5 fitness mistakes that almost made me quit and Steve Martin’s “secret to success”

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Hey, this is Mike Matthews from musclefullife. com. And in this podcast, I’m going to talk about. Five mistakes that I made back when I didn’t really know what I was doing with both my diet and my training. They kept me in a, kept me stuck in a rut, making [00:03:00] really little to no gains for many years.

And I also want to talk about a pretty cool lesson that I learned. From Steve Martin, not personally one on one, but actually from reading his book on how to set and achieve goals. I thought he had a very good insight in this. I wrote an article about it actually months and months ago, but I thought it’d be good to talk about it on the podcast.

All right. So let’s start here with these five mistakes that I was making. These are mistakes that I see every day in the gym. Sometimes I try to say something to help people out. Sometimes I don’t, most of the time I don’t, cause I guess most people, they just don’t really. Take nicely to that and then they don’t change anyway, regardless of what I try to explain unless they come and ask for help And then I’m willing, then they’re more receptive I started working out when I was about 17 turning 18 something like that Initially, I just wanted to impress girls Because that it getting into that age where it was no like, you know as a teenager 1516 if you just have a little bit of abs, you’re like, oh, you’re so amazing, right?

And then as girls get [00:04:00] older, then, they’re the, they want, they like to see guys more muscular. So that’s why I started working out and had no, no idea what I was doing. Read magazines, did a bunch of stupid workouts, just ate a bunch of food. At least I did that semi correctly. I ate way more protein than I really had to be eating and probably just generally more calories than I needed to be eating.

But at least I, wasn’t under eating but the net result was for my first year. Of working out. I made decent gains. I probably gained about 15 pounds in my first year, which is not that great. And it’s not 15 pounds of muscle because I was eating quite a bit more than really than I needed to be.

I gained some fat as well. I probably started around a 12 or 13%. I’m naturally. More on the ectomorphic side, body wise somewhere between ecto and meso. And I started out in a more kind of athletic, not super lean, but not overweight at all. And then maybe by the end of the first year I was upwards of, I don’t know.

Maybe 14 and 15 percent or something like that and I just stayed there for [00:05:00] over the course of the next whatever however many years and really for my first six or seven years That’s that was my period of I would I was consistent. I would go to the gym every day I would do all different types of workouts.

I tried everything Except for what I eventually realized and learned that is the key to making gains as a natural weightlifter, which is emphasizing heavy compound weightlifting. So I tried everything else, every magazine workout you could imagine. Now, all different kinds of splits that we’re training everything twice a week, training everything.

I even tried three times a week at one point and burned out on that to once a week, blah, blah, blah. A lot of high rep stuff, a lot of drop sets, super sets, the standard, what you would, what you are told to do in most magazines and on most websites and that kind of thing. And what you’ll see big bodybuilders doing.

And I’ll show, I’ll put up a picture here. I’m gonna put a picture of me at year two. Not the best picture because you can’t really see my entire body, but you can see that, that was into year two, so I’ve made some gains [00:06:00] but not nearly as much as I could have I played sports growing up, so I wasn’t necessarily naturally muscular, but I was naturally athletic looking.

So you can see there you’re two and then you’re eight, put this picture up and you can see, of course, I’ve gained some size, my chest responded well, just a genetic strength of mine, really, I didn’t, and I guess because I trained it, that was one thing I diligently trained, of course, was chest. Sometimes there’s two chest days a week and but my chest did respond.

It’s actually like for how big it looks in that picture, you’d be surprised at how weak I was. Like at that time, I probably couldn’t even bench 225 on a flat bench with proper form. There’s no way I could have done more than four reps. No way. I probably would have failed at two reps. That’s how pathetically weak my chest was.

It just responded well in terms of sarcoplasmic hypertrophy don’t know, it’s just a genetic thing, as you can imagine I wasn’t too thrilled with my progress, also with how my body looked. [00:07:00] At the time I thought that getting super lean and defined and having some size required drugs, period.

Not even, I wasn’t even overly cynical about it. I didn’t care that other people did that. I just thought that you, it wasn’t possible to look how I look now naturally. So I just did my thing. I ate a lot of food. I lifted weights. I was, like I wasn’t very strong, but I just stuck with it.

So it’s around that period around your, it was year eight, year seven, right? Where that last picture that you saw that, that’s when I decided to actually really start taking my fitness. I wouldn’t say take it seriously, but. I knew that I didn’t really know what I was doing. I just never really, I, it was something that I guess I, I would just go to the gym with my friends and we would all hang out and it’d be two hours, doing a million different exercises.

But then I started to get a little bit more serious in terms of okay, I want to actually get for the amount of time that I’m putting into this, I want to get more out of it. I want to have more to show for not just even how I look, but also, I want to be stronger. I want to be able [00:08:00] to. I wasn’t deadlifting at all at that time, but I started to realize the importance of exercise like a deadlift, like the squat, a proper bench press, incline bench press, military press.

So I started to gravitate more toward that style of lifting. And then I wanted to get more informed. So I started to educate myself in, everything that I’ve that I write about and that I teach is self taught and I’ve always been a good student. So you’re just. Dove into the subject and read as many things as I get my hands on and I had a fair amount of experience doing a lot of wrong things.

So that helped guide me away from certain things. Because if you have only theory, if you have no experience and all you do is read studies. You’ll get very confused very quickly because you can basically argue for almost anything and have some sort of study to back you up. The studies and it might be poorly designed or poorly executed or might be biased or whatever, but on the surface you can make a compelling argument for just about any sort of approach with diet or training.

So I, I [00:09:00] did have some experience and so when I ran into certain things that research would indicate or seem to indicate that a certain type of approach worked and I had been doing that approach for years and it definitely did not work for me. Then I knew I could just scrap that. And Hey, I don’t know if it worked for other people, if it worked for other people, but I knew it didn’t work for me.

It was a, there was a gradual learning curve to this, which I’m going to get into as I talk about these mistakes. But here’s a another picture that I’m gonna throw up on the screen here and that’s at year 11. So as you can see, my body has dramatically changed. I’m much leaner.

I’ve gained quite a bit of muscle, especially in my arms, my shoulders in my chest, my upper chest, particularly my, my, my pec major. That’s really what kind of filled out quickly. But my clavicular pectoralis, the upper chest, it was basically non existent cause I never did incline pressing.

So that was about three years, three and a half years or so of. And in terms of statistics that year eight picture if I remember correctly, I wasn’t, I didn’t have a log and go back [00:10:00] to look at, but I remember that my weight would fluctuate between about 200 and 205 pounds at that time. My weight’s always on the low end.

Even now I weigh about, I weigh one 88, one 87. It fluctuates right now and I’m about six to 7 percent body fat. But, many people guess me that I’m 205 or even 210. My guess is I have small bones. Like I have, my wrist circumference, I believe, was 6 inches when we measured it.

For doing an ideal measurements kind of thing. So my guess is that’s why I don’t weigh that much, but in that picture the year eight picture is about 200, 205 pounds, probably, 16, 17 percent body fat. And the picture of the year 11 picture I was, that was actually, I think it was, I have to go look.

I think I was about actually, cause that was actually taken last year. And I was about 1 86, I believe, and around 7%, maybe 7. 5 percent in that picture might’ve been 1 85. But so you can, you can see in terms of body composition that there’s quite a change there. So let’s get into these mistakes.

What did I [00:11:00] learn that, that helped me transform myself from, what I was to what I. You know what in the, in that year 11 picture and then what I am now, which I actually, I think I look even a little bit better right now. I’m a little bit leaner than that right now and otherwise my body does look more or less the same.

I think I’m pretty much at my genetic potential and I don’t really want to just gain more size. I don’t want to look like that, a big hulking bodybuilder. I’m pretty happy with how things are at the moment. So the first big mistake that I was making that I see a lot of people making is I was focusing on higher burnout workouts.

I mentioned that earlier. My workouts would, I would do like I’d get on one. I’d for whatever reason avoid the free bench where I would go to the Smith machine instead. The Smith machine is just less effective. It’s been proven to be less effective. It doesn’t stimulate the pecs and the pecs in the shoulders like the free bench does because it removes stabilizing muscles.

From the lift where if, when it’s on a fixed track, all you have to do is push it. You can push it, you can be pushing it really this way or this way. You can do things on a Smith machine that you [00:12:00] wouldn’t be able to do. On a free bench because you would just end up throwing the weight this way or that way or whatever.

So I would only, I would jump on the Smith machine. Now I’d usually like my, do pyramid training was my standard style of training. So I would work my way from like warmup sets into heavier and heavier, more reps. And then, peek at the heaviest possible weight that I could do after doing nine different sets and maybe I would get five reps or something like that.

And then I’d move on to the next exercise and do, I don’t know, anywhere from three to six sets there. And then I would do the next exercise and maybe do drop sets of flies or something like that. It looked like I was working very hard and I guess I was, I obviously I was exerting myself, but I thought that getting a huge pump and really like feeling the burn, I thought that those are really the keys.

To building muscle and strength and they’re not what I learned is that the real key to building muscle and strength is progressive overload, meaning you have to be lifting more weight over time. And it also, that kind of ties [00:13:00] into the exercises you’re doing, which is the next mistake that we’re going to talk about.

And that is doing too many isolation exercises and too few compound exercises. I, The smith machine press, I guess it is a compound exercise. It’s not as effective as a combat exercise as just a free weight barbell press. But most of my workouts, most of the work I was doing were what was with isolation exercises, meaning that a compound exercise and exercise that involves multiple muscles in the body and usually multiple large muscle groups in the body.

So in the case of the bench press, the big muscle groups that are really being trained are your shoulders and your chest. In the case of the squat, it’s obviously the muscles in your leg. The big muscles are the quadriceps and the hamstrings. And also the calves get trained as well, but the squat also trains your back the upper and lower portions.

Deadlift is pretty much trains everything in your body except for your pecs really. And so this is obviously a very common mistake. We see people doing it all the time where, how many people in your gym do you see? Dead lifting or squatting or [00:14:00] bench pressing, you’ll see it or military pressing properly heavyweight.

In my gym, I rarely ever see it. I go early in the morning, so I’m not going to probably see it. Is maybe if I were to go later, I might see it some, but even times I have gone later, sure. The gym is packed full of people but they’re not. The people that are squatting generally are half squatting, they’re half repping, and they’re not using very much weight.

Or they are, which is even more dangerous. And, on the deadlift, either they’re just dead lifting, very little weight, doing a bunch of reps, or they’re using way too much weight and, rounding their back like a cat. And so that was another big mistake that I was making is emphasizing isolation work way too much.

Isolation work does have a place in natural weightlifting programs, but it should never be the emphasis. Really never. I just don’t know why you would, what really should be emphasized is the compound stuff, meaning that you want to be starting your workouts. Give when you’re freshest, you have all your energy.

You start with your heavy compound weightlifting, you [00:15:00] start your chest day should always be starting with heavy pressing. It could be dumbbell or barbell. I like to start most of my chest workouts start with incline pressing as well to really emphasize that upper portion of the chest, which is stubborn and takes time to really come in.

Your back days or your pull days should always be starting with heavy dead lifting. I, there’s just no advantage to being doing deadlifts after another exercise unless you’re doing something like, I don’t know, warming up your lower back with hyper extensions. I guess if you needed to do that, but why would you want to start with something like dumbbell rows to fatigue your back?

And just burn up some energy to then go over deadlift, which you really need, maximum force production for maximum energy. Obviously your legs days should be starting with some form of squat, back squat, front squat and so forth. So that was another major mistake that I was making. A third, the third mistake was I was just following silly diets instead of regulating my calorie intake and breaking down my macronutrients properly.

I would read things in magazines and I wouldn’t say I really even [00:16:00] believed what I read. I just didn’t know what was right. So I just was like trying different things and, so oh, of course at one point I was like maybe carbs do make you fat. Maybe I should be cutting my carbs lower.

So I tried the low carb thing or, that losing fat really, maybe it is just Eating clean. So let’s try that. I thought at one point I thought I had to eat like ridiculous amounts of protein to actually build muscle. I was eating probably like 400 grams of protein a day. It was ridiculous.

Which is the only reason you’d ever want to be eating 400 grams of protein a day is if you’re on drugs and your body can actually synthesize, they actually use that amount, that much protein to to build muscle. Otherwise there’s nearly no reason to ever go above One to maybe 1. 2 grams per pound and on that higher end of the spectrum would be when you’re cutting to help preserve lean mass.

So you know I used to think that I had to eat protein every few hours or I would lose muscle. I would get super raged if I like had to go for more than if it by the third hour I was like, I have to eat [00:17:00] not, it wasn’t just hunger. It was like anger. I was like hangry. You know what I mean?

And then at five hours I was convinced that I was going, I was just wasting away if I hadn’t eaten protein in five hours which is completely nonsense. You could eat protein. I mean you probably could get all, I don’t know if you could get it all in one meal, but two meals. Absolutely. If you need to hit 200 grams of protein a day and you did a hundred grams in one meal and a hundred grams in another meal.

That you’d be totally fine on. I’ll actually, I’ll link you’d be fine if you’re a guy, more or less my weight. If you’re a girl and you weigh 110 pounds or something like that might be an issue. You might want to split it up into three meals, but the body can absorb a lot more protein than you might think.

I’m going to just make a note here. I’m going to link an article down below one handed typing. Protein absorption. All right. Cool. So you can check out if you want to, I wrote an article on it, go over the science of it. So yeah, I used to think that I had to eat just food every few hours to keep my metabolism running.

That’s also not true. Meal frequency has nothing to do with [00:18:00] metabolism or metabolic speed. I’ll link an article on that as well. I used to think that eating at night just cause fat storage for some reason, that if I eat a, if I ate a big dinner, I’m going to get fat. or fatter. That’s also not true.

Whether, gaining weight or losing weight just boils down to energy balance over, you can look at it over a 24 hour period or you can look at it over really any time period that you want. 24 hour period is easiest for calculating diets and such where you go. Okay. Every day, let’s say you sleep eight hours, you’re awake 16 hours.

So you look at that during your wake your awake hours, you need to hit certain numbers. You need to hit a certain calorie intake, you need to hit and then that breaks down into certain macronutrient numbers like so many grams of protein, carbs, and fats. That’s it. That’s what matters when you eat.

Doesn’t really matter. I could go on, but you get the idea. I would hear all these things and try different things and nothing would really change. When things did change, though, is when I started to educate myself on the actual physiology of the metabolism. How does the body really work?

What does the body really do with the food you eat? [00:19:00] What is a calorie anyway? Can you even do? Not you but I couldn’t define the word when I first started to really educate myself. Somebody asked me, what is a calorie? I don’t know. It’s something in food. But so to really start understanding the subject, I realized then that dieting is much simpler than all that.

It is just hitting numbers and doing it every day and adjusting things based on how your body responds. And of course there are it’s not the whole subject of dieting properly to get lean and especially it really lean doesn’t boil down to just hit your numbers every day. That’s the non negotiable aspect of it.

But there are of course along the way, sometimes things, exceptions I wouldn’t say exceptions. There are just circumstances that can arise that require you to do something, to change something, to address something. For instance, if you. are reducing your calorie intake gradually as you’re getting leaner, which you have to do.

There is a point where you don’t want to be reducing it anymore. When your intake gets down to about your BMR you [00:20:00] don’t want to be dropping below that because your metabolism is just slowing down and it can become how harmful really is debatable, but. You’re, it definitely can be harmful in terms of retaining lean mass when you’re, when your intake starts dropping below your BMR.

And also you’re just going to have a longer road of having to fix your metabolism if you do that. So that’s an example of you’re following the rules of energy balance, but there’s a point where you need to stop cutting your calories and start increasing your calories to bring your metabolism back up and then you can read, repeat the process.

So a lot of little things like that I’ve learned along the way, but it all started with the, with just realizing that. Proper dieting is math. That’s it. What you eat is not nearly as important as how much you eat. And by that, the types of food, whether they’re clean or not, doesn’t matter. Nutritional content of food does matter.

You want to be getting the majority of your calories from food with nutritional value. But whether, you need to hit that carbohydrate goal, whether you’re eating whole grain bread. [00:21:00] or vegetables doesn’t really matter if it’s 50 carbs, it’s 50 carbs and 50 carbs. A lot of people, I get asked fairly often about vegetables cause people get told like coaches and stuff.

Oh, you can eat as many vegetables as you want. And then so people sometimes email me like, why am I not losing weight? And when I dig in and I find out like, Oh, they’ve been told you as many vegetables they want, what does that mean? How many vegetables are you eating? And when they actually break it down in a lot of cases, they realize they’re eating anywhere from 50 to a hundred and probably I’d say 50 to a hundred grams of carbs a day from vegetables alone.

That’s not hard to do depending on what vegetables you like, like peas. I love peas. Go look at the calorie content of peas. They’re actually very calorie dense for a vegetable. Whereas something leafy and green like kale, okay, that’s not very calorie dense. I eat a lot of green beans. Those are in the middle.

You have to count those things. So anyways, that was the big mistake was just not following the fundamentals of I wouldn’t say dieting, but it’s more nutrition. How does the body really work? What does it do with food? How do calorie [00:22:00] deficits, how does eating less energy than the body needs affect it?

How does eating more energy, the body needs affected and so forth. Instead, I would just follow random tips or random fad diets. The fourth mistake was I didn’t, I would, and this kind of ties back into the first, I would, I wasn’t progressively overloading my muscles. And what that means is I wasn’t ensuring that I was adding weight to the bar over time instead.

One, I would change up my routine so much. It was hard to really know where I was even at on a given lift because I would only be performing it for one, maybe two weeks before I’d move off to something else and I wouldn’t return to it for another four or five, six weeks, whatever. So it made it hard to even know.

If I was progressing, but my tendency would be to add reps, not weight. So I was always pushing for more reps and I was more concerned with how to get more reps, how to get more reps as opposed to I have to get more weight, I have to get more weight. And that kind of just goes with the higher up training because on a spectrum of low, wet, low rep very heavy weight to high rep very [00:23:00] lightweight or very high rep, very lightweight.

You’re looking at. On the low end, like powerlifting, if you were just really mainly working on your one rep maxes and two or three reps stuff and any other higher rep was really just to build up to that, then you would see dramatic increases in strength. And you would get bigger, but you wouldn’t see as much size An increase in size as you would expect necessarily from your strength increase somewhere in the middle is like what I recommended bigger leaner stronger, which is more of a quote unquote power bodybuilding approach where you’re lifting heavyweight, but you’re working with about 80 to 85 percent of your one rep max.

And then on the higher end of the rep spectrum with lower weights, you’re looking at mainly muscle endurance, metabolic changes in the cells. So because I was training with a lot of higher up and doing a lot of drop sets. It just, it was fitting that I would then try to just get more reps.

And also I didn’t really keep even a proper training journal so I didn’t know what I was exactly doing. My workouts were more go in and get a good workout. Get a [00:24:00] big pump, be in there for two hours and sweat quantifying what am I actually doing. What this exercise I did last week, I did X number of sets.

I did this many reps and blah, blah, blah. I have to beat that. That’s not how I was approaching it. Now that’s that’s what I, that’s my goal. My goal, like a good workout. I don’t care. I don’t care if I feel like my muscles are, exhausted. I don’t care if I sweat a lot or didn’t sweat a lot.

What I care about is beating my last week’s numbers and the, that’s all I’ve cared about for the last four years or so when I really started learning what I was doing. And that kind of accounts for the dramatic changes in my physique that you see or that you saw in the pictures earlier.

That’s progressive overload. That is that’s one part of it. So basically what I’m trying to do every week is I’m trying to take the weight that I did last week and get one more rep. At that, my strength across the board is that an advanced I don’t think I’m really at elite yet in terms of strength standards, but I’m in well into advanced level strength across the board.

So I’m not going to [00:25:00] be, unless I’m like pounding a bunch of carbs. Yeah, sure. Then I can go add 30 grams or 30 pounds to my squat. The next day, if I eat 500 carbs today and go squat tomorrow, I will squat 30 pounds more. But with my diet, more or less stable, really what I’m looking to do is get one to two reps.

More with a given weight than I did last week. And then what that allows me to do is once I reach the top of whatever rep range I’m working in. What I actually am doing is a periodized version of the bigger lean or stronger program, which is I’m, I guess I can call it beyond bigger lean or stronger program.

’cause that’s the name of the book that it’s gonna be in that’s coming out. It should be good to go for next week. Everything is wrapped up. We’re just doing a final, punch list, check of everything to make sure we haven’t. So what it is it has, it starts with very heavy powerlifting type two to three rep stuff and then it moves into the four to six rep range and then it ends in the 10 rep range.

So if I got let’s say I squatted 350. For two last week then I want to do three 50 for three or four this week and then I will add weight for the rest, add weight for the next set, go up to [00:26:00] three 60 and see what I can do there. So that’s the key is, if you’re trying to build muscle and strength, you really shouldn’t be training higher than eight to 10 reps.

I would recommend that you emphasize the lower rep ranges. You emphasize four to six or even two to three. Over the high rep stuff. And I talk about in the book, I talk about really who I, why I think periodized training like this is best suited to advanced weightlifters. And why, if you’re new, you’ll probably do better with the bigger, leaner, stronger approach, which is really just working in the four to six rep range, 80, 85%, one rep max.

So that was a mistake that I was making in the past, which was, I wasn’t, consistently and systematically increasing the weight I was lifting over time. I was just random with it and I would tend to go for more reps than more weight. And the final big mistake I was making, which I mentioned is I wasn’t tracking my progress.

I wasn’t keeping a correct journal. So therefore how do I know how, even if I wanted to, systematically [00:27:00] progressively overload my muscles, how could I, if I didn’t know what I did the week prior? So now I’ve tried many different apps. I’m actually building. My own workout app. I have my trusty sketchbook here for sketching out every page.

I’m sketching out how I want it to flow and stuff because even though I have a good team of guys to work with. If you haven’t, they’ve never, they’re not into working out. They’ve never used these apps before, so they don’t know all the little quirks and things that are annoying when you’re actually in the gym trying to do your workout, fiddling with an app.

So I’m just being very specific with how I want it to work. So I use some app right now that’s whatever. Really all I care about and I can use my notepad on my phone at this point because the rest of the functionality in the app is pretty crappy and that’s just like the way most apps are, at least for lifting.

But the point is you need to know what you did last week and then if you want to be looking, that’s when you get in the gym, you need to know your bench pressing. Good. What did you bench press last week? You did two 50 for four. All right, good. You want to do two 50 for five this week.

There’s your goal or two 50 for six and then [00:28:00] that’s what you’re focused on. You wouldn’t know that otherwise unless knew what you did the week before. So a lot of people make that mistake. They just come in. Even a buddy of mine that comes and works out with me, I keep on telling him he needs to track his progress.

He’s new to weightlifting, so he’s, making great gains, newbie gains every week he’s up. But, there’s a point where you don’t make gains so quickly and you do have to fight for those reps. You can’t just go. Yeah, I think I did 185 last week. Let’s just throw 205 on and then see what happens.

And then he does it. You know what I mean? That doesn’t work forever. So yes, it’s very important that you, even if you just, if you you can use your notepad, in your phone, you just each workout, just note down what you did the week before, or you can just bring a notepad into the gym. So that just write down what you did.

and then shoot to beat that the next week. So those are the five big mistakes that I was making and what I did to change them. And those are the big things that really account for the changes in my physique. There are other mistakes that I was making. I was, wasting my time with a bunch of.

relative ineffective exercises. There are a lot of different exercises you could do, but [00:29:00] a lot of those, there’s really just no reason to do them because there’s something that’s better. Basically my training frequency was not laid out correctly. I tried very, I tried a high frequency programs, low frequency programs but I didn’t really understand that intensity and workout volume are more.

then frequency. In terms of making gains I was doing too much cardio. I would in a lot of cases I would lift and then I’d go run on the treadmill for 45 minutes or something every day. It’s just unnecessary, especially after lifting it can get in the way of strength and muscle gains. My macronutrients were all messed up.

I was eating way too much protein, and then my carbs and fats would fluctuate a lot, which is not really ideal for training purposes. You basically want to keep your carbohydrates as high, steadily high as you can and your fats in a moderate to low range enough to just support basic health, basic functions.

But without having to sacrifice a bunch of carbs. So what would happen is because I would just eat whatever I really felt like I would make sure I got a lot of protein in my meals, but otherwise it was just like, what am I eating? I don’t know. This now I’m eating that now I’m eating this now.[00:30:00] 

So maybe one day my carbs were at like. One gram per pound the next day my carbs are at two grams per pound the next day It was under one. It just you know, it was very random. So yeah, I mean there are Many more mistakes that I was making many other things that I learned and these are the things that I talk about my books Such as bigger than you’re stronger thinner than you’re stronger muscle myths and so forth.

You haven’t checked them out I think you’ll like them if you like what I say in my videos You’re gonna like my books and you’re gonna like the articles on my website muscle for life. I guarantee it So yeah, that’s about it on the mistakes if you’re making any of these mistakes try doing it differently.

Try doing what I did and I think you’re going to be pleasantly surprised with how your body responds. All right. So I’m going to change gears. I want to talk about this Steve Martin kind of method of achieving goals. He talked about this in his book born standing up which, I’ve always just been a fan of Steve Martin’s work.

So read the book and there was a, this is one of the things that I took away from it. And so he’s talking about that. He gets asked, people, what’s the secret to success and things like that. And his [00:31:00] answer is very simple. It’s be so good that they can’t ignore you. Now that might sound cliched, but I think it’s actually very profound and I think it really captures the essence of what it takes to achieve goals, whether big or small, really in any area of your life.

And it’s something that I Feel is lacking. A lot of the people that I know that are struggling to achieve and it doesn’t necessarily mean financial related things, but just achieve goals in really any area of their lives, whether it be wanting to get good at a certain sport or skill or hobby or whatever, or making money or what have you.

And it’s that they haven’t really put in the time both in the study and the application and the practice to get really good at something. I’ve spoken about this before, I think in other podcasts and other articles, and I like to come back to it because I really do think it is the simplest way to take control of your destiny in a sense.

It might seem a bit daunting, like what does it take to get so good at something that people can’t ignore you anymore that even if they don’t like you. [00:32:00] They see what you’re doing and there’s that’s good. I don’t even like that guy, but he’s good. What does it take to get there?

It takes a lot of work. There’s just, there’s no way around it. So that might seem a bit daunting, but I find it a bit invigorating because I think it simplifies what it takes to succeed at something, and it’s something that’s within our control. There are so many things in the world that we can’t control.

And we can drive ourselves crazy trying to control or worrying about or wishing or praying that we could control external factors the things that can come into our lives and throw wrenches in our plans and whatever. That instead of focusing on those things, which just can generate a bunch of anxiety, focusing on what we can control.

And the easiest thing we can control is what we do with our time what we put it into and in, in how we can cultivate our skills and cultivate our talents. You know what Martin’s saying is that there’s just, there aren’t any back doors or any gimmicks or tricks to success. There’s nothing mystical about it.

It’s. [00:33:00] Get really good at something, become extraordinary at it. You want to be better than everybody that you know and so good that you actually impress people with your skill. If you do this, unless you’ve chosen something so obscure that there are so few people that actually care about it.

If you at least chose something that is, that makes any sort of sense, you almost can’t help but succeed. People are going to be just naturally drawn to you. And there’s one other thing that, that really resonated with me that Martin talked about and that’s that he attributes a lot of his success to his diligence in just one field at a time.

So if it was standup comedy, it was standup comedy. If it was acting. If it was music. And he would obsess on that subject until he had mastered it and not take on too many different things, which, then you become the jack of all trades, master of none kind of thing.

And, today there are so many, there are an endless number of distractions, a number of things that we can do to fill our time. So I think that message from Martin is even more important now than it [00:34:00] would have been 50 years ago or a hundred years ago or whatever. In that, when you can hone your ambition to that razor’s edge, when you can say, this is the one thing that I am going to master.

And really align your life to that. There’s a lot of power in that, and one last thing that I liked about this just worldview is you’re on a path, you’re trying to accomplish things. Whether you have direct, whether they have people directly in your way trying to stop it, or you just have competition out there You instead of just comparing yourself to others and wondering, are you good enough or how did they get there or spending too much time chasing shortcuts, you can just come back to this question of, am I so good that I can’t be ignored?

And if you can’t really say yes, then that’s what you need to be focusing on. Just get better at whatever that skill is. Get so good that people, Know you as that person that’s good at blah and the more you can do that, the more successful you’re going to be. All right that’s it for this podcast.

I hope you enjoyed [00:35:00] it. Leave me comments over on my website or on social media or whatever. Let me know what you think. If there’s any way you think I can improve it or if there are subjects you’d like to hear me talk about, just let me know. I’m all yours. Thanks again. And I’ll see you next time.

Hey, it’s Mike again. Hope you liked the podcast. If you did go ahead and subscribe. I put out new episodes every week or two where I talk about all kinds of things related to health and fitness and general wellness. Also head over to my website at www. muscleforlife. com where you’ll find not only past episodes of the podcast, but you’ll also find a bunch of different articles that I’ve written.

I release a new one almost every day. Actually I release four to six new articles a week. And you can also find my books and everything else that I’m involved in over at muscleforlife. com. Alright, thanks again. Bye.