Life can be made simple. Life can also be made very hard.
When we’re honest, a lot of the difficulties we face are self-made.
What bothers me almost more than anything though is when we seek out “experts” to help us with our woes and they in turn just make things more difficult. More complicated.
In my opinion, the mark of a true expert is NOT how they can take a complicated thing and make it even more complicated.
It’s how they can take a complicated thing and make it simple. So simple that a child could understand it.
That takes true expertise to do.
The fitness industry in particular is rampant with terms and talking heads that seem to be trying to show how smart they are while under the guise of actually helping someone.
Things like:
Wave loading, conjugated sets, neuromuscular optimization, multiplanar movement, proprioceptive enhancement, eccentric emphasis, dynamic tension, periodization strategies, functional adaptation, maximal muscular recruitment, or kinetic chain integration.
The list goes on and on. People actually use these terms.
Now, I understand not everyone is me and some can get super excited about the above terms and what they mean. I wish them all the best.
But personally I take far more pride taking the complex and making it simple. Easy to understand.
I’ve found nothing takes people backwards quicker than the feeling of being overwhelmed.
I don’t have the stats but personally I feel that more goals (particularly fitness goals) have been shattered by feeling overwhelmed than anything else.
People start feeling overwhelmed, so they stop doing what they need to be doing (or at least think they need to be doing), so they feel guilt, which causes pain, which then leads them to quit entirely so they don’t feel the pain, which then causes them to feel more pain. Rinse and repeat.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all about pain.
Few things excite me more than experiencing it myself and inflicting it on others.
But it needs to be the “right” kind of pain. We have a motto at The Armoury:
“Embrace the pain for freedom from pain.”
But I’m not talking about purposely smashing your shin into a car bumper and thinking that this is the path to freedom of sorts.
I’m talking about the pain involved in growth, improvement, and gaining strength, both physically and mentally.
This is the goal for all of the lifters who set foot in The Armoury.
Back to my rant, I’ve learned that the quickest and most effective way to NOT get results for my members is to overwhelm and confuse them.
My whole goal is to show how simple this process can be.
Strength train 3x/week for 45 minutes each time. Simple.
Don’t sit all day. Go for walks and fit some steps in. Simple.
Consume one gram of protein per pound of bodyweight. Simple.
Go to bed and wake up eight hours later. Simple.
Stop watching the news/scrolling social and feed your mind with something positive every day instead. Simple.
But this isn’t enough. Strength training is both an art and a science. It’s one of my life’s great loves.
To tell someone to go strength train 3x/week when they don’t know anything about strength training is kinda like telling me to go build a house.
I think that building houses is a wonderful thing. I’m glad there are people out there who can do this. But I can’t build one. I don’t understand how. I lack the knowledge.
And it would take a lot more than watching a few “do it yourself” videos on YouTube and a trip to Home Depot for me to have the needed tools.
For most people strength training on their own is the equivalent of me building a house on my own.
The difference is that most people feel that it’s something that they should be able to do but then berate themselves for not having the “willpower” or “discipline”.
In my mind this is rarely the case.
It’s simply a lack of knowledge or falling victim to an abundance of information which leads to confusion and overwhelm. The whole goal of The Armoury is to take this feeling away.
