I watched the 2016 Action / Comedy film Central Intelligence with my two older sons the other day.
In it, the characters played by Kevin Hart and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson meet up again 20 years after High School.
The last time, they’d met, The Rock’s teenage character was overweight and heavily bullied.
Now he, of course, looks like The Rock.
“Look at you!” Hart’s character begins. “This is like a total transformation. You look like Hercules or somebody. What did you do? Come on, give it to me.”
“I didn’t do much, really. Stop it.”
“All right. I just did one thing.”
“Come on, I need to know.”
“I worked out six hours a day, every day, for the last 20 years straight. I mean, anybody can do it, right? Yeah.”
And, as Jason Bateman’s character references later on, it helped to “Chug a bunch of f’ing steroids”.
Hey – I love The Rock.
But to pretend he’s not been a heavy steroid user, on and off, for three decades or more is naive.
You don’t usually have to have surgery to remove breast tissue that’s growing because testosterone is being aromatized to oestrogen because of all the gear you’re taking, like The Rock did in 1999.
Having bigger muscles than the Natural Mr Olympia would be hard to explain when you’re 50 years old if you weren’t juiced up to the max.
Having enough money to have your own full time nutritionist, cook, trainer and doctor to manage your cycle helps massively too.
And, even without all of the above, The Rock is a big old unit naturally.
Now, I’m cool, with all of this.
His life and body to treat how he wishes.
And none of it negates how hard he works, both in his training, how he eats and his career in general.
But……….
If we’re going to make comparisons between ourselves and others (and we will)……….
Then making it a fair comparison is important.
Many of the physiques we see in magazines and online are chemically enhanced.
They’re the best photos from a long photo shoot with the lighting and angles tightly controlled.
The participants work out a lot more than we are willing to.
They’ve dieted down for that photo shoot.
They don’t always have the “best” relationship with food in general.
And all that is fine.
Again, their lives.
But 99% of us are never going to look like that.
Or, if we were to, it would require things we’re just unwilling to do.
Also fine.
Success, in my experience, comes from when we stop looking at the gap between where we are now and where we’d like to, theoretically, be……….
When we stop focussing on what we’re unwilling or unable to do……….
When we stop beating ourselves up about the above……….
And look at what we are willing to do to move from where we are now to a step or two in the direction we want to go in.
And repeat.
When we look at the relatively easy adjustments more than the really hard ones.
When we look at those who have similar challenges and lives to us and look at how they’ve made progress……………..
Rather than looking at what those who’ve done what we’re not going to do have done to get top 0.0001% results………..
Then we put ourselves in a position to progress.
Much love,
Jon ‘I do like The Rock. I just also like honesty and transparency’ Hall
P.S. If you’re ready to let go what will never happen, yet actually get more results than you actually have been, then you’ll find that here –> www.myrise.co.uk/apply
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RISE in Macclesfield was established in 2012 and specialise in Group Personal Training weight loss programmes for those that don’t like the gym and find diets boring and restrictive!
