A kid asked me the other day how to build muscle and get strong. Lord knows why as I don’t have much of either these days, but you never know what people are thinking.
I figured he wanted to know exactly what I did, so I told him the steps.
First, fall into a terrible depression around age 18 or 19. Listen to that voice inside your head when it tells you that you’re the most worthless waste of space to walk the earth. Use the pain of that self-hatred to fuel 30 years of obsessively punishing your body in the gym in between the booze-fueled crash-outs.
I don’t know if that’s a repeatable process for everyone.
I’m sure he wanted a workout plan and some insider tips and tactics on how to add 30 pounds of muscle, but he got the truth instead.
Telling the truth, when it’s the truth about yourself, is the hardest thing to do.
The real reason I ever got any results I got for myself had little to do with all the facts and science in my head. Those helped, as far as setting course for the journey, but they were always a means to the greater end. The reality had a lot more to do with the intangible, immaterial, qualitative experiences of negative feelings and moods that drove me to consistently show up at the gym and put in real effort for the greater part of three decades and counting.
One truth about me is that my adult life could be fairly described as a war inside my head, fought against a part of myself that doesn’t like me much, and wants to destroy everything good that ever came into my life.
Steven Pressfield calls this “Resistance” in his wonderful book The War of Art.
A century before that, Sigmund Freud named it Thanatos, the death drive, after the Greek god of death.
I’ve had several epiphanies about this recently.
One of them I mentioned the other day, which I found in the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard.
Despair is not the opposite of hope.
Hope is not naive optimism that pretends negativity isn’t real.
Optimism, like you find in “positive thinking” and “Law of Attraction” books, tells you to stop being negative, put on a smile, and whistle like you’re happiest son of a gun at Disney World.
That can’t work. You aren’t stupid. Pretending to be happy with fake smiles and insincere cheer is just another way of lying to yourself.
What I did not realize is that the negativity in my head is no different than any other fact about me. The nastiness lurking in the Shadow is as much a fact about me as the length of my right forearm or the color of my eyes.
How I choose to interpret and respond to the negativity is up to me.
And so it is for you, too.
By good fortune I fell into habits where this negativity pushed me into doing some productive things, like consistently lifting and paying attention to my food and my health, along with the self-destruction.
However much I tried to wreck myself, lifting was always there as an anchor to keep me grounded.
Other people use these same feelings of anxiety and doubt to avoid doing anything to better themselves. What sent me into the gym sends others to the couch or the dessert bar.
But I think I’ve figured this out.
Kierkegaard wrote that despair is not the opposite of hope, because there can’t be hope without despair.
These feelings of doubt and anxiety are not problems eliminate with drugs, or ignore or repress with insincere positivity.
“Therapy culture” makes it out that any kind of suffering, misery, or even mild discomfort is the greatest sin unto Eve eating the fruit of knowledge.
You must fix yourself by going to Experts in psychology and taking drugs (it’s always about getting you on the drugs).
I am coming to see that these existential pains and anxieties are necessary because only by that real experience of suffering can we open up the horizon of new possibilities for leaping beyond despair.
You can turn into your misery and let it own you, or you can use it as a spring-board to move into new possibilities in an unknown future.
But you can’t leap out of the mud unless you’re down in it first.
You gotta feel something before you can wake up and move in a new direction.
Here’s another thing to tie these threads together:
I’ve been rambling on lately about how the real key to getting results is not what you know about lifting and nutrition, or which programs or diets you pick to do it, but…
Committing to consistent action and doing it.
If there is no passion, no appetite, no desire to change, then there will be no commitment and no change.
All your perfect workout routines and meal plans are so many dead words on a page unless there’s heart and will behind them.
“Matt, you aren’t telling me what to do to change my body!”
I am telling you EXACTLY what to do if you’re bright enough to read between the lines.
You have to want your result, whatever it is.
You have to set your intentions to achieve that result at any cost.
To do those two things, you need fuel.
That fuel, for me, comes from the darker impulses inside myself.
What I have learned is that those impulses are not in control. They happen to me, but they are not me. With practice, you can summon them up on demand if you need to hit a squat PR or push through your sprints. Otherwise, they’re just feelings that come and go.
Here’s the lesson:
If you are powered by Hater Energy, if that inspires you and moves you into action, then use it.
If you are a gentler soul with more kind and noble motivations, then use these as your energy source.
Whatever fuels you, find it and tap it.
I’ve got a lot more to say about this in coming months and it’s going to be a centerpiece of the new trainings I’m cooking up, along with the coaching opportunities that are opening up in January.
If you want to know more about all that, it’s a good idea to get involved in the community.
Matt Perryman