when you look at people who make a certain amount, a disproportionate percentage of them exercise on a regular basis. It's part of their routine and you think, they're so busy, how can they have to? They've made it a part of their team because they've seen so much value and it actually contributes to them being more successful in business. It creates these disciplines. You learn that how these disciplines can apply in multiple directions. It's a part of the success formula is to be able to understand how to apply these disciplines in a direction that's going to make it where you want to go. The first lesson I can remember, I'm thinking way back because I was real young, but the first lesson I think I learned from weights, not realizing I'm learning this lesson, but the first lesson was that I changed my relationship to pain and struggle. Now, this is easy for me to remember because I saw this on my clients. When I would get a new client and we would do an exercise and I did not take new clients to high intensity. It's inappropriate. They're deconditioned. We're training at moderate intensity. We're doing 10 reps of something that I know if I push them, they could do 20 reps, but always. Rep number seven and eight, the burn would kick in and you could see the look in their face. The relationship with pain was different. It was like, oh my God, I can't do this. Or they'd get sore and they'd call me and be like, yes, is this normal? I'm hurt. Totally. I think I injured myself. This doesn't right. And it's because the relationship to pain is different. The relationship to pain is bad. All bad. Oh no, I'm doing this. It's burning. I can't handle the burn. Oh no, I can't handle the pain of this shoulder press or the squat. I need to stop. I actually, sometimes I would have clients actually throw dumbbells on the floor like they'd be, I tell them two more reps and they drop them like, I can't do anymore. And it wasn't because it hurt them more than it hurt me. When I do an exercise at high intensity, I feel the same pain somebody else does. The difference is I have a different relationship with pain. And I remember learning that when I was a kid, cause I'd work out and I had that feeling of doing squats and being like, I have to rack. I can't do anymore. But you know, because I wanted to change my body and early on it was all about how I looked. I kind of changed my relationship to that pain and I was able to go through it and be okay with it and get to the point where now the pain of exercise is something I enjoy. You create an entirely different association with it. You know that what you're doing is beneficial towards your growth and towards you gaining more muscle. So therefore now I look at it different because this pain is, you know, and I can get through this pain. It's temporary. I think this is where the sound bites like no pain, no gain come from because of the truth that's behind that. And what it is is that you're stretching your capacity, right? If you always work within your capacity at all time, the body's not going to be forced to adapt and grow and change. So sure, maybe you're exercising, but you're not necessarily training the body. And I think that's where the lesson lies is knowing that is stretching your capacity and the carryover I see that that's we're in life. If you're always in your comfort zone, right? Totally. I remember being stuck in this in a job. I stuck in a job four years longer than I should have been because I was comfortable because it was easy. I made good money. I had 401k. I had benefits. I liked what I did. Why should I leave? You know, even though everything inside of me was telling me like you need to move on and you move on from this, but moving on from it met struggle, met possible pain, met difficulty, met challenge, met maybe failure, all those things are going through my brain. But the truth is that was one of the best decisions I ever made my life was to take that chance, embrace the pain. That's where the adaptation and growth came from. It does. And life is about struggle. I don't care who you are, how much money you have, or whatever. You're going to encounter struggle and pain. And really it's about your relationship with it rather than not having it all, right? Not having any pain. Like, I mean, you could numb your body. You could numb yourself in life. You could live in a hole and never do anything. And that would suck, right? You have to experience pain. You have to experience struggle. Now, how was, how was it going to affect you? Are you going to crumble? Are you going to cry? Are you going to run? Or are you going to stand tall and weather the storm? And lifting weights is hard. If you do it right, it's hard. And so you learn to change that relationship. The next one, this one, again, this is an early lesson that I learned, which is to embrace failure as part of the process. Because here's the deal. When you start off, especially when you're new and you're lifting weights, you suck all the time. You're just not good. You're not good for a long time. Yeah, it's so much easier to avoid that feeling. You know, and I think that's one of the things that deters a lot of people from it is like, they know that this is going to be hard. This is something that I might not be that great at initially, just like any other pursuit, any other skill that you're trying to learn, you're not going to be great at it right off the gates. And you're lucky, maybe if you, if you're somewhat decent at it, well, this is also why I think people get stuck with modalities, right? Or exercises that they love, right? Because they, they don't want to fail. They don't go do an exercise. They've never suck at it. Yeah, they suck at it. They've never done before. So I'm going to keep sticking with these movements that I've been doing forever and I'm good at, but not realizing that the most change, the most benefits will come from going after something that they probably will fail at. Totally. I mean, I remember doing, you know, early exercises, compound lifts, and I'd get that. Remember the shaky feeling that you're trying to lift or so unfamiliar? Yeah, it feels unstable or it just doesn't feel right or and I'm trying to squat. I'm not getting it. I'm not getting it. Or I got to drop the weight because it's not working. And there's a couple of ways you could, you know, you could, you could tackle that. One is to be like, I'm never doing that again. I'm done. I'm gone. And the other one is like, I'm going to keep trying. And then you start to learn like, oh, this is, this is just part of the process. I'm always going to experience this because if I stop, then, you know, at this point, you're saying my body's not going to change, right? So I have to embrace failure. Is failure part of any growth process? 100% There is. In fact, we were talking about this yesterday on the drive from truckie, you know, Justin and I were talking about the business and we were talking about how oftentimes, you know, we're working hard on one thing and we think it's going to look like this and then something else happens that we didn't realize. And the only way that would have happened is had we pushed through and focused on this other thing. Otherwise, if we never took a chance, if we never, you know, attempted and failed, we would have never learned what the real answer was. This is why people in business who go out and try, tend to outperform people who plan and plan and plan all the time. Well, that's the old paralysis by analysis, right? I think that's what you learned from this is that instead of, you know, sitting there and analyzing your idea is one of the best things you can do is get moving towards that because the worst thing that could absolutely happen is failure from it. And who cares? Because now you know that that's not the answer anymore. And the quicker you can get to that, the quicker you can get to the right answer. And so I think that's what that lesson taught me is I quickly learned that, oh, wow, instead of me sitting around and arguing or debating why that's a good idea or a bad idea, I'm going to put that shit into play and accept that, hey, I may fail at it, but so what? Now I know. Now I know for sure. It's no longer a debate. It's no longer an argument. We've applied that in this business. How many times have we thought to your point, like, hey, this is a great idea. Let's go this direction and then we fail at it. But now we know we know that that's not the right way. It's the iterative approach. I mean, whoever gets it right the very first time, I would love to see statistics on that with the business, with an idea you have, a pursuit. But I mean, how often does that happen? That just is like a bolt of lightning hitting you. So it's way better to just get yourself out there, work on your ideas, and it will reveal itself if you keep working hard. Right. And you're working out what an easy way to learn that. And again, it's unassuming. You don't realize you're learning that just because you want to change your body when you get in shape, but you end up learning that through the process. This next one took me a long time. This is probably of all the ones that we listed. And we have 10. This is probably the one that took me the longest to really figure out, which is to learn to care for myself like someone I care about. Now the reason why this took so long was because for a long time I worked out because I didn't like myself. And as a result, I treated myself like someone I didn't like and care about, right? So I over-trained, take too many supplements, did crazy things with diet. And now here's the irony of all that, is my physique and my body didn't progress as fast or as well as it could because I wasn't treating myself appropriately. Eventually, and this took me a long time to figure out, that I need to treat myself like someone I care about. And then my training became more appropriate. My diet became more appropriate. I was able to in more intelligent way scale back my training when I needed to or increase it when I needed to. And then the progress started happening. But through the pursuit of trying to change my body, I started to figure this out. Like, oh, I got to take care of myself like someone I actually care about. Do you remember when in your life that happened? Was there a pivotal moment like in your training where that really like, because I can't remember. I'm trying to remember when I made that stitch. Obviously, I've admitted that I was driven by insecurities originally into the gym. But at some point, I made that switch to taking care of my body first versus worried about what other people think how I look. I just can't pinpoint when that switch happened. Can you? Yeah, I have a specific moment I've talked about before. This is when my health took a turn for the negative. This was in my, I want to say I was 30. And I thought I had an autoimmune issue. My gut health went terrible. I lost lots of weight. And the only way to fix myself was to start to focus on my health. And through that, I started to, and so no more aesthetics. I didn't focus on anything other than my health. And then I started to, through that, take care of myself, listen to my body, that kind of stuff. And then the side effect of that was I looked amazing. I remember at the end of a year of that focus, I looked at myself in the mirror and I was like, oh my gosh, I look better than I ever have. This is crazy. The side effect of me actually taking care of myself like someone I care about is the thing that I was always chasing in the first place. This actually took me a while to get to that point. I sort of carried that mentality, like a lot of athletes I know that they just are never good enough. Like I just was always punishing myself that I could do better. And that wasn't, you know, the performance I wanted out there. I'm not putting up, putting in enough work. And so it was just always this like high demand. And I was just criticizing myself constantly. And it wasn't until later on where I started pursuing workouts with a completely different mindset where it was enjoyable. I started to show up. I had more energy. And then all of a sudden I just got even better muscular gains and I got previous to that. Yeah, totally. Because if you train yourself in a way that's not like someone that you care about, you tend to overdo it. Like if you're tired, then you say yourself screwed, I'm going to beat myself up. I hate that I have this belly fat or I hate that I don't have this muscle that I want or whatever. But when you treat yourself like someone you care about, then you start to listen like, Oh, I'm a little beat up and tired. I think I'm going to go to the gym and work on mobility today instead of beating myself up or I'm not, you know, I'm not feeling so good. My gut health is not so good rather than like force feeding myself more protein because no, I need the gains. I'll say, Oh, you know what, maybe I need to back off a little bit and increase my maybe my vegetable intake or maybe I need to fast for a second to let things heal. And of course, the side effect of that is you end up looking better as a result. But yeah, that one took me a long time. I'd say the longest out of all of these. The next one, this one's a great life lesson, great life lesson. And you learn this again through years of working out, which is to learn to focus on what you can change and ignore what you can't, right? So if you think of your body and think of the things you're working on, eventually, especially if you're visually focused, vanity or aesthetic focused, at some point, you start to realize like, I'm not going to get 21 inch arms or I'm not going to get shoulders that are this wide or I'm not going to get this waist that is this small. My genetics won't allow it. I don't have the structure. I don't have the frame. And you either are going to quit and say screw it. I'm not going to do this anymore because I can't, you know, do these things I can't do or you accept it and say, well, okay, but I'm still going, I'm still moving forward. I'm still just going to focus on the things that I can focus on and keep, you know, moving forward. I don't have enough abs for a 12 pack. Well, what comes to mind when I think of that too is is for, because what stands out the most is the two real dominant types of clients, right? You either have the really overweight person who wants to lose weight, or you have the really skinny person that wants to put on muscle and they both struggle with different things. And part of this lesson I feel like is not only accepting who you are and your body type and your genetics, but then also learning to look at the strengths of that one, right? So if I have a client who struggles with putting muscle, like myself, right, an ectomorph, have a hard time putting muscle on, but one of the benefits of that body type is leaning out is really easy. So when I get to a place, if I actually add a little bit of muscle, it's really easy for me to shred body fat and have this look. The reverse is true for the person who has a hard time losing weight. Well, that person typically builds muscle really well. So it's also, I think part of this process is learning to look at your strength. It's not, it's accepting what you can't, you can't change and looking at the things that you're good at and try to be great with that or use that to your advantage. So often we look at ourselves and we, oh, I'm too tall, I'm too short, I'm too fat, I'm too wide, I'm not this, I'm not that. We're focused on all the things that we're not versus, hey, there's also the other side of the coin to that. There's the reasons that make, for every reason that you have that gives you a disadvantage, there's something that it gives you an advantage to or it just kind of reframes that. Yeah, I look at it as wasted energy. I mean, it's what can I control versus what's out of my control? And why not just focus on the things that I can control? And therefore that's going to then take over and, you know, and apply in positive directions. And, you know, I'm not going to be burning, I'm not going to be spinning my tires in the dirt, so to speak. Yeah, I remember there's one client in particular that stands out to me. He worked out in my facility with another trainer. He had lost his leg in a car accident years prior, and went through a period of depression and gained a lot of weight. And eventually, he came in and hired a trainer in my facility, and this was his motto. He's like, man, I went down that path, that dark path, I couldn't, I couldn't, you know, obviously I lost my leg, I can't have it come back. I'm not going to be able to walk like I could before, but eventually accepted it. And now I'm going to focus on the stuff I can change. Well, this guy ended up losing 80 pounds in a wheelchair and modified all kinds of exercises and did all kinds of stuff. He became one of the more motivated, inspiring people in my gym. In fact, when he would come in, I used to love him coming in when there were other clients in the gym. So the energy in the room would improve because he had this kind of energy. He had this focus with himself. So great example of what we're talking about. The next one, this one's a big one, which is that perfect doesn't exist. It's connected to the previous one, right? There is no perfect. In fact, if you're focused on perfect, it's like trying to quench your thirst with seawater. You're going to just make yourself thirstier and thirstier. This right here, if you don't learn this through fitness, because fitness can go two different directions, it can go in a very positive direction, which is what we're talking about, or it can start to turn negative. If you don't learn this lesson that perfect doesn't exist, you start to move in the direction of extreme dieting, plastic surgery, anabolic steroids, things that are very unhealthy for your body. In this pursuit of something that is unachievable, you can never get. It's a very dark place. I've seen lots of fitness, especially fitness professionals, stuck in this place, and it can be very destructive. Well, there's two people that come to mind right away from me. One is the fitness professional, like you said, who's deeply insecure about their body, is driven by it, looking perfect. Even though they look amazing to 99% of the population, they're more insecure about their body than the 600-pound obese person. The more fit they get, the more obsessed they become with looking more perfect, and it's like this endless, bottomless pit. That's one. The other one is the person who's really overweight who thinks that they need to lose all this weight so they'll be happy. They think that it's because they're so overweight is why they're so unhappy with themselves, and they think that losing the weight is going to do that. You have to have the self-acceptance, the forgiveness, the love for yourself first before that happens. Otherwise, what ends up happening to this client, and I've had this, where they lose their 50, their 100 pounds, and they don't ensure they have an initial like, I did it. They're excited about that, but a real quick hard crash after that because they didn't really deal with any of the other issues. They still are unhappy with themselves. They have the formula backwards. What happens is they think losing weight or getting fit makes me happy, and they don't realize that they actually have the formula flipped. It's this way. It's happy. If I get happy, then I'll lose weight, and then I'll get fit, and it'll work. Otherwise, they may lose the weight, but that'll come right back, because it didn't solve all of their deep problems. That chasing perfect is a trap. It is a complete trap. It doesn't exist. Everything's changing all the time, and if you get into fitness because you want to look perfect, and you stay in that phase, and you stay trying to chase perfect, very, very dark, very dark. Again, I've seen it, all of us have in our space many, many times. It's not a place you want to get stuck in. This is also what it's taught me to go and look at other aspects of the health sphere more. Again, I was driven by aesthetics originally and changing my body, the vanity thing you talked about, but later on, did I start to piece together the importance of mobility and mental health, and relationship health, and spiritual health. A lot of times, this lesson here alone has taught me to let go of the look sometimes and put a lot of energy and effort into other parts of this health sphere and actually double down on that. Knowing that, hey, I can let go of my body fat percentage being at 9% or 10%, let it go up 4% or 5%, and technically be a healthier person because I went so hard in the relationship, the mental and spiritual health or nutritional health. I like to challenge myself in those different areas and really push and focus on different parts of my overall health. Well, this is an interesting one because you're going to get a lot of gurus and you're going to get a lot of self-improvement people out there that are really going to drive home that message of trying to achieve perfection. You're going to get that in athletics, you're going to get that in all kinds of directions where this becomes an obsession to become great. It's the only way you can become great and get anywhere with your life. The sad part is if you look at all these documentaries and you see these ESPNs, 30 for 30s, some of the greatest athletes in the world and look at the dysfunction, look at all of the relationships they have, look at the other aspects of life that you have to consider when you laser in and you chase that dragon. In fact, I learn a lot of these lessons through training myself and also training clients because teaching is a part of learning. When you're teaching other people, this kind of stuff, sometimes it's easier to do it to see it in someone else than it is in yourself. That's really what helped me a lot with this one because you'd see your client get trapped in that body obsession phase and you're their trainer and you're not in their body, right? So you're not suffering from the same insecurities about them or whatever. And so you tell them, you talk to them about them, you reflect about maybe I should listen to my own words. The next one, this one I remember distinctly learning this one and that is to be humble. And here's why you should learn how to be humble when you're lifting weight. There's always someone stronger than you and there's always someone more knowledgeable. And this is not a bad thing. This is a great thing. I remember learning this because I started working out at the YMCA and in the Y, this was tiny gym. It was really small. It was like the size of this room, right? And I remember besides the power, there was this older group of power lifters that worked out. Besides them, there were a lot of kids that worked out there, a lot of teenagers. And within a certain period of time, I became the strong dude in the gym. Like I was deadlifting and bench pressing and you know, oh, Sal's coming in. You know, I'm a young kid, but I feel like I'm the king of the castle. I'm the super strong dude. And then I got my membership at 24 fitness, which was a bigger, more mainstream gym. And I remember going in there and seeing people warming up with my heaviest weights. And I immediately was humbled. That same thing happened when I stepped into my first gold gym or powerhouse gym where you're, you know, you think you're so awesome. And then you go in there and you realize that I remember seeing a female strength athlete squatting more than I could. And I remember, you know, it was very, it was humbling, right? Cause you think you're, you're supposed to be the strongest, the stronger I'm a guy or whatever. And it's humbling, but this is a good thing. Because when you're humbled, it keeps you learning and growing. You know, I think one of the worst things that could ever happen is you, you actually are the best ever anywhere, in which case you kind of lose that, that, that drive. So when I, I think of a humbling experience, like for the gym and what it taught me, I think of like going to the gym some days and getting buried under a weight, I think I should be able to move, right? Like there's nothing more frustrating sometimes than, you know, knowing that I could squat 400 pounds and then, Hey, it's been a while, maybe I've been inconsistent. So I throw three 15 on there and I get buried by three 15. And that is just so humbling. And it, and what it speaks to or tells me is like, Hey, I, it wasn't in the cards either. I didn't put the, the work in and the discipline to be at that level right now. And that just to me translates into real life. Like I think about that with sometimes you show up to work and a job you could normally crush, you fail at and you don't, you don't do well at. And instead of like whining about it or pointing and making excuses that, Oh, it's his fault or their fault or the world hates me. Everybody's against me. It's like, well, why, how did I get here? Why am I so much weaker than what I was before? And I know, I know. And when I deep down and I think about it, it's like, well, you know, when I was hitting 400, I was also dialed in. I was consistent. I was doing all these things. And I thought and are expected that I should be able to at least get close to that. And I get buried under and I get humbled. And that to me, that was the lesson for that. And I think about all the stuff in my life that, you know, I thought I'd crush it and I didn't. And it always made me go, fuck, you know, I didn't do this. I didn't do that. I should have done these things. This is a constant lesson from weights, especially like when I started identifying that I'm strong in a certain lift. And that's something that, you know, I've had great numbers that I've put up. And then I focus on something else. And, you know, and I sort of like throw that in the mix a little bit later. And all of a sudden, I can only do like 100 pounds less than I did before. And like, how did that happen? And it's just one of those things that you're just constantly getting humbled and checked, based off of like, how much attention you're putting in certain areas of your body, certain movements that you thought you crush all the time. But why am I not, you haven't been putting the work in? Totally. Or how about this one? Like, you know, if you stay with it long enough, you're going to get older. That's a great thing. There's nothing wrong with getting older. It's a blessing. But as you get older, you get humbled because I didn't warm up before. And then I go do it today. And oh, I hurt my shoulder, you know, or I haven't been focused on mobility. I got away with that in my 20s. And a little bit of my 30s. Now I'm not getting away with that anymore. So you get humbled because you're getting older, meaning you're not going to be able to get away with the stuff you did before. So you like keep learning this lesson. You by the way, if you stay with fitness or weight training or resistance training your entire life, this is a lesson that keeps giving you will always learn to be humbled. It's never not, it's never going to stop with this particular one. Now this next one, this is a really good one. And I can, I'm thinking of one story in particular for me where this really hit home. So this one is about consistency and how consistency is the key to success. I remember years ago as a young trainer, I had this gentleman that I trained and he was a self-made millionaire. He was a high school dropout as a kid, grew up a single mom, you know, I obviously knew his story because he was my client. And he was extremely successful by the time I was training him. And I remember talking to him and saying, you know, can you give me advice, like tell me like what's the key or whatever? And so he kind of, you know, there's a few things he said that were really impactful. But then he finished and he said this, he goes, look, here's the deal. He goes, if you tell me what I need to do to develop a nice body, you're going to give me a set of exercises. They're only going to be effective if I do them all the time. I have to be consistent. He said the real key to financial success, Sal, is to just be consistent. Just work hard, save your money, don't go into debt and build, you know, multiple streams of revenue. He told me and just be consistent. It's no different than working out. You just got to do it every single day. He says, in fact, somebody who's consistent is going to be more successful over time than somebody who's got better strategies who's inconsistent. Now, from a fitness standpoint, this is also true. A consistent person exercising with a okay workout is going to get in better shape over time than somebody who follows the best workout inconsistently. Consistency is everything. This speaks back to, you know, the mentality. When I would go to work out, before that, I would always, you know, have to crush that workout. I would have to apply as much intensity and I'd have to max out on these lifts. And you get to a point where you just, it just seems like something, it's not going to happen today. So therefore, it's better for me not to go to the gym. I can really just put that sort of effort and muster that in my workout. But, you know, it took a while to transition over to find out that even if I just, if I just, if I'm there and I'm going through these movements and I'm just taking my time and I'm doing way less weight, you know, this is still building something that I'm progressing towards. So nothing speaks to this to me more than my experience with competing. Because when I first got into this, I mean, if you 16 year old me would be like high five in the 32 year old me who got into competing like, Oh, this was my dream, like to look like that. Right. It was a young kid getting in like, I wanted to look like the physique that I built in my 30s for competing the, and the real biggest difference of all the things. There's lots of different variables that changed from, you know, 20 year old Adam to 32 year old Adam. But the biggest one that made the difference in that physique was just purely consistency. Never in my life had I been that consistent with my diet and my training. I mean, just we're talking about years, years of not missing, not missing a meal, not missing a workout, just pure. And the result of that was this physique that I never thought I could achieve because I had been kind of trying it for the, you know, 10, 12 years before that. And yeah, I ran, you know, some times of training really, really well. I mean, there's times for sure I trained very consistently for a year. But then the diet was kind of up and down, you know, or maybe I had the diet really, really good, but then the training never once had I ever put that consistency into training and dieting and just kept going and kept going and kept going. And that's what built that physique for me. And that, to me, obviously translates into work and every other part of my life. Like most people, what is the, Lane says it all the time, what the definition of success in business is the battle of attrition. Right. That's really what it is. Can you keep going while it's hard and you're losing and you're not seeing results and where most people give up and quit? Can you persevere beyond that? Because there's a, there's a place in business, there's a place in exercise, there's a place in all these things that we're trying to achieve in life where the majority fail. And when you learn that what will separate you from everybody else is being able to push beyond that point, that's where all the success resides. Totally. In fact, you were talking about diet, you know, working with clients in their diet. Like one of the biggest keys was just getting them to be consistent on the weekend. Like everybody was okay Monday through Friday. As soon as they were consistent seven days a week, then all the results started happening. And, you know, again, life lesson, right? What about relationships? You know, studies show that people who are consistently, say good morning, consistently spend a little bit of time at night talking to each other, consistently show a little bit of appreciation are far more successful than the people who do the occasional grand gestures, right? The occasional vacation or the occasional bouquet of flowers, but they're not as consistent on a day-to-day basis. That makes the biggest difference in everything and everything that you do. Speaking of everything, the next one is very important and that is learning that the journey is far more important than the result. The journey is far more important than the goal. It's all about the journey. Now you learn this lesson through lifting weights because eventually you fail enough times. What ends up happening is you typically will have a goal and you say, okay, I want to, you know, I'll make one up. I want to bench press 200 pounds. That's my goal. I want to bench press 200. And you work hard and you think about it and you're driving towards it and you're driving towards it. And then you achieve it. Then you finally accomplish your 200 pound bench press. Literally the day after, you're left feeling like, now what? What do I, okay, I did that. I lost every, all my motivation. I lost all my drive. What do I do now? Athletes will feel this after competing. They'll work themselves up to this championship or this particular achievement. They'll get to it and then they'll be more inconsistent. They'll be more just worse with their training and practice than they ever have before because they accomplished this massive goal. So what you end up learning over time is goals are great to help direct you, but it's really about the journey. If I enjoy it, if you enjoy the journey, you're not just going to get to your destination. You'll get to beyond. You'll always keep moving forward. Well, it's also the only way that you'll be able to see all the other things that it does for you. If all you, if you show up to your gym and you sign up with your trainer and you say, here's my goal. And all you do is focus on the goal. You'll miss out on all the things that it's doing for your life everywhere else. You won't make the connection. So you first have to recognize that the journey is everything, that that's where the real goal is at. That then allows you to start to make those connections. If you don't first accept that and realize that you'll miss out that, oh, wow, it improves my skin. Oh, it improves my hair. Oh, it improves my relationship. Oh, I'm a better. I'm better at work. Oh, I sleep better. Oh, my libido is better. You won't see all those things if all you're focused on is the goal. If that's all you see and that's all you want, and that's all you talk about, that's all you care about, then you will miss all that. And it starts with understanding that the journey is where all the great stuff is at. That will allow you to see those. Totally. Look, think of it this way. You have two different people. One guy wants to walk 10,000 miles. That's his goal. I'm going to walk 10,000 miles. The other guy says, I love walking every single day. I just love it. Over time, who's going to walk farther? Right? They're both hit 10,000 miles. The guy's driven to do it. But once he hits it, he's done. The other guy just loves walking every single day. You love the journey. Oh, man, the distances you'll go with your progress, it's everything. Now, the journey and everything, this has to do with work, with your marriage, with your kids, with life, with your friendships. It's about the journey. The journey is where you learn and gain all the time. Well, once you get in that mentality, the consistency has no friction. There's nothing that really prevents you from being drawn back to it. And I think that when you place it in a different mindset, that becomes like most of the issue is, how can I keep doing this in order to get to my goal? Well, why not just love doing it? Totally. Well, this reminds me of the lesson that I've learned of this too, is that looking for money in business, like trying to chase money versus looking for a passion or something that you would do for no money. Totally. Like that's the lesson that I learned from this, is when your whole life, if you're chasing after a dollar amount or reaching a certain financial pinnacle, you miss out on the journey process. And what you find out, even when you get the money, you're unhappy. So the same thing goes for this. I feel like those two are something that taught me. Totally. Now the next one, this one, you have to learn if you're going to be consistent, and this is going to be healthy for you, which is healthy self-criticism. So there's a couple of things I want to touch on with this. Now, one is that a lot of people think self-criticism is all negative. So you get this kind of backlash. You never criticize yourself. You're perfect. Never say that anything needs to change. And I think that's the reaction to people who are on the other end of the spectrum, which is, I'm never good enough. I'm terrible. I'm ugly. I'm fat and whatever. Somewhere in the middle is where you want to be, which is healthy self-criticism. So to use this from a fitness perspective, I can look in the mirror, and I learned this eventually over time, I can look in the mirror and objectively say, you know what? I can tell, I haven't been treating my body very well. I can tell that I need to work on my posture a little bit. So I think I'm going to focus on that. Okay. Now I'm not identifying with it, right? I'm not looking in the mirror saying, oh my God, you're a gross person. Oh my God, that's so ugly. Oh my God, I hate myself. And I'm also not saying nothing to see here. Everything's perfect. Everything's great. It's healthy self-criticism. And you need that in order to continue to grow. This is what self-awareness is. You have to be able to look at yourself and from a healthy standpoint say, these are some things that can work on. It doesn't make me a bad person. It doesn't mean I'm not deserving of affection, love, and care, and respect, but these are definitely things that can improve upon. It can be as easy as starting with what you do the most, just going through an inventory and really observing yourself, looking at your days, looking at your weeks, looking at your months. What have you been spending the most of your time towards? And what can you just shift a little bit that will steer you in a more healthy goal? Yeah. This reminds me too of, I think I was lucky that when I got into competing that I had a good relationship with exercise and nutrition going into it, because I had the ability to look at myself in the mirror and say things like, oh, my shoulders are underdeveloped compared to my chest and it not being an insecurity of that. This is what I'm going to be judged. And then me going back to the drawing board and saying, this is how I build those to look this certain way, not driven by an insecurity because I could objectively look at it and say, okay, they're not as proportionate as my arms or my chest or my back is. So let me develop it. I think there is definitely a healthy place. The other thing I can think of is when I got in that competitive shape, realizing and recognizing I had shit mobility. I looked the most amazing I've ever looked in my life. People are complimenting me. I feel awesome, but then I can't even squat past 90 degrees because I had terrible hip and ankle mobility. So being able to look at that and go like, okay, sure, I can present my physique and it looks cool. But then I'm really lacking in these other parts of the health sphere, right? And so being able to switch my focus now, okay, well, let me address those other parts of my life. And I think there's nothing wrong with that. I think if it comes from the right place, it's a very healthy thing for you to do. Exactly. And then finally, the last lesson I learned from one of the last lessons I learned from lifting weights was balance. Now I learned this because I pushed too hard and I don't get what I want, right? So I want to develop my body. I want to build my physique. I'm going to keep pushing, keep pushing. And I started to slide backwards. I started to over train and started to get injured. And eventually I was faced with the reality that maybe I'm overdoing it. Let me see what happens if I balance myself out. Let me see what happens if I focus on my sleep a little bit. Is that going to make my body change? Is this going to give me, you know, more of what I want? And the answer was yes. Balance actually led to better results. I remember one time in particular I learned this. I was like, you know, when I was younger, I didn't want to burn any extra calories, right? I'm an ectomorph. So, you know, naturally skinny. So I remember thinking, I'm going to lift weights and then sit as much as possible because I understood very basically calories in versus calories out. Don't move. Don't want to burn any extra calories because I burn too many as it is. So I'm not going to do anything. And I remember I had this trainer that worked for me who, you know, he's very developed and he said he was an ectomorph, but he liked to do some cardio here and there. And he had an incredible physique and he said, well, you know, want to do some cardio with me? I said, no, man, I can't burn any extra calories. He goes, well, if it makes you healthier, then maybe you'll build a little bit more muscles like a light bulb went off, but maybe he's right. And so I didn't, I didn't overdo it. I just did a little bit and I could remember my cardiovascular shape was so terrible, but I started doing it and then my body got healthier and it started to improve. I started to balance out my health a little bit. Now, is this a lesson for life? You better believe it. People who lack balance in life are terribly unhappy. You know, whether it's only focusing on work or only focusing on leisure or own being hyper focused on building your physique and not having any friends or friendships or anything like that. Like balance is very important for health. And again, if you don't have balance when you lift weights, you're not going to develop your body the way you want. This is one of the hardest ones, right? Because it to be successful at anything in life or in the gym takes what we listed before, consistency, discipline, pushing through failure. And that a lot of times seems like just like myopically focus on this and nothing else and just drive this home and that's it. That's it. But then what ends up happening a lot of times when you do that, you lose sight of all kinds of other things in your life. And so there is this, I think this is like a constant dance that you're playing. Like these things in order to achieve great things, it takes a lot of sacrifice, a lot of discipline, a lot of consistency, but in order to maintain it for a long period of time, it takes balance. So knowing how to weave in and out of that, that is something that it's taken me a very long time to figure that out. I feel like barely am I getting that now and almost 40 years old of learning how to, you know, hey, say it's okay for me to be very, very focused on this goal and maybe making some other sacrifices in other parts of my life because I have something I'm focusing on. But then recognizing, hey, when I achieve that goal, I'm not married to this idea or this thing, be able to move out of it and then focus on other parts of my life. It's a constant dance that I feel like I'm always doing. I mean, getting yourself towards a rigid plan and program is definitely some place to start and that's something that's going to provide sort of the framework and sort of the bone structure of, you know, where you need to go. But at the same time, there's just so many variables that come your way because of life. And, you know, especially if you'd look at like something like nutrition, where you're really dialed in and you're really pursuing all these healthy foods and consistency is there and, you know, this is at the utmost importance to you. But then birthdays happen and then you're going out with your friends and, you know, this becomes a compromise of do I really need to, you know, not partake because this is going to, you know, be something that's going to deter me. You just realize that there needs to be flexibility and there needs to be that in all these different directions. Totally. And again, these are all, again, if you stick with it long enough and you're consistent long enough, these are the lessons you learn through lifting weights and their valuable life lessons. Look, thank you for watching and listening to Mind Pump. If you want more information on how to develop your body or train particular areas of your body or burn body fat or nutrition or even for personal trainers, go to mindpumpfree.com, download our library of guides with a lot of free guides on there that you can learn from. You can also find all of us on Instagram. You can find Justin at Mind Pump, Justin, me at Mind Pump Salon, Adam at Mind Pump, Adam. You can look at, you can speculate on what's going to happen in the future and how it's going to suck. No, no, no, don't do that. Just literally take the energy. It's just energy and just shift it about three feet over here and start looking at how you can make this work for you. It's just