“Hello?”

“Dude! I just fell and completely screwed up my wrist! It’s so bad.”

“Jeez. What were you doing?”

“Skateboarding.”

“Michael, you’re 50.”

Just as I was about to prepare my first meal of the day, I get a call from a frantic client.

“Hello?”

“Dude! I just fell and completely screwed up my wrist! It’s so bad.”

“Jeez. What were you doing?”

“Skateboarding.”

“Michael, you’re 50.”

I’ve been working with this client over the past few months. He came to me because he struggles to put on weight and wanted to start building strength and muscle mass. As a 50 year old musician, he didn’t have a history with fitness. I realized that it was critical to build his foundation and some body-awareness first.

Michael is the type of guy who likes to try different hobbies and fully immerse himself into them, with not much attention given to anything else during the hobby’s lifespan. This is both a strength and a tragic flaw for him.

After building up some basic core strength and focusing on his posterior chain, I added in basic calisthenics—push ups, pull ups, and dips. More slowly than he wanted (they all want it immediately, don’t they?), but as surely as I knew he would, he started to gain strength and muscle growth. He didn’t believe it for weeks, but I saw it.

Then, almost overnight, his strength and mobility made significant gains, as well as his self-esteem. Yet almost just as quickly, he suffered a sidelining wrist injury, due to a second hobby he’d recently picked up, skateboarding.

Practice What You Preach

I’m not one to knock trying new things just because a person is aging. I landed my first back tuck at age 32. But he had never skated in his life and was out there with the kids trying to hit jumps. More importantly, it took away from his initial goal, and he was an emotional wreck. We spent a lot more time on core and legs, but he couldn’t do any upper body work. In the mirror, his muscles faded away just as fast as his confidence did. My job shifted more into the “therapist” role of personal training.

As fate would have it, I suffered a wrist injury at the same time. It initially happened boxing, but was compounded by many muscle ups, and moving my furniture into a new house —we’ll simply call it an overuse injury. It was not as severe as Michael’s and I probably could have toughed it out, but I saw it as an opportunity to practice what I preach, for once.

It was not easy. My muscle ups had been getting super clean, and I really wanted to be able to play with the athletes I was hosting at a competition in Sacramento in a few weeks. But instead of being stubborn, I took two weeks off, completely off, from strength training. I used it as an opportunity to focus on areas I’d been neglecting—my speed and cardio endurance (sparring for the first time in 10 years showed me how out of shape I was).

I spent two weeks playing soccer and cycling. It was tough at first, my capacity being at around 30 minutes of maximum output. But each day I started to go faster and longer and that holiday weight I gained started to shed. At the end of the two weeks, I peaked with a 7v7 soccer tournament, playing two straight hours of soccer (pro matches are 90 minutes). It was tough, but at 35 I was outlasting the 18 year olds and I felt good about that.

After a Sunday of rest, Monday came and it was time to get back to work. I was worried that I had lost the progress on my muscle up, straddle planche, and front lever. But as I grabbed the bar and pulled, not only did I not lose my strength, I felt lighter and therefore stronger. I floated straight up and over the bar with ease. It was clear that my rest had allowed me to grow.

No Pain, No Gain

Coincidentally during this period of time, I’d been reading Principles by Ray Dalio, legendary investor and founder of the largest hedge fund in the world. In the book, he talks about first, second, and third-order consequences. He says, “People who overweigh the first-order consequences of their decisions and ignore the effects that the second and subsequent-order consequences will have on their goals rarely reach their goals.” The similarities to my client’s (and my) situation were clear.

The first-order consequence of his injury was that he hated life on the sideline. He was depressed and only focusing on the fact that he couldn’t continue moving forward as quickly as he wanted. He was overweighing it. I spoke to him every day to get him out of this mindstate. I wanted him to focus on the second order-consequence of the injury which was that he would heal and be able to stay stronger in the long run, instead of “working through it” and potentially damaging his wrist more seriously.

Like me, he saw improvements in his weaker areas during this time. His posture got better, he figured out how to activate his core, and he completely stopped complaining about the pain in his lower back (a previous problem area). He thought we were just biding time with any exercises we could until his wrist healed, but I knew that strengthening these areas would then lead to the third-order consequence—he would have a stronger core and be able to control his body much more, making his exercises have better form and be more effective. Not only would his body properly heal so he could have longevity, but he would actually come back stronger. I experienced the same thing when I built up my endurance and lost extra weight.

The old adage “no pain, no gain” is nearly accepted as myth nowadays. But maybe, just maybe, a little pain can help you gain. As Dalio says, “pain gives you direction,” and if used to stay focused on your long term goals, and not the first-order consequences, I’d say that is a gain. After all, the real goal in almost anything should be longevity and lasting results.

This can be best summed up best by my friend Dan John, who says that the keys to success in the “Three F’s” (fitness, finance and … um … relationships) is the same: you need to give attention to them a little bit, often, and over the long haul.

The post No Pain, No Gain Needs to Make a Comeback appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Two things happened on my last night of a working trip to New York: I had my first poke bowl ever, and my girlfriend Facetimed to tell me she was pregnant. Both events caused me to close my eyes and take a moment to appreciate. But only one caused me to holler out in delight in the middle of the street. Why had I waited so long? Was this really about to happen? Isn’t this all I ever wanted? It was like all the little happy feelings and ideas I’ve ever had were coming together at the same time. It felt like God had made this little perfect bundle of tuna and avocado just for me. I would cherish every moment I had with it.

Meanwhile, back on the Facetime call, I was left speechless. The thought process, in five seconds, went something like, “Okay. Oh! I got it. That’s a pregnancy test. There’s two lines in the box. What does that mean? Oh… two lines means pregnant. Okay, this is a positive test. Wait. This is her positive test. She’s going to have a baby? I’m going to have a baby? I’m going to have… a baby?” And then it hit me. I was going to have a baby. With a thousand thoughts to choose from, my mouth opened to shout one of them out, but all I could come up with was, “How did this happen?”

The next few months were full of phone calls to family, listening to heartbeats at doctors’ visits, and clever Facebook announcements. As an alpha male that spent his life playing sports, I naturally wanted to have a little boy. And as it happens to most men like me, I was going to have a girl.

I had a moment where I was disappointed, I’ll admit. That moment was fleeting. I knew I was up for the challenge. I knew that my little girl would be special. If anyone could do it, we could make this girl into a strong, independent, cultured, kind, courageous woman. The disciplined athlete in me took over, and I realized I was prepared. I had trained for this.

Girls Become What We Tell Them They Can Be

The past five years of my life, I traveled the world, documenting and teaching the art of calisthenics, or bodyweight exercise, to youth. This was part of my life’s mission, and I was a hell of a teacher.

One of the battles I had to fight the hardest was proving to women and girls that, despite what society had told them for their whole lives, they could do pull ups and push ups. They just had to train for them. Time and time again I had to say, “Do not call them girl push ups. They are modified push ups, and everyone has to do them before they’re ready for regular push ups.”

A four-year-old boy is physiologically not so different from a four-year-old girl. The biggest thing that makes women have “less upper body strength” is their mental conditioning, not their physical potential. Around puberty, we slide our kids into these gender roles, and girls are told that they just can’t do certain things. So they stop doing them. If they keep doing those things, however, the results are exactly what you see with men: the ability to control their bodies in time and space with strength and beauty.

The Great Equalizer

Nothing puts people on equal footing quite like calisthenics. Whether it’s age, gender, race, nationality, orientation, or socio-economic status, anyone can do calisthenics, and everyone starts with one rep. During the production of my documentary, Raise Up: The World is Our Gym, I saw this phenomenon in action from the mountains of Norway to the beaches of Spain, and from the jungles of Africa to the concrete jungle of New York City.

The film focused on the rise of freestyle calisthenics, as it becomes one of the fastest growing sports in the world. While this sport is still dominated by men in many parts of the world, that paradigm is shifting fast.

In 2013, I was on a beach in the south of France with the president of the World Street Workout and Calisthenics Federation just after the French National Championship. I saw the opportunity for massive growth in this new sport, and thought we were neglecting a huge female audience that also wanted to compete. I asked if he’d ever thought about doing female competitions, and he simply replied “There will never be women’s world championship. No one wants to see this.”

Photo credit: Mauricio Merino

Four years later, some of the most intense battles in calisthenics competitions are between the ladies. International stars are rising up and leading the way for our future generations. My daughter will look up to amazing women like Gina Scarangella, the high-flying nurse from Philly, and Simone Ming, the mild-mannered beast from the UK. She’ll study the moves of the Dutch Melanie Driessen at one of her workshops. Or she’ll train at Brooklyn Zoo with the two-time World Champion, Jessica “Russian Red” Borgadov.

These will be her heroes, because these girls didn’t listen when people told them they were wasting their time playing on the monkey bars. These girls didn’t listen when people told them their training would take them nowhere. Instead, they boarded planes and traveled the world, cashing first-place prize checks, learning new languages, making new friends, and accomplishing new goals. They were becoming strong, independent, cultured, kind, courageous women.

Don’t Believe You Can’t

Now I’m back at home in North Carolina, preparing for my life to change in ways I don’t understand yet. I spend most of my days working on new film projects and writing. But a couple times a week, I head to Syncstudio in Durham, a yoga and cycling studio, to teach women from ages 20 to 70 that no matter what they’ve been told their whole lives, they can do push ups and pull ups. The term “girl push up” does not exist in our classes, nor in our minds.

I’m still not sure if I will be a great parent to a girl, but I think this is the best way to start. I just have to train for it.

You might also like:

• How To Progress Your Way To A Perfect Push Up
• 5 Drills To Help You Achieve Your First Pull Up
• 8-Week Workout Plan For Push Up Strength And Power
• 8 Weeks To Mastering Pull Up Power
• Push Up Progressions For Everyone
• The Proof Is In The Pull-Up: 10 Tools For Getting Better At Pull-Ups

The post My Daughter Will Never Do Girl Push Ups appeared first on Breaking Muscle.