Episode 75: What's Your Job Right Now?

Transcript

In the world of bodybuilding, there's a guy named Mike Menser whose opinions tend to be
quite a bit different than most other people who talk about this kind of stuff.
One of the things he's kind of famous for, generally speaking, people who do bodybuilding
tend to believe that higher volume of training, right?
So this would be doing more sets, more days of the week, you know, just more, more, more,
more, tends to lead to better results than just going in and doing less, but maybe doing
less harder.
So the difference being, let's say you go into the gym and you're just going to do one
or two sets of a particular body part.
In theory, you can push those one or two sets to an absolute, you know, maximum effort,
even push beyond failure because you don't then need to do a bunch more.
Whereas if you go and you do six, eight, 10 sets of something, a particular body part, you
need to leave a little bit in the tank as you go, because if you don't, you're just going
to run out of steam by the end.
But anyway, generally speaking, common wisdom tends to point in the direction that more volume,
so more sets throughout the course of a week are better, it leads to better results than
fewer sets.
Now there's some contention around this.
In fact, there's a video recently that was put out by a guy that sort of disputes this.
But anyway, the reason I bring up Mike Mentzer, he's on the other extreme where he preached,
you know, he was kind of famous for doing very, very few sets, but doing them to an absolute,
you know, kind of maximum failure and beyond kind of capacity, but not doing it very often
and not doing very many sets per body part per week.
There was an interesting little short clip where he talks about just a sliver of this
concept, and I'll link it in the description.
What he's saying in the video is essentially your job as a bodybuilder, your job is not to
go into the gym and show, you know, show yourself how tough you are or how much endurance you have
or how many sets you can do, your job is to go in and stimulate muscle growth.
So I'll back up for a second here.
There was a certain idea, at least when I was first getting into weightlifting and whatnot,
you know, years and years and years ago, there's a certain idea that the way muscle,
you gained muscle was by essentially tearing apart and breaking down your existing muscle
and then as it built itself back up, it would build itself larger than it was the first time
around.
I don't know if that was ever supported in research or not, but at the very least, culturally,
that idea has been debunked and kind of replaced.
What's really happening is you want to go in and stimulate muscle growth.
So you're trying to stimulate your body, kind of shock it into saying like, look, oh, I need
more muscle. And then, you know, throughout the course of your rest time, you will then
build that muscle, you know, through the rest of the day, the rest of the week, whatever.
So it's not that you're necessarily breaking it down and building it larger.
That concept has borne out to not be true.
In fact, if you're largely breaking down your muscle throughout the course of your workouts,
you're probably going too hard and you'll actually do, you'll gain less over time because you're
constantly trying to replace what you've already lost. Instead, you're just trying to, it's almost
like saying to your muscles like, hey, idiot, grow, right? That's how I think about it. Like you're
trying to find ways to tell your, you know, muscular system in your body, there needs to be more of
you. So his point is video is that your, your, your goal as a bodybuilder is not to walk into a gym
and try to do as many sets as possible and, you know, break yourself down and show how much your body
can take. There is room for that. It's just that it's not a bodybuilding thing. Instead, your goal is
to stimulate muscle growth and then get out to rest and recover because that's when you actually build
your muscle. Now I'm not necessarily saying that I come from the school of thought. I got, I don't
know. This has always been tough for me because on the one hand, I came up not through bodybuilding
or weightlifting, but through more athletic kind of stuff. And in athletic endeavors, particularly in
the ones that I did, endurance training was a huge part of that. So for me, it's almost baked into my
mindset. Like I do think to myself, how hard can I push myself? How far can I push myself? How much
can I endure? I try, I have tried to kind of bring that down, especially as I've gotten older over the
years, but it's still in there, but that's, that's a different thing. I bring this up because I have
outside of the realm of the gym. So not even talking about the gym, this kind of quote, which again,
I'll, I'll link to has really resonated with me over time. And I've grown to think about this
outside of the realm of the gym and weightlifting and athletic endeavors and any of that stuff,
but instead how it just generally applies to life, to my life, my professional life, even my personal
life. And what I find myself asking myself, particularly when things seem a little disjointed
or flustered, or like there's a lot going on, I find myself asking, what is your job right now?
Much like Mike Mentor's point of, you could go into the gym and maybe you find yourself,
you know, slamming through a bunch of junk volume just to show that you can take it kind of thing,
or just to see how far you can push. But if you're, if you're trying to build muscle,
you should really ask yourself, what is my goal right now? And the goal is how can I stimulate
muscle growth and then get out of here so that my muscles can build? I think this goes almost
doubly is true. When you start talking about things like productivity, life dynamics,
when you start feeling flustered and you start feeling, well, let me say it a different way.
There's sort of this culture, particularly in, you know, I'll talk about in America,
where people ask you, oh, what are you up to right now? And, you know, you're supposed to almost say
like, oh, I'm so busy. I got so much going on. So much, so many things, so busy, right? It's almost
like a badge of honor. Like we almost wear being busy as a badge of honor, but I don't think that's
good. We don't need to be busy. We need to be focused. It's not about how many small tasks can
you run around and do. It's not about how many side gigs you can endure. It's not about how many
hours you can skip sleeping. It's about what's your job right now? What is the thing you need to be
focusing on right now? And then do that. And then get out and rest. And let other things subside a
little bit. You don't necessarily need to be doing 10 things in a mediocre way. You need to be doing
one or two well. And I've just found, I've begun to remind myself of this, or this quote surfaces in
my head regularly these days. When I find myself trying to do a bunch of stuff, I remind myself,
what is my job right now? Is my job right now to do something for the place that I work at? Is that
the most important thing? Is my job right now to be a good parent? Is my job right now to be a good
partner? Is my job right now to dive into a particular hobby? What is my job right now?
And it goes larger scale than, I think you can do this in a micro or a macro kind of way.
The micro way would be literally right in this moment, what is my job? When you find yourself
kind of scattered and trying to figure out a bunch of different stuff or do a bunch of different stuff
all at once. But at a more macro level, think about it in terms of the whole day, the whole week,
the whole month, maybe the whole year. What's your job right now? What is the job right now?
And can you just do that and worry less about proving to yourself and everyone else how busy you
are and how much you can endure? Because ultimately, all of that just becomes a lot of noise and swirling
and you may not be doing the thing you actually need to be doing.