The Single Biggest Contributor to my Progress

The single biggest contributor to my progress

(note how I didn’t say success)

This sounds like a very clickbait title, and that’s by design. However when I look back on my relatively short training history of about 6 years (a lot of it being junk) there are several factors I can attribute to periods of massive growth in size and strength, and one particular factor stands out.

Let me give you some background; I was a very skinny kid. I remember getting tall pretty early on, just before leaving primary school. Of course at the time I felt like billy big balls, and this ego precipitated into secondary school when I continued to grow. Unfortunately my growth was only in 1 dimension, and I remember floating around sub 70kg early on in school approaching 6 feet tall (which is still my height to this day).. A friend of mine was just getting into the gym and I joined him for a session once every week or two in the local college gym. I love that place to this day, not that it's a great gym or anything. It’s a small room with the bare minimum; a squat rack, a fixed bench press, some basic machines and a shit tonne of dumbbells. I didn’t love it for the equipment (I certainly didn’t know any different) I love it because nobody else trained there. This was great, but unfortunately gave me zero perspective about what was good progress. I celebrated my miserly bulk up to a whopping 75kg and maintained myself for a while. It wasn’t until I moved to a hotel gym down the road with much more equipment and way more members that I realised I had accomplished very little.

This new environment gave me goals to reach for and ways to benchmark my progress. I grew another 5 - 7kg in what seems to be a relatively short period of time while staying pretty lean, I was elated. At the same time, something bothered me: I was still pretty weak. Now of course this is subjective, but i started to look and see what some guys around me were lifting, and I wanted to beat them. I looked online to see if I could qualify for Irelands strongest man, and felt the need to get my eyes checked when I saw what these guys were doing. I was, in a sense, shoved outside of my comfort zone, so I learned more and I trained harder. I started training with local powerlifters who were lifting what seemed crazy to me, and I slowly progressed to my own goals.

After some time, we realized that this “leisure club” simply wasn’t suited to our goals, and we needed to find a new place to train. Unbeknownst to me there was a powerlifting style gym in the next town over, so we took a day trip to check it out. As soon as we got there, I knew it was the place for me. They had plenty of weights, metal music on the radio and didn’t make a fucking federal case if you had some chalk. I loved it. The best thing? Most of the members were way stronger than me, and that fueled some of the best training I've ever done and some of the juiciest progress i’ve ever made. Topping that off with getting a legit badass coach after my disaster of a first powerlifting meet, and the rest is history.

“If you walk with the lame, you will develop a limp”. This quote originated in Westside barbell, one of the most well known and infamous powerlifting clubs there has ever been. Their success has been attributed to new “advanced training methods”, which I don’t particularly buy into. No, in my opinion what made Westside barbell so great, was the training environment and competitiveness that fueled some of the biggest monsters in powerlifting history, constantly competing with themselves and the world. There was no room for complacency and celebrating in that gym, because there was always someone working their ass off to make you feel irrelevant.

Your environment can shape and mold you, but you have to be receptive to this change. The same boiling water that softens the spuds, hardens the egg. It's not always about your circumstances, it’s about what you’re made of.