I think this buzz-word concept is a strange one. Because there’s no playing around when it comes to hard training. Hard training isn’t a game. It’s a battle. Because what is always at stake is your life!
For people that don’t take training seriously… that’s a game. You know the types. Those you see in and out of the gym balancing on bosu balls and using their spinning cycles as a couch to watch tv- and as a perch to spy for real LIVE BREATHING girls walking around! The locker talkers. And I’m not limiting this to “trainees.” I went into my campus gym a couple of months ago. Great facility and brand spanking new, but something was missing… a power rack.
When I asked the “trainer” behind the counter why they didn’t have one he looked at me like I was crazy. “A what?” he said completely bewildered. “You know,” I tried to break it down for him: “It has four posts, and safety bars. You use it to safely do squats, benches, rack deadlifts, and pretty much everything else.” “Oh,” he said still questioning himself. “We’ve got one of those.” And he pointed me at a Smith machine!
This kind of “game” mentality is akin to playing paintball. Sure it might hurt a little, but you’re around friends and you KNOW you’re walking off the field no matter how much you get hit.
This is not hard training. Hard training involves something deeper. The KNOWLEDGE that you CAN’T mess up. The knowledge that you ARE fighting for your life. You are lifting that weight and eating right because it sustains your life! Because you don’t want to be a fat pig outside of the gym. Because you don’t want to be crushed by that ton of iron inside the gym.
Because you don’t want the collateral damage of cluster bombing yourself with heart attacks, obesity, cancer, emphysema, and several other nasties. Because you want to roll through the streets confident with a Sherman tank, not wheezing atop a moped. And to those who say it is a game, because you can have fun. Sure. You can have fun. You should have fun.
If this stuff doesn’t excite you, or you’re doing it to prove something to SOMEONE ELSE, you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. You do it for you. To know you can continue to press on. To know that you can take the hill, and have the courage to fly in the face of society’s heavy machine gun fire of dirty living, drugs, and shitty food all around you. But you are courageous to know that you WONT get hit. Because you are a friggin’ superhero. You are bulletproof.
What if there’s an emergency and you have to save someone else’s life- OR your own! Then will you think it’s all a game? You are Captain America in battle. Your own Hulk or Superman. You CAN bounce back.
And you can do it because you are strong. And nothing will stop you or hold you back from that. The bodybuilders, the strongmen, the power lifters, the athletes, the gym rats. These are the superheroes. And these are the soldiers of the T-Nation army. And you know what…
they’ll win the battle. Because everyone else refuses to fight.
