I've been doing this shit since '83. I would not be human if I sat here and told you I was passionate about training every fucking day of my life. It's just not how it works. Anybody that tells you differently is full of shit. If people were wired that way, that they woke up and they were passionate for what they love every single day of the week, every single day of the year that they're lying, life would be easy. Accomplishing your goals would be easy. This shit's not easy for anybody.

Yeah, there's going to be days where you don't to train. There are going to be lifts that you don't like to train — I still hate the fuckin' deadlift. I hated it when I competed, I hate it now. That's never going to change. It doesn't mean that I can give it up. It doesn't mean that I could get away with not doing the deadlift. I still had to the deadlift in meets and occasionally in training, and I still do it now.

You're fooling yourself if you think that you're going to wake up every day and love what you do. That's true with anything now. That's true with work. That's true with relationships. That's true with anything. Everything takes work; everything takes hard work.

I'll put it this way: marriage takes hard work and it's supposed to be a life partner, somebody that you love and will be with for the rest of your life. Look at hard that is and how much work goes into that. If that takes that much work and you have somebody working on it with you as a partner, then why would training be easier? The weights aren't there to help you; they're there to fight against you. The weights don't talk back, yeah, I understand that. That's the greatest thing about it — the weights don't bitch about anything. That's great, it's a great thing, but they still fuck you up. They'll tear muscles. You'll get injuries. There's going to be a lot of things that you need to overcome especially if you're new into the game.

There's so many things you need to overcome if you're going to be in this sport for longevity for 15-20 years, things that you have no idea that you're going to have to overcome that most people don't. I've formulated the estimate that the life span for a top intermediate strength athlete is about three to five years.

They're passionate about it; they're passionate as hell about it while they're doing it. They're most of the trolls on the internet. They're most of the ones that are calling everyone else out. It's 100% all they do. It's all they think about. It's all they live. That's why they talk all that shit. It's everything that they live for.

Then something happens. They get a new job. They have a kid. They get married. Something gets in the way then they're not so hardcore anymore, they quit. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. Everybody's going to have different chapters in the book. People need to think about that shit when they're out there running their mouth and bitching to other people who've been doing it for 15-20 years, when they try to act like they know it all, when they've only been really at it for three to five years and they haven't really been tested. They haven't been injured. They haven't had to really sacrifice shit.

People talk about sacrifice all the time. Most of them don't even know what the fuck sacrifice means. Skipping lunch is not sacrificing for your sport. Taking a day off work isn't sacrificing for your sport. Using your vacation time to go to a meet is not sacrificing for your sport. You'll know when you're sacrificing for you sport because it's going to hurt. Most of the people that are running their mouth and they're talking they never hurt; they never hurt for their sport. I'm not talking physically hurt, mentally hurt and physically hurt, and knowing how to work hard.

As soon as a lot of these guys need to work hard, they're out. Yeah, they had a passion. I've always said passion trumps everything and it does when it's real and it's from the heart. When it's from the head, it does't trump shit. Yeah, it's work, it's work. There's going to be days you're not going to want to train. You still need to find a way to train. Those are the days you set PR's.

There's going to be other days that you really really want to train and you get into the gym and the shit won't click; it just won't feel right. Then you need to back it down, because you've got to listen with your body more than you need to listen to your brain. That's the key thing. If you're listening to your brain to try to overcome a lot of this shit and not listening to your body, you're going to get hurt.

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Sometimes your brain will play tricks on you. You won't want to train, but then you go in the gym and you have a great workout. You have a great session and it moves you forward. That's exactly what you needed to do and what you were supposed to do — what you're actually required to do. That's what makes great lifters great. The other part that makes great lifters great is when they go in the gym and they feel awesome and they're working out and something doesn't feel right, they back it down, or do something else, or they cut the day.

There will always be days you won't have passion. Passion isn't supposed to be a full-time thing. Passion is an emotional state. Happiness is an emotional state, it's not a full-time emotion, it's not a full-time outlook. If it was then what would happiness be? If passion was a full-time thing, how would you define it?