Truth is a dangerous thing. It can build but it can also kill.
Once you have opened the gate to the reality of natty lifting, you can’t close it.
You can’t just go to the gym and do low-bar squats while thinking that you will look like Rippetoe‘s crush Doug Young one day.
You can’t follow Jay Cutler’s pump routine thinking that you will get as big as him when knowing that he is on a mountain of drugs and eats 400 grams of protein a day.
You can’t keep pumping naturally while thinking that you will look like prime Jeff Seid thanks to broccoli and chicken and call yourself sane.
So, if you get exposed frequently enough to the reality of lifting, you will undoubtedly experience natty lifting depression (NLD).
There are two ways to cure NLD – inject or follow the plan below.
Here’s how to make natty lifting fun again:
1. Only Do Exercises You Like
Unlike what the fakers say there are no irreplaceable exercises. Everything can be replaced and no exercise on the planet offers enough value to do it when you hate it.
No need to torture yourself with fetish exercises like bench presses, deadlifts, and squats if you don’t like them.
Do what you like and don’t ask for permission.
If you want to train only on machines, do it.
If you only want to do deadlifts and no other exercises, do that.
If you only want to train with DBs, do that.
If you only want to do shoulder presses and wrist curls…do that.
Every exercise you do, you have to like it.
2. Only Train Where You Want
If you want to train in a gym that would get classified as a SPA by the gangsters, train there.
If you want to train at the local park with weird dogs passing next to you, train there.
If you feel good training in your living room while listening to your neighbors jumping on the bed, do that.
In other words, don’t go to places that make you feel distracted and uncomfortable. The sacrifice isn’t worth it.
Ultimately, the more things you hate about your training habit, the less likely you are to do it. And if the ambiance in your gym is one of those, you can easily change your surroundings.
3. Forget About Satisfying The Gurus
Don’t waste time living up to the expectations of some fitness guru.
Don’t be a fanboy looking for approval from some muscle constructor. They are not your friends or your father. You don’t need their blessing or approval.
Run free, brah.
4. Forget About Muscle Imbalances
Ironically, muscle imbalances are something that many naturals lose sleep over.
Everybody is worried about the perfect push-to-pull ratio and other nonsense.
Look, bro. It takes an insane amount of effort (and a dose of bad luck) and time to experience the severity of muscle imbalances.
The truth is that you can train certain muscle groups and ignore others forever while remaining perfectly healthy.
It’s physically impossible to train all the muscles in your body equally anyway.
5. Forget About Being Functional or Unfunctional
Functional training started as a way to counter the bodybuilding idiocracy. It was somewhat nice and entertaining in the beginning.
Example: It’s more functional to do pull-ups than a lat pull-down in case you’re chased by a bear.
Sure. But the chances are that you won’t get chased by a bear ever. You probably won’t even see one running free in your entire lifetime.
Ultimately, functional and non-functional are subjective terms and change quickly with the context. So, it’s best to ignore both of them.
Do what you like.
6. Don’t Chase Roided or Someone Else’s Numbers
It’s nice to have goals, but it’s nicer to be real. Compete against yourself, not against people on the Internet you’ve never seen.
Setting a PR will feel way better than receiving applause from anyone on a forum.
Just be yourself and smile cause you never know what will happen tomorrow.
And besides, you will never feel good enough if you constantly compare yourself to others (especially online.)
7. Don’t Idolize The Lifters of The Past
Don’t fall for the scam called idolatry. You don’t even know those people – why are you so obsessed with them?
Your idea of them is a combination of public information that may or may not be true and a healthy dose of imagination needed to fill in the Blancs. You can respect them but don’t make them your king.
8. Don’t Allow Joint Pain In Your Life
Genetic conditions aside, joint pain in lifting is super easy to avoid.
How? Proper form + common sense.
Just don’t do exercises that aggravate your joints. If you are feeling some irritation, don’t ignore it because you “must do” exercises x,y,z. There are no mandatory lifts. All of them can be replaced.
In most cases, the sources of joint pain in lifting are – poor technique, too much weight, and/or too much volume + frequency – all variables within your control.
9. Don’t Max Out
Maxing out is the fool’s idea of success.
You don’t have to be a professor to realize that the heavier the weight and the closer to your limit you are, the more likely it is to experience an extreme outcome such as a nasty injury.
So, spare yourself the CNS and joint stress.
10. Choose Your Frequency
Train as frequently as you want. If you want to train arms 6 days a week, do it.
If you want to do a full-body workout once a week, do that. Both have their advantages.
And never forget that you can always switch from one to the other when needed.
– Natty
Great Article!
Training should be fun, not a chore. And obssesing over lifting ( And all things in life) is harmful
Man, I went through this exact process a few years after having spent my youth chasing the impossible while powerlifting as a natural (result; life long injuries that were completely avoidable).
The beauty of facing this reality is complete freedom from idiotic goals, expectations, and wastes of time.
Now whenever someone tries to tell me that lifting is important for your life, I ask them how much Jeff Bezos can bench press; that usually shuts them up immediately.
Absolutely.
Training is a great habit to adopt in a lot of senses, but one shouldn’t overdo it. If you can build muscle in the process, fine, but you must be realistic with your own body and keep realistic expectations. Otherwise, the physical and mental benefits you get from the activity are distorted into something potentially detrimental.
Good job…you are the best…
I have trained seriously for decades, including directly under gurus, swamis, you name it. I accomplished much but at too great a cost.
This article is the liberating antidote to the time-honored cult solutions, which nitwittery not only fails to deliver the promised outcomes but are unpleasant, injurious, unsustainable.
You can get the same body-building results—absent the downsides.
As a younger man, I would have never believed this could be true. But the toughest part is accepting that this is entirely true, without enduring the hard lessons that prove it.
Louis
Wise words and exactly what it was for me in my youth, I would’ve never believed this. Guess it’s just how it must go, but it’s still annoying. Through competitive sports and strength training I’ve lost so much in my life. I was healthy and fit, good at school, had a lot of friends and nice quality relationships and I had this overall positive drive in life. But the monotonous focus on sports “career” and fitness took a lot of those away in the end.
Before this starts to sound like a blues song, I’m happy to tell you that this has mostly changed for the better these days. Once again, big thanks go to NoN, this has been a game changer for me, and I’m forever grateful for Truth and the community here, and for the fact that I found this site. Although I have many emotional and physical battle scars from my past, nowadays I feel good doing dips and / or pushups, pullups and Bulgarian split squats. A few years ago, I also realized that the biggest reason I exercise is the positive effect it has on my mental health. Since then, this has been straight forward, I feel good, so I just keep going. Don’t fix it if it’s not broken.
I also get a lot by thinking about how little exercise I must do to look and feel at least decent, to keep the gains and live in the maintenance mode. I can write my whole fitness regime into a regular sized matchbox, and I’m proud of it. And frankly, I could do a lot less and keep the gains, maybe even gain some, but I like to train daily, to keep the blues away. I usually rest on Sundays, and I hate them. Now that it’s Monday here, I feel great to start the week even though my summer vacation just ended and I’m back to work. But it’s a pullup day, so I’m in a great place in my mind.
Oh yeah, one more thing worth mentioning. In a matter of two years or so, the city I live in has invested in these outside gyms which are great. Those have given me additional motivation to do a little more. Unlike the ones I’ve seen in the past, the equipment in these gyms is very good, all the machines have these lever systems which allow you to add weight. For example, the bench press goes higher than 100 kilos, which is plenty for my purposes. At least two of these gyms are close to a beach, which makes it even better during summer. And the newest gym just happens to be very close to where I live, (7,5 minutes’ walk). I like to jog or walk there, do a session, jog / walk to the beach, swim and jog / walk back home. Doesn’t really get much better than that.
Forgot to add that this article had an all-time great starting line with the “Truth is a dangerous thing”. You are a dangerous motherfucker Truth 😊 because anybody / thing that makes you think, is a danger. Just bought your new PDF’s and I’m very eager to start reading them. Thanks in advance!
Strongman got my training fun again a couple years ago as the Barbell training was getting boring. and I kept getting hurt trying to push the numbers. I still find it loads of fun to pick odd objects my body weight or more and farmer carries almost my bodyweight per hand. Lifting rocks half my bodyweight or more overhead I find really fun.. Downside to this is I am best at picking stuff up the ground and lifting it over my head such as deadlifts, rows, cleans and overhead press. My squat and bench gains have deminished. A benitit to Strongman training is my knees, rotator cuff, lower back and elbow has never been healthier and resilieant.
At 40, after training since 17, I’m just trying to enjoy more training freedom rather than trying to overprogram or optimize anything. My goals now is to improve at pullups and keep muscle mass for aesthetics and for “armor” for my martial arts training (mostly bjj), there’s no need for complicated stuff, following rules, or having must do exercises.
I would argue that in the past I had better results when I just kept showing up and doing whatever I liked, because it’s easier to be consistent without burning out, than at the times I went ocd with training variables, exercise selection, etc..
Great article. I keep a basic set up in my shed, blast the music, and do whatever the hell I want to do. I don’t even really think about it anymore. I never look up info on bodybuilding, couldn’t name a current bodybuilder, could care less whether I am stronger than I was 6 months ago, and very rarely see myself in the mirror. In fact, I absolutely hate mirrors in gyms. Sometimes I will even knock back a beer or two while working out.
I am 50 and have been at this for 30 years. I just like being fit and strong but it really doesn’t bear dwelling on.
Great website.
This was such a nice comment. Reminds me of old-time strong men. I don’t remember who those brothers were that drank beer on a regular basis, but it didn’t really affect their results.
What also comes into mind is that approach of freestyling your workouts. When many people were talking about the internet sensation Hannibal for king, there was also this other black dude who did impressive calisthenics stuff (handstand clapping pushups was one of his specialties). My memory plays tricks again so I don’t remember what he was called. What I do remember is that he said in an interview that he approaches training like Jay-Z approaches rapping, by freestyling. He just did what he felt like doing.
What goes around comes around.
Although I know nothing about rap music, I recently saw a clip of the producer legend Rick Rubin who was talking about the difference between Eminem and Jay-Z. He said that Eminem always has a notebook with him, and he is constantly writing shit down, and eventually 99% of that doesn’t get used when recording. Then again, Jay-Z doesn’t write anything, comes to record and just listens to the beat and then freestyles often complex stuff on the spot.
I feel that nowadays we tend to make training so very complicated by overanalyzing stuff and 99% of that so-called information we gather we don’t even use. I’ve been thinking a lot about taking the freestyle approach. Approaching it like a child approaching playing. This is what I used to do with my friend decades ago when we started lifting. We just went in and started to lift. And we had a blast while doing it. Similarly to competitive sports. I used to play soccer as a kid and in my youth. It was all just so much fun when I was approaching it like it’s used be approached, a game. When things got more serious and “planned”, it quickly wasn’t fun anymore.
Great piece.
This article is what I needed. I overthink everything mentioned. “If you don’t squat then (insert inadequacy here)”. At 44 I hate squats (even with a SSB it’s still kind of meh on my knees) and deadlifts (even trap bar). I like single leg work, machines, db presses, and I freaking love cables.