Patience Teaches More Than Enthusiasm

“Don’t try to be 40 before you’re 30.” – Ramit Sethi

The above quote was one from a best-selling finance author and owner of an incredibly successful website called I Will Teach You To Be Rich, and is meant to discuss concepts of business and personal finance, but can have huge cross over to a lot of other elements of life, such as fitness.

Think of it this way: You’re a 20 year old who just graduated college, have no job, no income, and are looking to simply pay your cell phone bill this month and have a place to sleep. Does it really make sense to compare where you’re at now to the guy who has been working for the past 10-20 years, regardless of the field, has a house, a car, a spouse, a family, some savings, and travels for vacation when they feel like it? Want to hit da club and pay for bottle service? Hopefully the 20 year old likes eating Ramen noodles for the rest of the month.

Now admittedly, you’ve probably made some poor financial and life decisions in the past. We all have. I remember the first house I purchased back in 2007, right when the housing market was at its’ hottest point and just before the entire financial world collapsed. We saw a house that was relatively affordable, needed a bunch of work, and decided to put in a bid that was 10% above asking to secure it. We then put about $40,000 into renovations and repairs and last year were happy to sell it for 8% less than we paid for it in 2007.

What lead to this poor financial decision? Well, the pressure of a market where prices were increasing on an almost daily basis and shrinking inventory lead us to think we would quickly be out of options if we didn’t jump on something soon. Our realtor mentioned there were competing offers entered that morning (maybe, maybe not), so advised us to put up a higher bid to secure the place. Our collective naivety of what renovations would cost for some high-ticket things that have no immediate effect on resale value (upgrading electrical from knob & tube, replacing the 60 year old furnace, insulating front and back entries, and tearing down a dilapidated garage) meant our initial outline of $10,000 would quadruple in short time.

What’s the silver lining to a story like this? Well, essentially there are some lessons you can’t learn in school or in a text book (or a blog for that matter), which is why experience becomes such a valuable tool at your disposal. I can now say in terms of my real estate investing, I wouldn’t look at a property like that again, and especially wouldn’t over bid to get it either.

This was a lesson my 25 year old self wouldn’t have been able to pick up for himself. I was too interested in deadlifting, training clients, and expecting the world to keep on trucking the way it had been for the past couple of years. Then the market crashed, my club relocated, my wife quit a job in a manipulative and somewhat abusive scenario, and we were kind of stuck without savings or an understanding of what the next 12 months would bring, let alone the next 5 years.

Let’s circle back around to how something like this can relate to fitness. Do you think a 30 day challenge will be worthwhile for you in 10 years? How will chasing PR after PR after PR when you’re 20 affect you when you’re 40?

Essentially, if you want to test the limits of your body, what happens when you find out where those limits actually are?

I don’t want people to avoid chasing their goals or working their asses off in the gym after reading this, but it tells a lot about where a persons priorities lie when they start looking at the long view of their health and wellness compared to the short term goal of a new PR or a hard diet for quick results. Most of the time, the hard efforts aren’t sustainable for long durations, but can provide a very big benefit when used judicially on occasion. My goal is to be able to still train hard and healthy when I’m 80. I can’t get there if I’m doing stupid stuff and punishing my body in my 30s.

Now consider how this concept can be applied to an individual exercise. Let’s use a squat as an example. We see someone on Youtube squatting an ungodly amount of weight for a single and think “well golly, that looks swell. I think I’ll give that a try tomorrow.” Meanwhile, the person in the video has spent most of their life under a bar for a couple of hours each day, worked their ass off on technique, fine tuned the movement as best as possible, is likely lifting in enough gear to fill a shopping cart, and has 4 or 5 spotters. The guy watching the video is going to lift in tube socks and a smith machine.

That dude tried to sprint before he could walk, and now he can’t even walk any more (probably)

What would have been a better option? Grabbing an unloaded bar and doing some sets and reps to work on getting down and up without letting your heels lift off the floor, have your spine explode, or require extensive dental work. Add some weight progressively while still working on the ability to do the exercise properly versus just tossing around plates like a Greek wedding.At this stage the guy is the fresh-faced unemployed 20 year old looking at the 50 year old driving the Benz and wondering why he can’t have that too. Because you haven’t earned it yet, Skippy.

Putting in the time to improve can’t be faked. You can’t download a cheat app or find a productivity hack to do it for you, and you can’t get the results you’re after without it. To see quick changes are relatively easy, but to see actual changes in your tissues, metabolism, internal chemistry, and overall longevity at the cellular level takes a lot more than a 30 day challenge. If you want to treat this marathon we call life and lifting like a sprint, you won’t last very long at all, so having the patience to achieve the long term goals while setting short term goals along the way can go a long way to helping you get to those long term goals. This goes for fitness, finance, life in general, and even relationships.

Consider what the costs of what you’re doing are to your health and wellbeing, and whether they’ll be worth it to you in the long run. If you’re a professional athlete or an amateur gearing up for Rio, you’ll need to work extra hard until those games are over, but then hopefully you’ll be able to focus on recovery and getting back to healthy again before the next training cycle starts. If you’re an average Joe who works in a corporate environment, and you have a mortgage and family that relies on you to support them, pushing a PR at the risk of an injury that could leave you unable to work may not be worth the price, but that’s something experience teaches best.

Take care of your body now so you don’t have to later. Eat good food, keep the booze to a reasonable amount, workout regularly, and do some maintenance stuff like foam rolling, mobility training, working on correctives if needed, floss, wear sun screen, all the cool things in the world, right?  Well, what’s cool is being 70 or 80 and still lifting hard and being able to tie your own shoes.

When in doubt, just remember the story of the old bull and the young bull. It’s all about where you value your priorities.