If you don’t count a couple shots of espresso in the ay-em, I haven’t used a pre-workout drink for many years.
I used to be addicted to the things. I thought I needed all kinds of pills and supplements to “get in the mood” to train.
Boy was that silly.
The espresso isn’t even for waking me up or any such thing. I don’t need the energy, strictly speaking, but I do enjoy the little kick, and the taste of strong black coffee in the quiet hours of the morning one of life’s genuine goods.
About working out, though.
When I wrote Squat Every Day, people thought I was crazy because they were only looking at the external factors. How many days do you train? How heavy? How many sets? What’s the total volume?
All that junk that keeps trainers and coaches occupied arguing with each other while their clients remain thoroughly confused and unchanged.
As I often say these days, the book was really trying to communicate an inner shift of perspective. I came to see training and recovery through a different lens.
One way to look at the change:
I stopped seeing results as external things that happened to me.
Used to be I had the attitude of passive tense, waiting for things to happen. “Motivation”, which is the word that fitness-people use to mean temporary feelings of excitement and enthusiasm, has to happen to you before you can have a good session.
If the motivation-faery doesn’t bless you, you can’t train good today.
That attitude didn’t come from nowhere. I picked it up from people around me, who all seemed to believe that. When I glance around at the “content” from fitness influencers, I see that things haven’t changed a bit. If anything it’s even worse now than the old days when I was active in that world.
People will do this for everything, not just training or diet. I used to hear it all the time from other grad students, and my own undergrads when I was teaching.
“I’ve got to be inspired before I can do that.”
Naw.
The shift is to see your own inner being as the cause of the results that you get.
You are responsible. Not genes, not neurochemicals in your brain, not “motivation”.
Instead of waiting for outside forces to act on you, you act, the verb in active voice.
The sting is, it’s hard to be the cause of your own life when you let yourself stay trapped by the noise of everyday life. So many things to do and think about and decisions to make and the endless to-do list and… and…
Then there’s too much drive to scale at any cost. People are seduced by false desires and goals that they don’t really want, chasing images of “success” that are in your face 24/7 thanks to the diabolical algorithm.
People are not having honest conversations with themselves about what they want, what they value, what is desirable to them. They’re allowing the bar to be set for them by people 20 years younger, with top 1% genetics, and no wonder they’re demoralized.
You’ve got to be on that ladder, chasing those results, or you’re nothing.
Let me leave it at this:
There’s real power when you stop caring about struggling to be something you aren’t and don’t want to be.
Tell yourself the truth. What you want–really want–comes naturally after that.
Matt Perryman