The Psychology of Muscle and Identity

I think what you just touched on there so important and I think it's such a hard thing to realize like even you know we're still like in our late 20s now and it's still one of those things where it's like you're trying to prove it to

yourself and prove it to your peers that you know you're still a badass you know you don't want to be like okay i've reached the peak you know you still want to get as big and as jacked and as strong as possible but um yeah sometimes the value switches and it's just like okay it's just not that important to me anymore so how how long did it take you when you made that decision to as you started pulling the weight off i mean your whole life you'd been working to get as big and as gorilla as possible like was it a hard shift like did you just wake up one day and as it started to come off did you think fuck this i'm gonna put it back on or how was that back and forth you know it was yeah it's funny it's it's one of those things where you just find like it's hard to do like normal shit and you just feel awful and i i knew something was i knew something was a miss when i when i rotated around to to put a couple of milliliters of testosterone in my butt cheek and i realized i can't actually write so i had to start jabbing in my thigh and i was like this is stupid like i can't even turn around and look at my blue like what the fuck is wrong with me right and then you know it's just stuff it's shit like that right just normal normal stuff and then like one of the one of the things that i was like something's definitely wrong i was in i was in chicago i was at my buddy zach's uh facility all strength training in chicago and i was i was on the bench press and i had 365 pounds in the bar and i was doing like five sets of five and and i I was like, okay, he doesn't have a lot of – it's a really toned-down group training thing for general population. So they've got some racks. There's not a lot of equipment there. It's a very efficient space to train him. And I was like, I'll do some push-ups. Let me do a few push-ups and see because I haven't done push-ups in years. I couldn't fucking do 10 push-ups. And I told Zoe, I said, I would rather load that bar with 365 pounds and rep that out then they get on the ground with no weight and do a push-up because the push-up is too hard. And at that point, I realized something wasn't right. So then I was like, you know what, I'm tired of this. And, you know, that's one of the things as you get older, it's going to be harder to do is things. There's things that are very trainable, like hypertrophy and strength is pretty trainable as you age, right? You can maintain a lot of that. But things like reaction time, speed and stability and power, those types of things start to diminish. I started thinking, okay, for longevity, I'm halfway through my life about, so the next half of my life, I'm going to work on where I'm going to be in 40 years. I don't want to end up like my grandparents and not be able to move and be mobile because theirs is from underuse, and mine's going to be from overuse of the wrong things. And so I started thinking ahead. So what we talked about earlier, like, why am I thinking about the next six weeks? I need to be thinking about the next 40 years that I've got left on earth, hopefully. you know it so it wasn't that it wasn't that hard really and and my wife made me realize that she's gonna love me no matter if i'm fat or if i'm lean or if i'm gigantic and strong if she doesn't give a shit so why the fuck do i care about what anybody else thinks because she's the only one that i give a fuck about so um yeah so uh where was i going with that there was something else i was gonna say but now i forgot i'm gonna get i think i think just when you when you run or you play that card for a while and you kind of maybe when you start you're not there right so you're at the beginning of the journey and our expectations of what life or whatever you however you'll feel at the end of it is always different to the reality and so you're like okay when i'm gorilla jacked and i can do 150 kilo bench press for 10 reps i'll just squish small people in my hands yeah i'm gonna get this is how i'm gonna feel this is the attention i'm gonna get this is how my life's gonna be and yeah maybe you get some of those things or whatever but then you realize this actually isn't that good anyway. Like it was more just covering up an initial insecurity. But getting there is not that good. It's like the same, you always hear billionaires or people that have crazy success get rich and they realize, okay, well, I'm still not happy. My relationship still suck. I'm still out of shape because a lot of these things in life can't be fixed with a dollar bill. And the same thing is when you get there and you get jacked and you put on all this muscle, it's like, oh, I actually didn't want attention from that person. I didn't give a shit about that person. I don't actually feel better or feel good. And I think that's when people start to make the switch is when they get to their goal. And they're like, wow, this is nothing to like what I expected. What do I really want? Yeah, I want X, Y, and Z. They move towards those. Well, part of the, I think part of the problem is people are too busy working out. They're not working in and they need to start working in a little bit more and saying, okay, you know, it's an addiction, right? It's the same thing as a drug addiction, alcohol addiction, an anorexia. You know, you got guys that got bigorexia. And they think, well, I'm going to get bigger and stronger, and it's going to make me feel better about myself. And then they get there, and they realize, man, this is a real pain in the ass to maintain. My joints hurt. I'm bloated all the time. My fucking food bill is like $1,000 a week. This is ridiculous. And you get to the point where I actually not happy anymore And then you say well I go buy myself something cool I go buy a new TV or I buy a new house I buy a new car I buy a yacht about whatever And then you you sitting in that new car You're scared to park it anywhere because you don't want somebody to dig it or scratch it. And then that becomes a pain in the ass, you know? So people, people, but I think we are trained, you know, we're trained to think that something new and shiny is going to make ourselves feel a little bit better. And so we're always chasing those reward things. And what's the newest, greatest thing I can take that's going to make me feel better about myself?