Hello everyone.
A few years ago when I was the photographer at what was then one of the largest gold gyms in Asia if not the world, I had the pleasure of meeting a massive gentleman who worked in the capacity of a janitor at Golds Gym.
The reticent quiet individual had at that time won dozens of body building awards and was continuing to win consistently even at that time.
The odd thing was that no one had ever seen him workout. I was working my magic with the camera there on a near daily basis and I saw him lift weights only when he was putting them back on their respective stands.
It seemed that the more he DIDN’T work out was the more he won. I shouldn’t say it was natural for the talk to move in this direction, but human nature being what it is, it wasn’t long before people ( mostly guys ) had had it up to their ears with this janitor who was continuing to win body building awards without working out. The talk about illegal drugs and this guy’s name were starting to make the rounds. It took more than a month before I actually found him in a position that looked like he had just been lifting weights.
Curious as I was, in my head I had already asked him for his secret.
I blurted before my brain had a chance to properly catch up to my tongue, “How do you win all these contests if this is the only time I have ever seen you work out?”
He looked at me oddly and asked me why I thought he never worked out. I told him about the rumors that he might be on muscle building drugs or steroids etc. He laughed quietly and remarked, quite truthfully that drugs don’t build muscles they only help one to work out more strenuously.
This seemed like the opening I was waiting for so I watched him expectantly, thinking that he was about to let me know what was going on. In vain, apparently since he left that space with a spare weight in his hand. It was pretty well a month later before I could get his attention again on the topic.
On that occasion, he wasn’t simply finishing a set, he was in the middle of a strenuous one armed preacher curl. Gathering my lagging courage, i approached him and waited. When he had finished his set, in an odd kind of time bending way he continued the conversation of a month before without even saying hello.
He was talking, but not quite about what I and the rest of the gym really wanted to know, so I tried to gently steer in the direction of — how did he do it?
I couldn’t help myself, I smiled as I thought he was finally going to tell me something earthshaking. Something so profound that the rest of the guys in the gym would just marvel. With earth-shattering stillness, he simply said the difference was in the interval. Oh yes, I thought to myself your interval is like once every 30 days. Aloud, I said patiently, is that so?
Without fanfare, he simply said, “Trevor, the difference was the interval period used between various workouts”.
This athlete knows his ‘At rest’ heart rate. After a strenuous workout his heart rate goes up and stays up even as torn muscle is being rebuilt. He says if it takes days for the heart rate to normalize, then so be it. He won’t even work out another body part until the heart rate is back ‘At rest’
And this is how this quiet unassuming janitor wins regional tournament after tournament and places high on the Asian body building charts while the rest of the guys scratch their heads and wonder when or how he trains.
So what? Was this just another jock story of Cinderella being found by Hollywood producers? or is there some deeper thread hiding in here somewhere? Truly the morale of the story was not really not about the weight lifting ( or lack thereof so don’t sweat that ). It is really about how through learned tunnel vision we can sometimes forget that there can be more than one way to “skin the cat”.
Are you are yearning for change but planning on doing more of the same thing that got you to this point? Would it be kind of us to assume that perhaps that change that you are looking forward to, simply isn’t going to happen while you are continuing to do more “of the same”?
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