One of the fun parts of being a trainer and having a day job is that you give out a lot of free advice to coworkers–maybe 10% of which actually gets listened to.

I was talking with a coworker yesterday who was asking me how to revamp his workout, since it was getting stale. It turns out he was lifting upper body only (strike one!), five days a week (strike two!), on machines only (strike three!). After telling him his workout needed scrapping, not revamping, he trotted out my favorite excuse for a crappy workout:

“I don’t want to get too big–no offense, but like you.”

I’ll admit that at 210 pounds on a 5’6″ frame, I’m bigger than a lot of people want to get. I can’t buy a suit off the rack, and there are stores where I don’t bother even looking at the pants. I buy the baggiest jeans Levis makes (569s or 570s) because they fit like, well, jeans.

However, I didn’t wake up one morning at 210. I lifted aggressively, ate aggressively, and slept aggressively to get here. I ate when I wasn’t hungry. I set the alarm on my watch to remind me to eat. I tried training like a powerlifter. I tried training like a strongman. I limited my cardio. I napped after work. In short, I did everything short of taking steroids or growth hormone to get big.

And this guy is telling me he doesn’t want to train intelligently because he’s worried he might accidentally get big.

I pointed out politely that I had worked my ass off to get big. That most people never build as much muscle as they ultimately want. That if by some miracle you do build the body you want, you just have to shift your food intake and training to maintenance.

He wasn’t buying it.

And that’s when it hit me: he was looking for an excuse not to train his whole body, hard, with free weights, three times a week.

Most people are actually like this. Ronnie Coleman famously said “Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass weight.” People don’t want to admit that they’re afraid of the pain of lifting heavy, so they shift the discussion to aesthetic terms: I don’t want to get too big.

I’m here to call BS on that excuse, once and for all. By lifting and eating intelligently, you’ll never get too big. You’re always in control of how big you get. What you will do is dramatically improve your physique and your athletic performance. Sure, it takes hard work. Sure, it’s going to hurt sometimes. Sure, it’s going to suck. But if it doesn’t hurt and suck, it’s not doing you any good.

A simple hurt-and-suck workout that will get results goes as follows:

Workout A

Squat

Bench Press

Bent-Over Row

Arnold Press

Barbell Curl

Calf Raise

Workout B

Deadlift

Incline DB Press

Chin-Up

Standing Press

Incline DB Curl

Hanging Leg Raise

Alternate workouts A and B, working out a total of three nonconsecutive days a week. Three sets of eight should be about right, given that the final rep of the final set is an all-out effort or very close to it.

You won’t get too big, but you just might make the best progress of your life.