Pay Your Dues

We all know the guy in the gym, strutting around with an average physique, constantly rotating their workout from MMA-fighter-style, to power, to sculpting and for all their effort, they go nowhere, achieve nothing.They never have and never will, and yet they tell everyone in the gym how to lift, how they should train for particular goals, how to get ripped, how to do this, how to do that…and the list goes on.

Dave Tate
If you want extra-ordinary results, listen to this guy…

Watch them train. They use too much weight, moving moderate loads about an inch at the top of the movement, building neither size nor strength. They befriend the gym goers who excel in their training, never plateau and achieve levels of performance and fat loss that seems miraculous, as if proximity imparts exceptionalism, while they can barely reach even modest goals.

Worst of all—and what pisses me off—is given the chance to spot someone exceptional, they scream commands to impress the newbies, to establish themselves as the source of talent, dedication and know-how that went into somebody else’s achievement. When this happened to me, when I set up for an easy 355 on the bench, when I had to yell at the guy to get his hands off the bar in the middle of a rep, when I had to listen to him screaming meaningless commands, I felt like throwing him out a window. In retrospect, maybe I should have.

Bryan Wunder
Don’t listen to this guy.

Don’t be one of these guys. If you’ve never been there—and “there” might be a 400 lb bench, a 600 lb squat, 7% body fat, a sub-4-hour marathon—don’t tell others how to get to a place you’ve never even seen. Don’t tell a 215 lb guy who just squatted 930 lbs that his form sucked and he got lucky to sneak one past the judges. Don’t tell someone their biceps could use a nicer peak when yours don’t even exist. Watch, listen, and learn: until you’ve been there, this is all you should be doing.

Ask questions, do some research and experiment. Successful people are successful for a reason: they don’t need your opinion; they need facts; they need experience. And contrary to popular belief, not all opinions stand on equal footing. There are ignorant people and their opinions count for dirt.

When you can out bench me, out squat me and out run me while staying leaner, tighter and eating cleaner, then you can give me your opinion. Until that happens, shut the hell up and pay your dues.