How I Got My Gains, Back

(Note: I’m not quite sure I ever had gains in the first place, but I thought “How I Got My Gains Back” was a much catchier title than “How I Got My Gains In The First Place”, so here we are.)

 

What follows is a rather embarrassing story. I’m not sure if it was more embarrassing to live it then, or relive it now, but here we go.

I was a high school athlete; football player to be precise. Now, if you’ve only known me the last few years, or only seen recent photos of me, this would probably not come as a shock.

NFL GMs, I am still available…

But if you knew me in the before time – the long, long ago – you might have been surprised to find out I dabbled on the gridiron.

I thought that at the time, despite my performance handicap in anything faster than a brisk walk, that I was a decent athlete. Yeah, I was the biggest, slowest kid on the team, but I was strong dammit. And I sure proved it by never making it off the scout team (those are the benchwarmers who get their asses kicked in practice, for my non-sports peeps out there).

My high school football career came and went, and the NFL never came calling…*sigh.*

I got to college and my focus shift. I hung up my cleats and turned my attention to just being able to scale the three flights of stairs to my business classes without feeling like the world was going to end.

Having been a big reader of Men’s Health – let’s be honest, mostly for the sex tips – much of my young adult life, I though this was a great place to start my quest to be less fat and weak.

What followed however, was essentially four years of jogging in place (not literally, that’s too much cardio). I saw no gains, lost no weight, and probably left college in worse shape than I came into it.

 

From Fat and Weak, to Weak and Fat

 

Tell me if this sounds familiar…

You find yourself a new workout plan; be it off the interwebz, a magazine, or the local meathead who you swear actually lives at the gym…seriously the guy’s always there.

You start your new plan, and it’s difficult; unlike anything you’ve ever done before. But you stick with it cause hey, if it worked for so-and-so then it must work right? And you ain’t no damn quitter.

So you stick with it for a bit. Maybe it’s a few weeks, maybe a month or two on and off, and you see some marginal results. But it’s not what you want. It’s not what you were promised. So you get discouraged, thinking maybe this plan doesn’t work for you.

You continue on a bit, hoping things will change, but you’re hearts not in it, and eventually you give up all together.

Mentally spent and exhausted from this discouraging endeavor, you sink back into seclusion, not seeing the light of the gym for weeks and months, undoing all your progress and then some.

Think this is impossible? Think this is some far-fetched, made up story from a galaxy far, far away?

It’s not.

This was me.

For four years.

Yes, I spent four years stuck in this endless cycle. Trying everything under the sun to lose weight, build muscle, and get stronger.

And you know the worst part about being stuck in the cycle? YOU DON’T KNOW YOU’RE IN THE DAMN CYCLE.

It’s not until you break the cycle, then look back, and realize, “Oh shit…”

 

How to Be A Breaker of Chains…and Cycles

 

It’s hard to break a cycle because, like I said, you usually don’t know you’re in it until you break it.

But no matter what your struggling with – your job, business, a relationship, or your fitness goals – there are things you can do to identify, break out of, and end the cycle of frustration and not achieving your goals.

 

Step One: When things don’t go the way you want them to, identify why.

 

There is a why behind everything.

If something works, or if it doesn’t, there’s a reason for it. If you want things to work more often than not work, you need to figure out why the things that don’t work, don’t work.

If the latest fitness program you tried didn’t get you the results you wanted, there’s a reason. Maybe it’s because it required you to spend two hours in the gym 5x a week, and you work 40+ hours. Or maybe the nutrition plan was too restrictive. Hell, maybe fitness really isn’t that important to you. That’s okay, but if it’s not, you’re going to have a hard time finding a plan to get you in shape.

I’ll say it again, if you want something to work, you need to first figure out why things that didn’t work before, didn’t work.

Now, I’m going to drop some harsh-but-true life knowledge on you; something that I wish I had accepted back when I was riding the bench in high school football.

Most of the time, the reason our fitness program didn’t work, the reason we’re not where we want to be at in our job or with our business, the reason our relationship didn’t work out, has a lot more to do with us than we care often care to admit.

Maybe we didn’t count our macros the way our nutrition plan called for, and therefore tried to out-train a shitty diet.

Maybe we’ve been logging a lot more time on Facebook, or on the couch, than on our business.

Maybe we were selfish, and treated our boyfriend/girlfriend poorly.

Maybe, just maybe, something is actually our fault…

*Gasp*

But that’s okay, because we’re identifying it, remember. And that means we can change it.

 

Step Two: Change what doesn’t work into something that does.

 

Once we know what doesn’t work, we can use that to identify what does, and help break the cycle.

Some things work for certain people. But that doesn’t mean those things work for everyone. We’re all special, unique flowers after all.

If you had trouble counting macros because you found it too time consuming, maybe you need a simpler nutrition plan.

If you broke up with your girlfriend because she ate her peas one at a time, maybe you just need to chill the fuck out Jerry Seinfeld.

But what if you can’t figure out why things didn’t work? What then? How do you figure out what will work?

Well, you can either keep doing what you’ve been doing; beating your head against that wall, or you could get help.

Sometimes, we need a second set of eyes and ears to look at what we’ve been doing, show us why it wasn’t working, and show us what will. This is where things like hiring a coach, or professional can save us so much valuable time; by giving us their expertise in an area where we probably don’t have any.

Once we identify, or have help identifying, what we think will work, it’s time to move onto Step Three.

 

Step Three: Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

 

Step Three is simple: Once we’ve identified something we think will work for us, give it a try.

If you start getting the results you want, awesome. Keep going.

If not, repeat Steps One and Two until you do.

Trial and error. That’s how you get results you want. That’s how you break the cycle.

Sexy? No.

Time consuming? Sometimes.

Success rate? 100%…if you never stop trying.

Because, at the end of the day, that’s what matters most. If something is important to you, you never stop trying. Because either you are going to succeed, or you’re going to realize that it’s not that important to you after all, and then you can move on to something else.

And this is exactly how I got my gains, back.

As hard and frustrating as it was, as many times as I stopped out of frustration, I never gave up. I kept trying and trying different things, different methods, until I eventually found something that helped me see progress. And the rest snowballed from there.

This is exactly why I became a fitness coach; to help expedite this process for people.

Going it on your own can obviously produce results – it did for me – but asking someone for help can produce results much faster, with fewer frustrations, giving you more time and energy for other things.

Helping people get results, helping them alleviate frustrations…that’s why I write…that’s why I coach…and that’s why I create products…to help people break their endless cycles of pain and frustration.

One such product is Mass Made Easy.

I created Mass Made Easy because I wanted people to have access to a muscle-building program that not only gave them the results they wanted, but was fun, and allowed the user to feel in charge of their own program.

Because, when you take ownership in something, you work that much harder for it. And that’s what Mass Made Easy lets you do. You get to choose your programming; you get to choose your area of specialization.

Mass Made Easy gives you everything you need to get the results you want. All you have to do is follow the program.

All this week, Mass Made Easy is on sale for over 50% off. If you want a muscle-building program that will give you results like never before, while enjoying yourself like never before, grab Mass Made Easy now.

 

Grab Mass Made Easy here, and get your gains back, like I did.