Determination & Building Mass

Hope this finds you all blessed and prospering in every aspect of your life and training. Today we’re going to talk about a few things, but we’re going to start with determination.

I think determination or the absolute conviction to accomplish whatever it is that you’ve set out to do is probably 50% of success in life. I think it’s tied in to other factors and notably tied in to being spiritually attuned. If you get right spiritually and start moving down the right path, I think that’s the other 50% of success.

You have to project what you want mentally and focus specifically on that. What you constantly focus on is what you will get. So if you constantly focus on the negative, that’s what will follow. Therefore you must determine to keep the negative out of your life and mind. One of the most useful interpretations of determination for me is not so much forcing things to happen, but forcing my mind to stay spiritually focused and on positive tasks and purposefully, completely blockading the negative.

So once you find what you want and begin to consistently focus on its accomplishment in a positive manner, you’ve taken the first steps to achieving whatever you want. The rest is determination.

I think that in moving to the utmost of success you have to have some very specific traits of determination. It’s easy for me to be a determined guy when you regard it only as a bulldog tenacity. That tenacity is a necessary trait of determination, but it is not all. If you get past the initial and into the deeper meanings and application of determination of success in life I think you find that there’s much more to making it work than just bulling your way through.

Here are some thoughts on that:

1. Find the right thing. I don’t necessarily consider Donald Trump the greatest example in the world, but I heard him say something extremely smart the other night. He said, “If you don’t love what you’re doing, you’re doing the wrong thing.” Not every part of life, or even every part of your most anointed life path will be loveable, but you better be locked on to the enjoyment of the greater part of your journey or most likely you’re going down the wrong road.

2. Probably the most important part of determination is maintaining your focus. Modern life speeds by so fast it’s easy to drop the ball. Being able to doggedly stay on one point is a big factor in success.

3. Some points you absolutely will have to be a bulldog. Be prepared for that. Once you’ve made up your mind, there will be opposition. Even when you’re spiritually focused. Some obstacles are meant to be smashed.

4. Being a bulldog will have its drawbacks and it is not enough to make you truly successful in everything. A true catch bulldog can get to a place where he would literally rather be shot than let go of whatever it is his caught. I think that makes the drawback obvious. Intelligence has to rule as well as dogged persistence.

5. Probably more important than pure will in accomplishing something is the determination to stay spiritually focused on what you want and mentally positive. I’m not giving that as if thinking alone will get the job done. It won’t. But it will keep your physical work or will directed in the right path and that is the greatest part of accomplishment.

6. Commitment and motivation. This goes back to loving what you’re doing. If you really care about it, it’s not that hard to be in it for the long haul and to keep working on things when others have quit.

7. Patience. This is a hard one for me. I know that I’m going in the right direction, but it still doesn’t happen fast enough for me. I think a balance must be struck here between aggressive achievement and realizing that life takes time in physical, mental and spiritual senses. Balance must also be struck between your goals themselves. Not giving up your whole life for one goal.

8. I said this last week and I’ll say it again. It’s hard to focus on details if the big questions aren’t settled. You can settle them by knowing Jesus Christ.

Life and lifting are full of wonderful, inspirational examples of persistence. Lifting especially gives a plethora of tremendous, inspirational examples. Next time, I’m going to give you several real, modern lifters’ stories as they apply to persistence not only in life, but in lifting. You’ll be amazed. I know these guys and still find some of what they’ve overcome to get strong both amazing, and outrageously motivational.


TRAINING TIP

Many of you out there are looking to put more size on your muscles. That’s a great goal. Let’s talk a little about putting size on.

I think size training should be melded with or a product of other functional training goals. I think it’s useless to put size on for the sake of itself. It must come with strength and functional ability. Actually for more drug free guys, if you’re going to put on any serious size it’s going to have to come with strength. Because actually building any serious size without the use of drugs, is going to have to be the product of heavy training and good eating.

I would also say that in putting on size, you ought to force it to happen in the context of also building and or maintaining endurance and flexibility. Most of you will find it’s much more productive to do it that way. It creates a pain-in-the-butt situation to get huge and then find out that you haven’t kept up your flexibility so you can’t scratch your own head or you can’t walk across the parking lot without being out of breath so you have to go back and rebuild it. I say build it all at one time. That way you get a truer, more functional product with less trouble and more lasting gains.

Making size gains within the context of maintaining your aerobic capacity and flexibility and increasing your strength are the kind of gains that last. They don’t go away if you miss a week’s training especially when you do it drug free. I also believe you will in the long run gain more size by keeping up your endurance and flexibility. The flexibility will keep you training harder and with less injury and the endurance will also allow you to train harder and recover faster. A healthier system is always more cooperative in achieving your goals and smarter in the long run.

Size in individual muscles to me is best built by using the big exercises. If you build your arms by doing heavy rows and presses, by the time you get around to or actually think about concentrating on curls and tricep exercises you’ll actually have enough base muscle to give you a good platform to build on. Plus that muscle will be in balance because you had to use it in muscle groups instead of individual muscles. It will be stronger, more functional, and less likely to be injured. Plus I think the truth is that the majority of your size, if you’re talking about really getting big, is going to come from there and all you really do is top off with the smaller exercises.

I think this training requires a couple of different factors.

1) An anabolic stimulus. By this I mean training with exercises that are truly whole-body, for instance squats and deadlifts. These big exercises create such a systemic hormonal stimulus that they make you big all over. They convert your body into a size building machine when you do them progressively and with the proper intensity. Rows and presses fit into this category, but to a lesser extent as in they don’t have quite the whole-body effect, but they do work huge amounts of muscle and are the necessary base exercises for your upper body. For you skinny guys who can’t gain weight period, this is absolutely a must! This gives your body a reason to put on muscle.

2) Progressive training, eating and resting. I have not particularly found volume to be a hugely necessary factor in putting on size. Solid form in basic exercises trained intensely and progressively putting on more and more weight has been the key. Eating real whole food, getting all the macro nutrients in large amounts and resting the body enough between workouts to progress has been the most productive for me.

This really covers the basics of size training. There’s much more to be said as far as sets, reps, specific combinations of exercises, training days, implements and equipment to use, eating, training for individual muscles, etc., but this is the base jumping off point. The rest is icing if you don’t get the basics right.

Hope this helps some of you and gives you some food for thought.

By the way… I don’t usually worry about measurements a whole lot, but I happened to take one about a week and a half ago and then another one two days ago. During that time I’d done my regular rowing, pressing, squatting workout along with some kettlebell swinging for endurance. As I normally do, I cycle in different Alternative conditioners and did two hard, heavy workouts with the Lifeline chest expander. Just four simple exercises done for three sets each.

Overhead pull downs, front chest pulls, tricep extensions and one arm curls. I figured the cable type pulling will be good for my bending strength, but what I was shocked by is that the first time I measured my arm, it was 22 ½”, the second time I measured it, it was 23” and that’s a full ½” on my arm that was already big to begin with and I’ve actually lost weight. I’ve been eating lighter than usual and doing endurance work. I think that really talks about how effective the cable resistance can be for building muscle. Because at my advanced level, if I can add size and be slimming down at the same time… that points to a truly effective training stimulus.

I didn’t tell you all that to sell you our training video for cables or the Lifeline cables even though I do think you should invest in both. I told you that because it illustrated my point and REALLY surprised me even though I had trained with cables before and knew how effective they were. It even has me a little jacked up about a possible training experiment, but I’ll have to tell you about that later.

Here’s a link to a new article we put up about cable training if you missed it. http://strongerman.com/19_reasons.html

And here’s a link to our cable video. You should really check this out as we finally put together a full description of the video itself.

http://strongerman.com/alternative_conditioning/cables.html