Most weeks, I’ll get someone messaging me saying “I’m stuck”.
It’s most often weight loss related, but every now and again someone will tell me they can’t build muscle for love nor money or that their strength has plateaued and they’ve been stuck lifting the same weights for months on end.
Regardless of cause, my response is broadly the same.
Specifically:
===
“A great body is just 12 years away”
===
A “great body” in this context meaning one that looks AND performs brilliantly.
And I say “12 years away” because viewing training in terms of years and decades rather than weeks and months removes all of the pressure brought about by feeling like you’re “not working hard enough”. Vital, as this sort of pressure will drive you to follow bone-splintering training protocols, metabolism-macerating diets and, potentially, start abusing steroids, weight loss jabs, etc.
Ironically, results tend to come more swiftly when the pressure comes off. Firstly and most obviously because your attention switches towards putting in quality work instead of trying to short-circuit the process with downright dangerous antics that generally leave you so burned out and injured you are worse off than when you started.
But I also suspect relaxing into and I daresay enjoying the work aids your recovery greatly by virtue of you being less stressed. I’ve no double-blind randomised controlled studies to back this up, but it rings true in my own experience and that of many of my customers and clients.
Behold a training-adjacent example to illustrate the point:
A few years ago, I had written just one book on fitness (“Lift” which is the book I gift to new Phil Tyreman Letter subscribers).
This stressed me out greatly. How could I expect people to take me seriously on matters of getting strong and in shape with only one, measly book to my name?
Answer:
I could not.
And the stress associated with that resulted in me achieving the sum total of f-all on the writing front for a good six months. Instead, I occupied myself by sucking up every morsel of cheap dopamine I could get from producing social media “content” for likes and comments much like one of those disgusting crawler zombies from 28 Years Later writhing about in the dirt eating worms.
Until one day I decided to adopt the same attitude towards writing that I’ve taken towards training for the last decade and a half by sitting down and focusing on doing as much quality work as I could handle, although never pushing myself to the limits of my capabilities.
Since then, I’ve knocked out 16 books (it’s at the point I genuinely struggle to name all of them), plus my monthly print newsletter, these daily emails, editorials for the local magazine, and so on, and so on.
All without any special method beyond: “sit down, open google docs, think, write words the best I can, stop, do the same again the next working day”.
So it is with training:
I sit down, think, train the best I can, stop, do the same again next session.
It’s not an approach that delivers stunning results overnight. But it is one that delivers little wins that compound over time potentially leading to an unrecognisable body and levels of performance (in a good way), given enough time.
OK. That’s all I got for today.
But for more on this principle, consult the 13-page document I recently put together about what I have called “The Systematic Method of Training”.
It’s a shameless pitch for my Private Coaching service, but it’s constructed in such a way that there’s much to be learned by reading it, irrespective of whether or not you decide to work with me.
If you want it, email me (phil at philtyreman dot co dot uk), and I’ll send it over.
Thank you,
Phil Tyreman