They say that a lot can be said about a person by the company they keep. If you associate with positive, motivated and driven people, that can only rub off on you and make you more successful in everything you do. If your fellow racers are nothing more than a bunch of degenerates, that means either you are a degenerate or that you will end up being one. As the legendary old-school rap group EPMD once said, “Hang on with nine broken brothers and you’ll soon be the tenth.”
Sometimes in life we outgrow our friends as we age and mature. Yes, it is sad, but it is also a reality. In high school and college, everyone wants to have fun and be carefree. Over time, most of us realize that it is time to grow up and get serious. Unfortunately, not everyone finds the same sense of responsibility and that drive to succeed in life. When you have friends who fall into that category, it is best to let them loose. While this may seem like tough advice at first, it will turn out to be your best option in the long run. You can’t change people no matter how hard you try, so don’t waste your time. I’ve walked that path several times and experience has taught me that negative or unmotivated people will only bring you down. It usually ends up being more trouble than it’s worth. If you want to get to the top in anything you do, you have to surround yourself with like-minded people. Training partners should be no different.
Your training partners are a reflection of you in the same way as friends. If you want to be bigger, stronger and faster, you better surround yourself with people who want to do the same. The amount of hard work that goes into being a superstar athlete or world-class lifter is enormous. It takes dedication, discipline, and desire in massive amounts. If the people you train with don’t share these same qualities or have the same passion to excel as you, get rid of them right away. When you show up to the weight room every day ready to break your ass, your partners better be ready to do the same. If not, they are only doing you a disservice. When your training partners are less than their best or don’t show the same unwavering commitment to excellence as you do, they become your enemy. At that point, they are holding you back and you cannot allow that at all.
When I had the great opportunity to host an elite strength training seminar in April of this year, my friend Jim Wendler told the audience that (I’m paraphrasing): “No matter what kind of training you do, the weather is HIT or Olympic lifting or Westside or whatever. It doesn’t matter if you’re not training with the right people. The people you train with are the most important factor. “
As an athlete who wants to be the best, you must go to the gym with a specific goal in mind for each workout. While some people may be there to socialize or find a weekend date, you are there to work hard and take the next step toward greatness. That will be a lot easier to do if you have training partners with the same goals as you. Although it can be done without the help of anyone else, I would take Jim’s advice and find someone to train with. If I had to describe myself in one word, it would be “driven”. I will do whatever it takes to be successful in any aspect of my life. So of course you could train alone, but why would you want to? No matter how motivated you think you are, there is something to be said for that alpha male instinct to compete and win. By adding just one or two more competitive people to your training environment, your weight will automatically increase. Successful athletes hate losing and will do anything to avoid that feeling. Try as you might, you can’t create this kind of atmosphere yourself.
The hour you spend in the gym should prepare you for what you will face in a gaming situation. And that is, above all, competition. You must be fiercely competitive with your training partners and they, in turn, must be willing to crush you. Of course, they still want to support each other, but as strength training guru Louie Simmons once said, “I don’t know these people (their training partners) here when I’m training. I don’t like these people … I want to take them to deep water and drown them … The goal is for you to be the best dog at that training. I don’t have room for poodles in my gym, I just want pit bulls. “If your training partners don’t share the same pit bull mentality, I suggest you look someone who does.
A few years ago I was training with my friend and former professional baseball player, Joe Cuervo. We had a strongmen competition on a Friday afternoon to finish our training week. The third or fourth exercise of the day consisted of cleaning the barrel and pressing. We fill the barrel with water approximately two-thirds of its height, cover the side tap and begin. The goal was to clean it and press it from the ground up as many times as possible without stopping. I went first and did twenty-one reps in a row. I knew there was no way Joe could get over that and I told him. I wasn’t thinking at the time that this guy had been told he couldn’t do things for years. They said he was too short to play baseball. They told him that due to multiple operations on each knee, he should stop playing ball as a sophomore in college. He ignored that advice and tore his ass to fulfill his life’s dream of playing professional baseball. Knowing that, I should never have underestimated him. He performed the first fifteen reps with relative ease. In number eighteen, he lost control of the barrel that he dropped and his eyebrow widened. If he let go of the barrel to heal his wound, the contest would be over and I would have been victorious. Instead, he blew the blood out of his eye and, with a rush of unbridled adrenaline, he finished the last four reps he needed to beat me and one more to emphasize his victory. When he left the barrel, we cleaned up the blood and took him down the street to the ER for stitches. Thirty minutes later we were back in the gym to finish our workout with a car push contest. That’s the type of person you want to train with.
In the latest Westside Barbell Club video, Vogelpohl XXX, they show Chuck attempting a box squat and completely missing the lift. He sat down with a massive amount of barbell and band weight and was stapled to the box. In that situation, there would normally be two options for most people. Half of the people would lose the weight and try again. The other half would hold the weight and prepare for another try. Chuck did neither. Instead, he grabbed two twenty-five and slapped them on either side. On his next try, he didn’t get just one rep, he got two. And he made it look easy! For all the Jedi at HIT (as they like to call themselves), that’s what you call intensity. That, my friends, is the type of person you want to train with.
Where you train is just as important as who you train with. Most public “gyms” are not enough. Gyms like these are a great place to get a pump and meet girls, but they’re generally not conducive to a serious, hard workout. Chrome and fern palaces, as the great author John McCallum used to call most commercial gyms, are not the place you want to be if you have a choice. Find a small hole in the wall spot with some character and good equipment. You don’t need a place that has forty-six different leg curl machines. A squat rack and a good glute bench will do much more for your strength and speed development. Westside Barbell Club is the strongest gym in the world and has absolutely no fancy machinery, neon lights, or juice bars in its less than two thousand square feet of space. What they do have is attitude. And a whole gym full of intensely motivated lifters who would do everything humanly possible to lift heavier weights.
One final note on public gyms is that it’s generally unwise to attempt a max rep with Britney’s latest abomination of a Rolling Stones classic or something like that on the gym’s stereo system. In fact, I think there are several studies that have shown that pop music can decrease neural output and overall strength by up to thirty-seven percent. To avoid this, bring headphones or find a gym that plays Slayer.
Now that you know where to train and what types of people to train with, you should ask yourself the following questions: “What are my training partners doing for me? Are they helping me achieve my goals? Do they motivate and inspire me? Are they on time ready to go to war every day? “If the answer to any or all of those questions is no, then you better find new sparring partners. Remember, you can tell a lot about a person by the company you keep.