Have you ever found yourself stagnating with your progress in the gym? Not losing weight and finding it very hard to be as ‘in shape’ as you once used to?
I have experienced this and it was both confusing and frustrating.
It was confusing and frustrating because I couldn’t see why it was happening, when in the past, progress in the offseason for me was quite linear and when I said ‘I want to get leaner’, then I easily got leaner also.
It actually took me years to see why I was experiencing such results… or lack there of, but when I did realise what was going on, it was rather logical and straight forward.
I have written about this kind of thing before, but I feel it is something alot of us overlook.
For 23 years of my 37 on this planet, I have eaten, trained with weights and slept.
I will assume everyone who trains with weights also eats and sleeps, so essentially we are all doing the exact same things.
But, we are not.
For periods of my life, I have been more and also less focussed on these three things. It has varied.
Depending on my level of focus, my results then vary also. The more time and effort I commit to eating, training and sleeping, the better my results in regards to progressing in the gym and optimising my body composition.
I may have been eating, training and sleeping for the last 23 years, but I can’t say I have been 100% soley focused on those three things for that whole time.
When I started training in 1998 at 14 years of age, it was just something I started doing because a friend of the family gave me a couple dumbells. I’d seen my father lifting weights, so I thought I may as well lift some also. I had no goals at the time, I was just lifting some weights for the sake of it.
Over the years I got more and more into my weight training (mainly due to injury from football and running track) and eventually realised I had to eat more than a sparrow and stop doing ridiculous amounts of cardio if I wanted to grow some muscles. I had never given growing muscles any thought, when I started training, so I only started eating more like a bodybuilder when I stopped playing football and stopped running track as seriously as I used to and actually gave bodybuilding some focus (this was probably around around 2002-2003, so I had been training for 4-5 years already).
The day I actually gave up running track completely (March 2008) to focus solely on becoming the best bodybuilder I could possibly be, was the time I made better gains than I had ever made before. Even better than my newbie gains, 10 years prior… I actually never got any newbie gains, so that wasn’t hard to beat! Perhaps just too much cardio and not enough foods back then, for my body to grow excess muscles.
From 2008 until I moved out of home in 2012, I can honestly say that nothing got in the way of my eating, sleeping or training. Not work, not friends, not family, not funerals, nothing. I was committed to being the best bodybuilder that I could possibly be, so I never gave myself the choice, of prioritising anything else in front of my sleeps, foods or training. To prioritise anything else, at any time, would just be cheating myself and my goals, so it was not an option.
I worked fulltime as a personal trainer still, but I made sure my clients fit perfectly around my eating, training and sleeping. I still saw my friends, went surfing occasionally and would go clubbing quite often, but I never missed a meal or missed out on sleep because of it. I felt I did everything I wanted to do, despite the restrictions people around me may have seen.
I loved the ultra focus I had towards my bodybuilding. It gave me structure, goals to aim for and being so routined and disciplined, was something I felt I was able to do better than anyone else… anyone else I’d ever met anyway.
In my mind, I was a world champion. Perhaps not on stage in competition, but I knew in my mind I was out sleeping, out eating and out training everyone else and for me, that was a very empowering belief.
Despite this very strong self belief that I could out work anyone else on the planet, I actually had quite a negative self belief about my ability as a bodybuilder, competition wise. I knew I could outwork anyone off-stage, but I also knew that so many people I’d seen in the gym and in comps seemed to grow muscle at a much faster rate than I and on the bodybuiding stage, the more muscles the better.
I may have been the hardest worker in the room, but genetically, I saw myself as just average. Not shit, I never thought I had bad genetics in regards to muscle growth, but I did not grow like some of my clients were able to grow and especially some of the guys I saw competing. I saw juniors twice my size! I remember seeing Josh Lenartowicz win a junior world title, I think back in 2006 or 2007 in the INBA (Yes, he was actually natty) and his level of musculature was fkn ridiculous. Aaron Smith, Clifford Barnes and I had some mutual friends and again, they were big for open bodybuilding, let alone juniors!
So, when this skinny little natural bodybuilder won a national open bodybuilding title in 2010 (see picture), it came as quite a shock. I was confused how every other athlete had let me win. I knew I looked good, but in my mind, I only looked that way due to my work ethic, so how lazy must all these other guys have been to let me beat them? Do they not eat, train and sleep the way I do? I thought every competitive bodybuilder would have their entire life revolve around their eating, sleeping and training, just as I did. Perhaps I was wrong.
Doing so well in that 2010 season really encouraged me. It was the first time in my life that I had ever thought I could actually be a decent bodybuilder. Imagine what I could look like in another 5-10 years, I thought! The way I was living my life at the time, meant my progress was very consistent. Slow of course (natty gains), but consistent none the less. So if I could win a national title now at 86kg/189lbs, imagine what I could do in a few years time. Imagine what I could do with another 5kg/11lbs of lean muscle tissue on my frame. I could actually be something pretty special here!
In 2011, the following year, I had the best offseason I had ever had. I trained harder than ever, ate more than ever and pushed more weight than I had ever done before. It was very productive. I was bigger and better than ever.
I decided to compete in 2012, despite being banned from drug tested competition after testing positive to 1, 3 Dimeth (stimulant in many pre workouts at the time), so I entered the IFBB and NABBA federation’s, for the lols.
Again, I wasn’t that interested in beating anyone else, I just wanted to beat my previous best, so getting up there with the big boys in an untested comp was no issue for me. But 2012 didn’t quite go as planned. I had moved out of home, so without giving it much thought, my sleeping schedule had changed slightly due to increase travel time, extra meal prep and being in more of a committed relationship. I fit everything in as best I could and at the time I didn’t realise it, but it was no longer perfect like it once was.
Because I wasn’t concerned with how I placed that year, I also experimented with my prep. I did no cardio and once per week I had the biggest cheat meal you could ever imagine, all the way through the prep up until the week before the show.
An example of my weekly cheats went something like this: Thai beef satay with large coconut rice, large pizza with the lot, 1L tub of ice cream, 1 block of chocolate and usually a 5 pack of cookies from woolies and some cinnamon donuts. Must have been close to 10k worth of calories. It was very enjoyable.
The combination of all these factors meant the physique I displayed on stage was not quite as impressive as in 2010. That was OK for me though, as I just put it down to the cheat meals. I still looked good, but not as good as I expected to look.
The next year in 2013 I finally competed in the naturals again. But again, I was disappointed with the physique that was displayed. I was as lean as ever, but I was somehow getting smaller over the years.
I never saw it at the time, so it was very frustrating and confusing for me, but I just wasn’t committing the same time and effort towards my bodybuiding as I had in the past.
I now had a fiance, a mortgage, alot more clients in the gym and I just wasn’t the absolute, laser focussed bodybuilder I once was. Not too surprisingly, that was having a negative impact on my physique. Not drastically, but as with anything in the natural bodybuiding realm, it was just a slow, steady progression in the opposite direction to where I wanted and expected to go.
2014 came around and I was still naive to what was occurring and why, so when it was time to diet down and compete again, I had to postpone it until 2015, as I hadn’t progressed yet. When 2015 came around, I was still experiencing this very stagnant state of training/body composition, so again, I didn’t compete. In 2016 I now had a daughter, I hadn’t been negatively impacted by her existence just yet, but again, no progress meant no competing yet again.
It wasn’t until 2017-2018, when my lifestyle was severely impacted by the little human, that I then managed to look back and realise that it wasn’t just now that things had changed, things had slowly been changing since moving out of home in 2012 and the laser focussed, obsessively routined bodybuilder that I thought I still was, hadn’t actually existed for quite some time. It was only then (6 years later) that I realised why my progress had stalled; I no longer committed the same time and effort as I used to, so naturally, my results had slowed/stopped and I had even regressed.
It was a conflicting revelation for me.
It was relieving yet also disappointing at the same time.
I was not the bodybuilder I used to be.
The things I knew I could do better than everyone else, I didn’t do anymore.
I was rather disappointed to realise this.
Anyway, this is possibly the longest story I have ever written and all I really needed and wanted to say was that the time and effort you commit to a given task or goal, generally dictates your results.
More time and effort in and more progress and a better result as the outcome.
Fairly logical.
Eat well, train hard and sleep lots. <3
