Not the Strongest, but Stronger Than Most

This was going to be a Facebook rant, but I decided it was best to put it here on my blog instead.

I'm on week two of the Candito Intermediate Program. Week two is the hardest week, as it's the hypertrophy week. For those that don't know, hypertrophy is when you work your muscles out until you have no gas left in your tank, yet you push yourself beyond that point. You've pushed, you've benched, you've squatted and deadlifted until you're basically just a giant mess of yourself left in the fetal position, and even then you push on.

Week two makes sense when you're pushing yourself to new limits. It's required if you want to reach new limits. You handle yourself at a weight just lower than what you're accustomed to, with a rep max far more than what you thought you were capable of.

In week two, I have two sessions of an upper body workout that have me doing a 200 pound bench press for eight reps. After tonight, I just smoked both of those workouts like a cheap cigar. I could easily do ten reps at that weight if my workout plan required it. Bench pressing two hundred pounds is nothing to me. It's easy!

It wasn't always easy for me. When I was in my early 20s, I couldn't do a set of a bench press past 185 pounds. I always hit my limit at that point.

At my job (where I work in private security, a profession that requires us to have great physical strength), most of the people I work with can't break that 185 bench press. They told me so. They struggle to break that 200 pound barrier.

And yet I've now reached the point where I can not only bench press more than 200 pounds, but it ain't shit. Bench pressing 200 pounds is easy. It's 250 pounds that's hard. And it's only hard now. In six months, it might be my warmup weight.

I'm fairly certain that for most men, breaking that 185 pound barrier is something that eludes them. They won't get past it, because they aren't willing to work hard enough. They're that "casual gym member" that I spoke about in the past. The type that joins a gym in January but quits that same gym in March. That's most men. I am not most men. I have worked very hard to get where I am now. I've reached the point where I can bench press far more than 185 pounds. I'm much stronger than most men, and far stronger than I have ever been.

There's a lot of men that can bench press more than me. But not many. They are but the few, greater gods than I,

I'm not the strongest, but I am stronger than most. And that is enough for now.