Why I don’t train like the pros

I’m not that strong. I’m not that flexible. I’m not that muscular. Don’t get me wrong, these levels are good, probably top one to 5% of the population, but I am nowhere near being world-class in any fitness pursuit. And the reason this matters is that these sort of results that put you in the top 5% of the population are infinitely easier to achieve than what you need to get into the tiny percentile that make you a true top performer. In this video, I want to demonstrate just how unreasonable that difference is so that you can make the choice for yourself. For context, the results that I’m showing you here came from 40 minutes a week of strength training, some very simple nutrition, hitting one good meal a day.That’s it. That’s all I did. Now, you could argue that I could achieve so much more by doing more.
And over the last five years, I could certainly have gotten bigger. I could certainly be more flexible. I could be stronger in doing much more elite callisthenics moves. But the question is not what is possible. The question is what is the trade-off? Think about any topic that you know nothing about. Let’s say you don’t know the first thing about physics. If you cared enough, within 20 hours of focus study, reading some good books on physics, you could know more than 19 out of 20 people on the topic. That puts you in the top 5% of the population in physics for a few weekends spent in the library. Now, does this make you a world leading expert on physics? No. We all know that that is going to require over a decade of dedicated full-time focused study to achieve. There is no shortcut to that. It’s a huge difference from becoming an armchair expert, but for day-to-day purposes, the difference between zero and 20 hours of study is already massively more than the difference between that and world-class.
And so back to fitness, if you want to become competitively jacked, if you want to be doing the sorts of things Olympic athletes are doing on the gymnastics rinks, that stuff is going to require a lot of work. To be at the top, top level, it’s multiple hours a day for years and years. But I would argue that for the large majority of us, the tangible difference that being at that level is going to make to your life compared to being in the top 5%. It’s almost nothing. I honestly never desired more muscle mass than I have now or a better body composition. And while being strong and healthy and being able to move my body pain-free without any practical limitations is life changing. It’s incredible. And it has a huge difference to my quality of life. I can literally go and do any activities that I want to do without fear of getting hurt and perform them at a high athletic level.
Being able to do specific gymnastics tricks, the only time that has any bearing on anything is when I make videos about it. It’s fun as a pursuit in itself, but it really doesn’t matter for any practical purposes. And so while many of us learn from the top performers because they’re top performers and they’ve dedicated their life to it, I’d argue that professional bodybuilders and world-class level athletes for the large majority of us are not the ones that we want to be emulating. I just want everyone to understand how easy it is to get all the practical benefits that you would want from fitness. Six movements cover your entire body. If you train them across a full range of motion and work as hard as you can across that range of motion, you get almost everything that you could get from strength training. You get the ability to do a bunch of cool movements.
You build muscle mass across your entire body. You build all the functional mobility that you could want. You really needed to do one hard set a week to get the bulk of the stimulus for that progress. You do a couple of sets, you’d nearly maxed it out, as opposed to all the other work you could do. For pro bodybuilders, throwing a bunch of extra isolation exercises in to make sure you’ve killed every muscle from every possible angle. Fair enough. That’s the tiny percentile stuff. It’s doing lots of volume, long sessions, five, six, seven days a week using complex periodization models, exercise cycling, D-loads, accessory work mobility. These are all really common things for high performing strength athletes. Do you need them? No. Again, nutrition. If you get one good meal each day that hits your protein target and includes a bunch of nutrient dense quality food, you’re basically set versus tracking every calorie and macronutrient that you put in your body, managing all your micronutrients, taking supplements, cycling carbohydrates, nutrient timing.
There’s an infinite amount of things you could focus on with your nutrition, but is all that going to make a difference? Again, top percentile stuff. If you go back to that model we talked about recently, plotting results against time and effort, the 40 minutes a week I’m talking about is this. You put in this, you get all these results. For the world-class performers wanting to be top percentile. They need all these results, but look at how much more time and effort is required. And so I’m all for going after your goals. And for the people who want to be absolute beasts physically, go for it. Don’t let me hold you back. But there are only so many things that you can go for world-class in. I’d argue it’s a couple over a lifetime if you spend a decade or two on each. And so if you want fitness to compliment a life that has other things going on in it, you have a career, you have a family, you have other hobbies, then to me, the approach of focusing on the 95%, and honestly, that’s being conservative.
You can get top 1% with this sort of approach that I’ve been talking about and be in very, very good shape. Be absolutely ripped and very strong if you see it through for long enough. And that’s the other thing you got to think about. Whatever approach you take, you need to sustain. There is no escaping the multi-year process that great results take. The whole discussion of this is irrelevant in the first place if trying to go for that is going to stop you sticking with it for at least five to 10 years. So the only practical way to think about fitness in my mind is lifetime. The beauty of this, right, if you think about how little time and effort it takes 40 minutes a week of strength training, you’re not then limited to one pursuit. You can be multidimensional. You don’t just have to be jacked.
The whole time I’ve been doing this and starting business, I’ve also been learning languages. I’ve used the same approach to learn Spanish over the last three years. Again, am I elite native speaker? No, but I’m now extremely functionally fluent from just doing a tiny bit of effective work consistently over a long enough time spent while building business, while travelling, and while spending a bunch of time in other hobbies like surfing, photography. Everything comes at a cost. So I just want you to think about the cost of that 5% or 1% and decide which of these two options make sense for you. If you’re not aware of this, it’s very easy to get sucked into doing more. So many people do. And again, if that’s your intent, cool, but I see so many people not where they want with their body. In fact, the large majority of people, and if taking on too much is the cause, then that just does not need to be the case.
If you’re in doubt, start with very good. Get ahead of 99% of the population for very little time investment, and then you can decide if you want a 10X the time investment to make the next tiny bit of progress. If you want help getting maximum strength, muscle, and mobility gains from 40 minutes a week of smart training, you can learn how my system works and how you can get help by watching the free training linked in the description. But I hope this helps you realise that the body that you actually want is a whole lot easier to achieve than the world makes it seem to be. Go make it happen. I