YOU ARE YOUR OWN BEST TRAINER
By Shane Robert
Building muscular size and strength is one of the main reasons people lift weights. Some want a bigger, more muscular physique. Others want tremendous strength. Many want both. Whatever your goal, there is one mistake that can hold you back more than almost anything else: trying to become something you are not built to become.
There is nothing wrong with having ambitious goals. But ambition works best when it is grounded in an honest assessment of yourself. Not everyone is built the same way. Some people are naturally lean, with small joints and relatively little bodyweight (this describes me pretty well); others are naturally heavier and sturdier; some gain muscle and body weight easily while still others struggle to gain anything.
The term "hard gainer" gets thrown around too freely these days. It implies an inherent problem but, often, the problem isn't genetics at all. Often it’s simply eating too little, training poorly, or frequent program hopping. There are, of course, genuine individual differences, and you have to take them into account. A lean, naturally muscular trainee may have an excellent foundation for bodybuilding whereas a naturally heavy, powerful trainee may be better suited to strength sports. Others fall somewhere in between and may enjoy combining both approaches. None of these paths is superior. There are only paths that may be superior for you.
You don't have to become Mr. Olympia. You don't have to become a world-class powerlifter. You don't even have to compete. Training can still make you stronger and more muscular, healthier and more capable. It can also simply become your “thing” rather than an attempt to satisfy somebody else's definition of success.
No routine written blindly can tell you exactly how your body will respond. You have to pay attention and keep track of your individual response. This knowledge is valuable because it tells you what works for you. That doesn't mean ignoring established training principles. It means applying them intelligently. Experiment with proven exercises and methods. As Bruce Lee famously said: "Absorb what is useful, discard what isn’t”.
Give worthwhile methods enough time to judge them fairly, but don't remain loyal to something simply because someone else says you should. If you discover that a particular exercise works better for you with a different grip, range of motion, tempo, or setup, pay attention to that discovery. If you try something that works amazingly well, keep doing it, even if a so-called expert tells you that it doesn’t. It may not work forever, but the only way to know how long it will work is to stick out.
The knowledge that matters most cannot be handed to you in a video or post. You have to earn it to learn it. It comes from learning your body well enough to recognize when you're making progress and when you're simply spinning your wheels. The process is simply one of training hard, observing what happens, making adjustments, and repeating the process. For a long, long time.
The ultimate goal isn't to copy another lifter. It's to discover what makes you stronger, more muscular, and better at training, and to have the patience and discipline to keep doing it. If your goals are realistic and you're willing to learn from your own experience, you don't need to make training more complicated than it has to be. You simply need to train, observe, adjust, and keep going.
