Patience Is The Most Powerful Drug in Bodybuilding
A stringy, teenage guy approached me at the gym yesterday. While he may not have had a tripod with him, he definitely belonged to that social media-dependent crowd. He was polite, calling me “sir”—a common courtesy here in the South—and said, “You have the most detailed calves I’ve ever seen in my life.” Normally, I would have cracked a joke like, “How long could that possibly have taken?” or “You should have seen them 50 pounds ago.” However, I’ve been trying to embrace my downsizing, a necessity of aging, so I simply replied, “Thank you.”
Then he asked the inevitable, dreaded question: “What did you do to get them to look like that?” The short answer would be, “four trillion reps.” But who likes short answers? Certainly not this kid; it was as if he were holding a paper airplane and asking me to explain how the space shuttle works. That’s my go-to opinion these days. The problem I have with most kids under 30 is that they are so conditioned to instant gratification that the idea of dedicating years to achieve noticeable results seems inconceivable, akin to asking them to give up their iPhones.
Let me share a quick anecdote: several years ago, I spoke at a bodybuilding seminar in Mexico City. My topic was the enormous amount of fake and counterfeit steroids on the black market there. After the seminar, a young, bloated, pimple-covered kid in his 20s approached me with a jug of ISS protein powder under his arm. At the time, Jay Cutler was Mr. Olympia, and he was under contract with ISS, so his picture was on the product label.
