7 Valuable Life Lessons I Learned from Working Out For 10 Years

#5: Pain is temporary, pride is forever (unless you herniate a disc)

I was lucky enough to be born into a family in which all members were sporty — mum, dad, grandma, grandpa. As I grew up to be a sporty kid as well, I fumbled around quite a bit and tried lots of different sweat-breaking activities. Swimming, running, soccer, tennis, basketball, skiing — you name it. Although all of them were fun, I never stuck with anything for too long, besides swimming, which I did for a couple of years.

That was until I first stepped foot in a gym. I was 17, too cool for school, with a face full of acne, mind full of dumb ideas and, thanks to bad eating habits and puberty growth, the body of a prisoner of war. (I’m not exaggerating. I was a scrawny kid.)

Now I’m ten years older and about 30 kgs heavier. During this time, I have been working out rigorously. I have had good workouts and bad ones. I have dragged myself to the gym at 3 a.m. and done double sessions until I puked and passed out. I have seen people come and go. I have built my self-esteem and I have been humbled by the weight, often within the same workout.

To me, the gym and lifting are more than picking up heavy weights and putting them back down. It’s the one place I can go to when I want the whole world to shut up. It’s where my phone goes into airplane mode, my headphones are on my ears, and the volume of my music is up.

It’s the place where I challenge and push myself past my limits, day after day, workout after workout.

It is the one thing that gives my life an overarching structure and stability like no other.

“The Iron never lies to you. You can walk outside and listen to all kinds of talk, get told that you’re a god or a total bastard. The Iron will always kick you the real deal. The Iron is the great reference point, the all-knowing perspective giver. Always there like a beacon in the pitch black. I have found the Iron to be my greatest friend. It never freaks out on me, never runs. Friends may come and go. But two hundred pounds is always two hundred pounds.”

— Henry Rollins

Over the last ten years, I have learned many a lesson by lifting up heavyweight or getting crushed underneath it. Every drop of sweat, every second of pain, every sore muscle has taught me something about life. And today, I want to share these inspiring lessons I have learned with you.

It’s not you versus someone else — it’s you today versus you yesterday.

Have someone step foot into a gym for the first time and their eyes will inevitably land on some of the buff dudes or fit girls. They will want their big biceps, chiseled abs or tight glutes. And that’s cool. You need goals, something to strive for. And if other people inspire you to give your best and work harder, make the most out of this motivation.

However, there comes a point at which you need to realize that there will always be someone stronger, leaner or buffer than you. Given that there are 7.8 billion people on Earth, the probability that you are the very best in something is infinitesimally small. We are all different. Long arms, short arms. Big butts, small butts. Dark hair, blonde hair. Good at drawing, good at maths.

I have seen many people working themselves up and feeling inferior because another guy had bigger arms. The question I always ask them is who cares? Unless you are stepping on stage at a bodybuilding competition there is no point in comparing yourself with someone else. Their life is not yours and your life is not theirs.

Instead, strive to become better every day. That is how you achieve growth and success. If you are better today than you were yesterday, you are on the right track. Period.

Don’t let appearances fool you.

I remember the day like it was yesterday. During my first week in my first ever gym, I saw a guy I’ll never forget. He looked like he was straight out of Netflix’s Inside the World’s Toughest Prisons documentary. He was huge, bald-headed, moved tons of weight and had multiple face tattoos. Me, a 17-year-old scrawny kid, looked at him with a mix of admiration, awe, and fear every time I saw him lift.

One day, my friends and I were doing deadlifts with less-than-optimal (read: shitty) form. Enter: Mr. Freak of Nature. He walked over to us, with large, ground-shaking steps. I thought my last hour had come.

But then, to all of our surprise, he calmly and gently explained to us what we were doing wrong. He told us how to improve our technique and avoid injury. Not only that, but I met him at the local bakery some days later and we had a nice chat. Turns out he is a humble, down to earth guy who just happens to look like someone you don’t want to meet in a dark alley.

A couple of years later, at a different gym, I was minding my own business when I spotted a girl across the room. Fit body, long hair, pretty. Exactly my type. To the younger, fresh-out-of-puberty me, she was an angel in human form. Motivated by her sight, I went back to my workout and after a couple of sets looked over again to where she had been training before. To my disappointment, she had not only left but also left something. Her weights. Scattered all over the floor.

For anyone who doesn’t frequent a gym, I’ll explain. Not re-racking and putting away your weights is the equivalent of taking a massive dump (I am talking all you can eat Indian buffet level) and then not flushing. It’s disgusting and the next person has to clean up a mess they clearly are not responsible for. There is a special place in hell for these people.

Moral of the story: Don’t let appearance fool you. Looks and character not only are two different things but often completely unrelated.

Learn to walk before you try to fly

Whenever I talk to someone about working out, losing fat, and building muscle, there is one topic that inevitably comes up: Supplements.

I have to admit, my supplement stack isn’t necessarily small. Protein powder, Omega-3s, zinc, and various vitamins to just name a few. But when some people tell me about all the pills and powders they pop, I feel like I am taking inventory of a pharmacy rather than talking to a hobby athlete who works out three times a week and “wants to lose some weight so my jeans fit again”.

Funny enough, these are often also the guys who haven’t got a single clue about nutrition or training — they can’t tell the difference between simple and complex carbohydrates or how many calories their daily breakfast bagel with bacon has.

Without going into the details, about 95% of your athletic performance and workout success will depend on three pillars: Training, nutrition, and rest (aka sleep). These are your basics. The majority of people I see at the gym could surpass their fitness goals in no time if they just focused on getting these three basics right.

So why do they opt for supplements instead? First, because the $123 bn. dietary supplement industry has very effective marketing. Second, because they want to avoid the hard, basic groundwork that is crucial to success and instead get straight to the icing on the cake. “Take this supplement and watch your fat melt away.” Nuh-uh. That’s not how this works. That’s not how anything works. For the first three years of working out, I didn’t take any supplements at all. Instead, I focused on getting my basics right.

Whatever it is that you are trying to accomplish, there will always be some hard, basic groundwork that you will have to grind through.

If you want to set up a successful blog, you have to become good at writing. There is no point in thinking about sales funnels and marketing campaigns if your writing sucks.

If you want to become a master chef, you have to learn to sharpen a knife, debone fish and chicken, and chop veggies perfectly. Dabbling with exotic spices and fancy ingredients won’t make your food taste good if you don’t have the basics down.

The lesson here is the following. Get your basics right before you go for the fancy things. Do the groundwork. That is where you have the most potential for improvement.

Think long-term

Success isn’t always about greatness. It’s about consistency. Consistent hard work leads to success. Greatness will come.

— Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson

This is something I have already mentioned in my article about excelling and skyrocketing your skills. When talking to people about the gym, I often get asked some form of a “How do I get buff?” question. And my answer is always the same.

Eat right, train right, sleep right (see the basics above) and do that for at least three years.

99% of them then stare at me with a confused look as they have expected some super-secret hack. Maybe they thought I’d low-key look left and right before pulling them closer, lowering my voice and initiating them into the circle of the enlightened. Nuh-uh, nothing to see here.

Small improvements accumulate and compound over time. If you are serious about something, think long-term.

I am sure you or someone you know has fallen into the following trap:

You decide you need to change something about your life and your waist measurement, become super motivated and then go apeshit at the gym for three months. Weightlifting six times a week, broccoli-rice-chicken all day every day, cardio on every day that ends with the letter y. You get the idea. While I have mad respect for that kind of performance, I have to break some bad news to you. In the long run, this will get you nowhere. I have seen it more times than I can count, with all sorts of different people. They go hard for three months, then they crash and burn. Then they’re back after their next New Year’s resolutions only to repeat the cycle once more.

You have to find a way to integrate whatever you are doing into your everyday life so you can maintain it for a long period of time. This might mean that you have to slow down intentionally in the beginning to avoid burning yourself out. Fine. Little strokes fell big oaks.

Ask anyone with a nice body how long they have been working out for.

Ask anyone who’s an expert in their professional field how long they have been working for.

Ask anyone who has mastered a craft how much time they put in.

You have to find ways to stick with something long-term. That is how you achieve greatness.

Pain is temporary, pride is forever (unless you herniate a disc)

Aside from No pain, no gain this might be the most overused phrase among gym rats, minus the addition in parentheses. And that is because it’s true.

When I was working out with my old gym buddy, we used to push ourselves through ridiculous workouts. We’d force each other to put in more and more reps even when our muscles were depleted and we were in burning pain. Puking out of a gym window isn’t fun.

Through all of these sessions, I have learned an important lesson: No matter how much pain you are in, it is only temporary. It will disappear and be replaced by a feeling of pride. A feeling of pride that is rooted in what you have achieved, how far you pushed yourself. A feeling of pride that no one can take away from you.

However, there is a reason I added the part in parentheses.

Years ago, a couple of weeks before I stepped on a bodybuilding stage, I deadlifted 200kgs (about 440lbs). My body was haggard from my diet, my joints were dry and my sinews stiff from the low body fat. In a word, this lift was stupid. But I still did it. I pushed myself through the pain and lifted that shit, two times. While I didn’t injure myself seriously, I can feel that ever since then my lower back doesn’t feel right. When I try to deadlift heavy, I’m in pain for the next few days.

I got away with a black eye — I didn’t herniate a disc and can lift almost without restrictions — but I have learned my lesson.

The pain itself might be temporary and the pride is forever. But the harder you go, the more scars you accumulate. You only have one mind and one body and both have to last you for the rest of your life. So be nice to yourself and treat them with respect.

Progress and success lie outside of your comfort zone

I am going to be honest with you. Sometimes, I’m scared of going to the gym. When I know I have a particularly brutal workout coming up, I feel uneasy for the whole day. I’m nervous, stressed and use the four-letter swear word starting with f more often than your typical Brazzers movie.

There was one gym I went to for almost five years. For five years, I saw people come, work out, and leave the place again. And over the years, most of them made good progress, or, for the gym rats amongst you, mad gainz. But some of them looked exactly what they looked like at the beginning of these five years, despite trying to improve.

First, I couldn’t get my head around why. After all, these people were doing what everyone was doing — show up, put in the work, repeat again the next day.

Then it dawned on me. They never left their comfort zone. They came in and moved the weight they had always moved, for the same number of repetitions they had always gone for.

If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.

— Henry Ford

Just as you need to change your workout, exercises, weights, and repetitions in order to set new impulses for your muscles to grow, you need to go beyond what you are used to doing in life to achieve growth. Try new things. Try old things in new ways. Do something you are afraid of.

Pushing yourself past your comfort zone is unpleasant and hard. But that is exactly where growth happens. Outside of your comfort zone. If you don’t leave it, you will always be stuck.

If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail

In 2016, I decided that I am going to step foot on a bodybuilding stage and compete. Although I knew it was going to be one of the hardest things I had ever done, I wanted to see how far I could push myself.

And push myself I did. When you add working full time, a three-hour commute and hitting the gym 6 days a week, there isn’t much time left for basic activities such as eating, talking to your friends and sleeping. Grind through the week, sleep in on Saturday, have Sunday off, and again the next week. Merry-go-round.

In addition to the tight schedule, I couldn’t just get takeaway when I was hungry but had to stick to a very specific meal plan, most of which was home-cooked. And I did. During the whole 14-week preparation, there was not a single meal or workout that I messed up. Like clockwork.

So how on earth did I make it? By using my free time to prepare for when shit got heavy.

Every Saturday, I bought groceries for the week. Every Sunday, I chopped chicken and veggies, fried eggs and weighed oats.

On Sunday, it was easy to put two into my meal-prep — during the week, when I often couldn’t spare more than five minutes, I just had to grab a Tupperware and could be on my way.

Not only did I build a meal prep habit that still sticks with me to this day, but I also have carried this lesson to other parts of my life.

Great performance is almost always the result of thorough preparation.

You often only have very limited time to perform but you will be judged on that. When you get a difficult question about your project presentation at work, it’s too late to sift through tons of backup material. So do your homework.

One great way to do so is to take some time off at the end of your day — or in the morning, if you are an early bird. Look at what the next day is going to bring and find out if you can save yourself some hassle by preparing for it.

For example, I am not a morning person. Never have been, probably never will be. So I prepare for that by getting everything that I need for the next day in order the night before: pack my gym bag, have my breakfast ready, put my clothes out, print documents I need.

When opportunity comes, it’s too late to prepare.

— John Wooden

You never now when life is going to happen. But you can do your best to be prepared.

Ten years of teaching and learning

Walking into the gym in 2010 and picking up the weights was hands-down one of the best decisions I ever made. This sport has taught me more about life than anything else ever has. It has given my days structure, it has made me grow both physically and in character, and without it, I wouldn’t even be close to where I am today.

It has been a rough ten years. There have been ups and downs, good and bad times, but the iron was “always there like a beacon in the pitch-black”. It has been one of life’s greatest teachers and I hope that you can profit from its lessons as much as I did.

~ Moreno

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