Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Who Cares How Strong You Are? | Ep 338

Transcript

Who Cares How Strong You Are? | Ep 338 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:01
  Philip Pape: You walk into the gym feeling pretty good about yourself.
• 0:04
  Philip Pape: You've been consistent for six months and your squat is finally at body weight.
• 0:08
  Philip Pape: Then you see someone your age warming up with what you consider your max.
• 0:12
  Philip Pape: Your confidence evaporates.
• 0:14
  Philip Pape: You start second-guessing everything.
• 0:16
  Philip Pape: Maybe you should just stick to the machines in the corner where nobody can see how weak you are.
• 0:20
  Philip Pape: Sound familiar, or something like it.
• 0:22
  Philip Pape: That moment when someone else's strength makes you question your own worth as a lifter here's what nobody tells you.
• 0:29
  Philip Pape: That feeling is not only normal.
• 0:31
  Philip Pape: It is completely missing the point of why you're there in the first place.
• 0:35
  Philip Pape: So today we're going to break down why your current numbers are irrelevant to your success, how the comparison game is holding you back and how to think differently so that your training is more effective and enjoyable.
• 1:00
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency.
• 1:07
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, and today we're going to tackle something that affects all of you.
• 1:13
  Philip Pape: It affects every single person who picks up a barbell, and that is myself included the toxic relationship we have with our lifting numbers, with our strength.
• 1:24
  Philip Pape: The title of this episode who Cares how Strong you Are has nothing to do with the fact that we don't care about strength.
• 1:30
  Philip Pape: It's the fact that we don't care about your current strength.
• 1:33
  Philip Pape: We care about where you've been and where you're going and what process you're following, whether the process of improvement is in place for you.
• 1:40
  Philip Pape: And when we think about the psychology here, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
• 1:45
  Philip Pape: It's the voice in your head that whispers.
• 1:47
  Philip Pape: You're weak when you see someone deadlifting twice your max or when you compare your numbers to a friend.
• 1:54
  Philip Pape: Or maybe your friend picks on you a little bit for that in good spirit perhaps, but it might cut you at your core, depending on who you are.
• 2:01
  Philip Pape: The embarrassment when someone asks how much you bench and your answer feels pathetic.
• 2:05
  Philip Pape: Or you don't want to answer.
• 2:06
  Philip Pape: The way that you avoid certain exercises because your numbers are quote unquote too low.
• 2:10
  Philip Pape: But what if I told you this entire mindset is not helpful at all.
• 2:15
  Philip Pape: It is preventing you from reaching your true potential.
• 2:17
  Philip Pape: What if the secret, the magic pill to getting stronger and building more muscle and actually enjoying your training has nothing to do with where you currently stack up with your absolute numbers or against other people?
• 2:30
  Philip Pape: So that's what we're going to look at today and I guarantee this episode is going to change how you think about this, because it's often the thing that is holding people back, not all the other information and the training programs and all of that.
• 2:44
  Philip Pape: Now, before we get into the topic, if you like this kind of mindset content, I'd love to hear from you and I'd love to send you more like it.
• 2:51
  Philip Pape: To build not just physical strength but also the mental resilience To do that.
• 2:56
  Philip Pape: Just join my email list.
• 2:57
  Philip Pape: Go to witsandweightscom slash email.
• 2:59
  Philip Pape: I'll send you exclusive content there that you're not going to find anywhere else.
• 3:02
  Philip Pape: A lot of it is strategies for overcoming the mental barriers that are holding you back from doing your best, achieving your best.
• 3:11
  Philip Pape: Physique health, confidence, all the things you want fat loss, the specifics, the generalities, the principles, the methods all of it.
• 3:18
  Philip Pape: Go to whatsaweightscom slash email or click the link in the show notes and then, when you're on there that's another conduit to reach me you can reply by email.
• 3:26
  Philip Pape: I'll always get back to you personally with a response.
• 3:29
  Philip Pape: All right, let's get into the show.
• 3:30
  Philip Pape: Let's start with the elephant in the room or the gym.
• 3:33
  Philip Pape: You're scrolling through social media, right?
• 3:36
  Philip Pape: We all do it, and you see someone, your age, someone you compare yourself to benching more than you.
• 3:43
  Philip Pape: Maybe they're benching 300, while you're working toward 200.
• 3:45
  Philip Pape: Honestly, the numbers don't matter.
• 3:47
  Philip Pape: In fact, that's part of the trap.
• 3:48
  Philip Pape: Or you're in the gym and the person next to you is squatting what looks like your max for a warmup set, and so what happens in your brain?
• 3:58
  Philip Pape: If you're like most people, there is a cocktail of shame, of inadequacy, of self-doubt, and it just floods your system.
• 4:07
  Philip Pape: It's a very human thing.
• 4:08
  Philip Pape: You start questioning your training, your genetics and your worth as a lifter, your self-worth.
• 4:16
  Philip Pape: So much of what holds us back is in what we think about ourselves as people, and we tie some of the things we do and some of the performance that we achieve as equivalent to our identity.
• 4:30
  Philip Pape: And it just isn't.
• 4:31
  Philip Pape: This is what I call the comparison trap.
• 4:33
  Philip Pape: It's one of the most destructive forces out there, especially in the world of fitness, especially today with social media, and here's why it's so damaging.
• 4:42
  Philip Pape: It shifts your focus from your own progress to your relative position in an imaginary hierarchy, a construct, the matrix, the abstract.
• 4:54
  Philip Pape: It doesn't mean anything to you and yet you put yourself in that leaderboard and again, it's a very human thing to do.
• 5:02
  Philip Pape: We love competition, we love comparison, but the problem with that hierarchy is that it's arbitrary.
• 5:10
  Philip Pape: Strong compared to what?
• 5:11
  Philip Pape: Compared to who?
• 5:13
  Philip Pape: A power lifter, a sedentary person who works in an office, Someone who's been training for 10 years or 20 years versus your one or two years?
• 5:21
  Philip Pape: Someone with different genetics, different training history, different body proportions?
• 5:26
  Philip Pape: The list goes on.
• 5:28
  Philip Pape: And the truth is there is no universal standard for strong enough.
• 5:32
  Philip Pape: I really don't like the strength standards.
• 5:35
  Philip Pape: I might've done one episode on them a long time ago and even then talked about how a lot of this is relative to your body weight and relative to your history and your capability and your process.
• 5:47
  Philip Pape: There is only stronger than you were yesterday, than you were last month, than you were last year, and that is the only comparison that actually matters for your progress, for your health and even yes, for your well-being and happiness.
• 6:05
  Philip Pape: Not how strong you are, but how strong you are compared to where you've been.
• 6:11
  Philip Pape: And I can think of at least a dozen clients right now including some that have had check-ins this week who come to me convinced that they're weak in some way because their deadlift is only this number, you know, 185 or 225.
• 6:32
  Philip Pape: And very often we'll look back at their history, whether it's with me, or even before they started being, we'll say well, what was it six months, six months ago?
• 6:35
  Philip Pape: Well, you've added 90 pounds.
• 6:35
  Philip Pape: Your deadlift, that's a phenomenal achievement, but it's hard to see that because you're comparing yourself to other people.
• 6:42
  Philip Pape: I have another client who her strength is going up very slowly, but her performance in her sport has gone up massively, to the point where she just won an elite competition, almost surprising herself, and it's because she had focused on her health and performance and strength.
• 7:00
  Philip Pape: And that is an outcome of following the process.
• 7:06
  Philip Pape: And even then she expressed concern for tying her self-worth to that achievement, which I agree.
• 7:11
  Philip Pape: It's not something we want to do.
• 7:13
  Philip Pape: We want to separate the two and understand that the performance is simply an indicator of the process we're following in the moment and once we shift to that progress, things can change.
• 7:25
  Philip Pape: Your motivation will start to go up, because that's the thing that feeds back to telling us that the actions we're taking make sense, the behaviors we are doing, we are engaging in, are serving us, and guess what that does?
• 7:37
  Philip Pape: That psychology feeds back in to our dedication to the craft, to improving our form, to avoiding ego lifting which can injure you, and then, ironically, this often leads to an increase in the numbers, in the strength, in the progress.
• 7:53
  Philip Pape: Now you might be thinking but Philip, don't numbers matter at all, right, isn't getting stronger?
• 7:58
  Philip Pape: The whole point?
• 7:59
  Philip Pape: Isn't wits and weights and your strength-centered, muscle-centered approach, all about strength?
• 8:03
  Philip Pape: Well, that's a great question.
• 8:04
  Philip Pape: Numbers absolutely matter.
• 8:06
  Philip Pape: They matter as feedback, they matter as motivation, they matter as markers of progress, but they don't define your worth or your potential or your identity as a lifter.
• 8:20
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 8:22
  Philip Pape: So think about it this way your current squat number, your PR, your 5RM, whatever you're measuring, is simply a snapshot of where you are right now and it's given your training history, your genetics, your recoverability, your life circumstances.
• 8:35
  Philip Pape: It's not a permanent label, it's not a ceiling, it's just data and, in fact, 20 years from now, your current squat number might be lower because of all those factors.
• 8:47
  Philip Pape: And yet it's still going to be a snapshot of all those things and it's not good or bad.
• 8:53
  Philip Pape: That has gone up or down.
• 8:54
  Philip Pape: It's just an indicator of where things are.
• 8:56
  Philip Pape: And I've seen, for example, 50 year old women who start with their body weight training, maybe some light dumbbells, eventually incorporate barbells, machines and get stronger.
• 9:07
  Philip Pape: I've seen 60-plus-year-old men who couldn't deadlift 95 pounds work up to pulling 300.
• 9:14
  Philip Pape: And so their age or starting strength or what have you didn't predict their potential.
• 9:21
  Philip Pape: Because there's plenty of older folks walking around this earth who will continue to be weak and unhealthy and unfit and have a poor lifespan and poor healthspan, and so it's hard.
• 9:32
  Philip Pape: You can't predict your potential.
• 9:34
  Philip Pape: But what can predict your potential?
• 9:36
  Philip Pape: Guess what can predict it?
• 9:37
  Philip Pape: Your consistency and your mindset.
• 9:41
  Philip Pape: Like those two things.
• 9:43
  Philip Pape: When I see someone who is committed to taking action and building consistency through the support structure we have, through habit formation, et cetera, and has a positive approach, that everything they do is a chance to learn and grow, no matter what.
• 9:59
  Philip Pape: No failure is a bad thing.
• 10:00
  Philip Pape: Every failure is just data.
• 10:01
  Philip Pape: That is a form of grit and persistence that will never fail you for the rest of your life.
• 10:06
  Philip Pape: And I know this from personal experience because my numbers do not always go up.
• 10:10
  Philip Pape: I've had injuries, I've had surgeries, I've had situations where I'm in a fat loss phase, I'm just not eating enough, and I've had situations where it was slightly unexplainable why my numbers didn't go up.
• 10:20
  Philip Pape: There's usually a reason, and sometimes the number going up in and of itself isn't the be-all, end-all as well.
• 10:28
  Philip Pape: There's research on neuroplasticity.
• 10:30
  Philip Pape: You've probably heard the term before.
• 10:32
  Philip Pape: It's about our brains.
• 10:33
  Philip Pape: It shows that our brains are very adaptable.
• 10:34
  Philip Pape: They can improve for the rest of our lives, well into our 80s and 90s, and the same principle applies to strength and muscle.
• 10:40
  Philip Pape: You know your current numbers are not your destiny.
• 10:42
  Philip Pape: Now I'm not saying that you can perpetually push your PR all the way up forever.
• 10:47
  Philip Pape: We know we can't do that, but nor do you necessarily want to do that or need to do that.
• 10:53
  Philip Pape: What actually defined you as a lifter is your consistency, your form, because that's a skill.
• 10:59
  Philip Pape: It's a skill that you're getting better at your effort.
• 11:01
  Philip Pape: Effort includes both making the attempt and making the attempt with intensity or with effort, right, that kind, so kind of different types of effort.
• 11:12
  Philip Pape: And then, of course, your willingness to learn and adapt, having that growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset.
• 11:18
  Philip Pape: And these are the qualities that are absolutely going to predict long-term success, no matter what, no matter where you happen to be today, regardless of the numbers.
• 11:26
  Philip Pape: So when you're constantly worried about how your numbers are stacking up, there are some destructive, very destructive things that are happening that will slow your progress when you get caught up in this race.
• 11:39
  Philip Pape: The first one is ego lifting.
• 11:41
  Philip Pape: You're going to load the bar with weight that you could barely handle, just to hit a certain number.
• 11:46
  Philip Pape: You're going to compromise your form.
• 11:47
  Philip Pape: You're going to increase your injury risk that you can barely handle.
• 11:47
  Philip Pape: Just to hit a certain number.
• 11:47
  Philip Pape: You're going to compromise your form.
• 11:47
  Philip Pape: You're going to increase your injury risk.
• 11:48
  Philip Pape: Don't do it.
• 11:49
  Philip Pape: I see it all the time Someone loading up the bench with weight they can barely control.
• 11:54
  Philip Pape: They get a half rep and if they don't have spotters or spotter arms, it could be a dangerous situation and they might even call that a PR.
• 12:02
  Philip Pape: If they barely get it up and it's just, you know, a half-assed lift.
• 12:05
  Philip Pape: There's no benefit in doing that whatsoever.
• 12:07
  Philip Pape: The second thing is you're going to avoid exercises because you feel like the numbers are embarrassing.
• 12:13
  Philip Pape: Right, you're going to skip the overhead press just because you can only press whatever weight 95 pounds and it's not moving up, so you just skip it.
• 12:19
  Philip Pape: Well, that kind of exacerbates the problem, doesn't it Right?
• 12:22
  Philip Pape: These might be what you need for balanced development, for injury prevention, for making progress.
• 12:29
  Philip Pape: The third destructive thing that happens here is you get stuck in, let's say, the wrong rep ranges or trying to do something over and over again.
• 12:39
  Philip Pape: Right, you only want to test your one rep max, because that's the number everybody cares about, and you haven't pushed it up.
• 12:43
  Philip Pape: And there you go, um, and you start to limit your variation.
• 12:47
  Philip Pape: And then you're you start to backslide, cause you're not serving your goals.
• 12:52
  Philip Pape: You don't even have a specific intentionality or purpose with your current training block that helps you focus on okay, I'm focused on volume or intensity, or you know, these rep ranges or this kind of cycling through my lifts or whatever.
• 13:05
  Philip Pape: And then the last part, which maybe is the most important part, and the sad part is, you lose the joy in training.
• 13:11
  Philip Pape: Every workout then becomes a test, a thing you have to do, instead of an opportunity to get better.
• 13:19
  Philip Pape: Instead of celebrating the fact that you can move heavy weight through space, which is a blessing, something to be grateful for you're lamenting that it's not heavy enough.
• 13:28
  Philip Pape: So how do we fix all this?
• 13:29
  Philip Pape: How do we maintain the motivation that the numbers can provide, but avoid the toxic comparison, the comparison game?
• 13:37
  Philip Pape: And so I think it starts with redefining what strength even means.
• 13:41
  Philip Pape: Right Now, we know the physical, the physics definition is production of force, right, but it's not about hitting arbitrary numbers.
• 13:49
  Philip Pape: It's about continuous improvement within your own context of strength.
• 13:55
  Philip Pape: That's why we tend to lose sight of that.
• 13:57
  Philip Pape: We tend to focus too much on strength in and of itself rather than the improvement of, or building of, strength.
• 14:02
  Philip Pape: So, instead of asking yourself how much can I lift, ask how much stronger am I getting?
• 14:08
  Philip Pape: Instead of am I strong, ask yourself am I stronger than I was?
• 14:14
  Philip Pape: I'm a huge fan of reframe.
• 14:15
  Philip Pape: Anybody who's worked with me or is in a physique university or you know, talk to me for any length of time knows I love to reframe, and a very powerful reframe is that every single rep you complete is a victory.
• 14:27
  Philip Pape: Every workout or training session where you show up is an achievement.
• 14:32
  Philip Pape: Every week that you consistently train and you didn't skip a session, you move things around to make it work is is really building something significant.
• 14:40
  Philip Pape: It's a legacy for your body and for your strength.
• 14:43
  Philip Pape: So I want you to start thinking about strength in terms of compound interest.
• 14:48
  Philip Pape: Albert Einstein allegedly called compound interest the eighth wonder of the world.
• 14:52
  Philip Pape: Did you know that?
• 14:53
  Philip Pape: It's a cool little thing?
• 14:54
  Philip Pape: I don't know if it's true, but I heard it.
• 14:57
  Philip Pape: Small, consistent additions, right, just like compound interest of your money, compound interest of your habits James Clear talked about it in Atomic Habits.
• 15:05
  Philip Pape: They're going to compound over time into massive, massive gains.
• 15:09
  Philip Pape: Right, a five pound increase on the bar might seem like nothing in out of context, but if you do that consistently over months and over years, you are going to be amazed where you end up to the point where it's almost hard to put perspective on it and actually look back and say, oh my God, look what I did in just a month or three months or a year.
• 15:25
  Philip Pape: I still do that.
• 15:27
  Philip Pape: I still think wow.
• 15:29
  Philip Pape: I have a lot that I want to accomplish.
• 15:30
  Philip Pape: And sometimes I have to take a breath.
• 15:32
  Philip Pape: Look at a before and after photo, look at my numbers from a year ago or two years ago.
• 15:37
  Philip Pape: You know anything.
• 15:38
  Philip Pape: Whatever.
• 15:39
  Philip Pape: It makes sense to compare yourself with yourself of the past, not with anyone else.
• 15:44
  Philip Pape: You could be amazed, you could surprise yourself, and this is why I love working with beginners.
• 15:48
  Philip Pape: Sometimes and I say sometimes a little bit sarcastically, because there's pros and cons right Beginners are not yet corrupted by this comparison culture.
• 15:57
  Philip Pape: Usually, like when it comes to strength cause, they're just not in that world yet.
• 16:01
  Philip Pape: They're excited about the small wins they celebrate.
• 16:04
  Philip Pape: You know, adding five pounds to the squat, they see how much change they can, they can um induce in their body in a short period of time, and that excitement, that focus on personal progress.
• 16:16
  Philip Pape: We need to maintain that, and I know it gets a little bit more challenging the more you grow.
• 16:21
  Philip Pape: But the more you grow and the more capable you are, the more you realize the effort that it takes and you tend to step it up to the next level as you go forward.
• 16:29
  Philip Pape: So if I were to give you some practical strategies for maintaining this, because we all love like specific tools, don't we?
• 16:36
  Philip Pape: The first thing I'm going to say is to track your progress.
• 16:38
  Philip Pape: Don't just track where you're at, but track the improvement over time.
• 16:42
  Philip Pape: You know your training log, your app, whatever, whether it's food training, whatever, biofeedback, anything you want to track, so that you can look at where you were three months ago or six months ago, a year ago, and that's your reference point for where you've come.
• 16:55
  Philip Pape: Right, and maybe not every single metric has quote unquote gone up, and that's okay.
• 16:59
  Philip Pape: But look at the totality of it.
• 17:01
  Philip Pape: Look at the totality and don't discount factors like your relationships, your success at work, your mindset, like you could make very little strength gains, but have a much better mindset about the whole thing and be enjoying what you're doing.
• 17:17
  Philip Pape: Isn't that a huge amount of progress right there mentally?
• 17:19
  Philip Pape: So track your progress.
• 17:21
  Philip Pape: The second thing is celebrate all the non-numerical victories as well, and I kind of just alluded to this, right, maybe you felt more skilled with your squat today, maybe your form was better, maybe you recovered faster between sets or feel a little more, you know, heart healthy, right, just just healthier in general, and these improvements are just as important as adding weight to the bar.
• 17:41
  Philip Pape: They really are.
• 17:42
  Philip Pape: The third thing here is to understand progress is not linear.
• 17:45
  Philip Pape: I have to keep hammering home this message.
• 17:47
  Philip Pape: You're going to have bad days, you're going to have plateaus, you're going to have periods where your numbers go down due to a number of factors life stress, recovery, injury, intentionally because you're in a fat loss phase and you just can't maintain all that strength.
• 18:00
  Philip Pape: It's okay.
• 18:00
  Philip Pape: It doesn't mean you're getting weaker.
• 18:02
  Philip Pape: It means you're human and it's part of the process.
• 18:05
  Philip Pape: In fact, those moments might teach you more than any other.
• 18:14
  Philip Pape: Fourth, regarding the psychology here of progress is focusing on the process, not the outcome.
• 18:16
  Philip Pape: I've said these things many times, but I can't say them enough, because humans are really bad at staying motivated toward a goal that's far away.
• 18:26
  Philip Pape: If you currently bench 95 and you want to bench 225, that's very hard to maintain motivation to get there unless you have micro goals that include process-related goals.
• 18:39
  Philip Pape: Meaning I'm going to bench twice a week in my program, like that is a micro goal that is process-oriented, right, the numbers are going to follow, but the process is the thing you control.
• 18:49
  Philip Pape: You're optimizing the process for the outcome, but you're still optimizing and focusing on the process.
• 18:56
  Philip Pape: And then the last thing I have for you is that, remember, strength is specific, because being quote unquote strong at powerlifting doesn't necessarily make you strong at, you know, rock climbing or BJJ or, uh, you know, even just other movements in the gym.
• 19:13
  Philip Pape: Yes, strength is a production of force.
• 19:15
  Philip Pape: Yes, strength can be measured in many cases by numbers, but it also depends on what your strength goal is, if you're trying to develop strength or muscle, some combination, if you have a sport that you care about.
• 19:28
  Philip Pape: In other words, there's lots of things that are valuable when we talk about strength.
• 19:32
  Philip Pape: As much as I come from the starting strength world, where number on the bar is important, that's for novices, that's for beginners, that's an easy metric that you can control, that goes up, but then at some point you have to branch out.
• 19:44
  Philip Pape: So those are some techniques for the psychology of this, and I think something that's going to surprise you here is that some of the strongest people I know, some of the strongest people I know I can think of people that I don't know personally because they're big influencers, or I can think of people I do know personally, you know in terms of absolute numbers.
• 20:02
  Philip Pape: They're also some of the most insecure about their lifting.
• 20:05
  Philip Pape: Why?
• 20:06
  Philip Pape: Well, guess what?
• 20:07
  Philip Pape: They're doing the same thing.
• 20:09
  Philip Pape: They've achieved impressive numbers, but then they're still comparing themselves to elite athletes and they're still feeling inadequate and they're still chasing external validation.
• 20:17
  Philip Pape: Now, a little bit of this is okay.
• 20:19
  Philip Pape: So I'm going to give everybody here, myself included, some permission to drive yourself, to drive yourself to improve and always want to be improving.
• 20:27
  Philip Pape: Right, that's not really what I'm talking about.
• 20:29
  Philip Pape: There is a positive angle on that, but there's also a very negative one that we've addressed, related to self-worth and external validation.
• 20:37
  Philip Pape: That, I think, is the dangerous part.
• 20:38
  Philip Pape: On the flip side, I know people who are never going to bench 225, but their lives look completely different than they did before they started training.
• 20:47
  Philip Pape: They've gone from being unable to carry groceries upstairs to deadlifting their body weight.
• 20:52
  Philip Pape: They've built confidence.
• 20:53
  Philip Pape: They've improved health markers we can't discount how huge that is from A1C to lipids, to blood pressure, to resting heart rate, all of it and they discovered what their bodies are capable of.
• 21:07
  Philip Pape: Right Now, who is winning there?
• 21:09
  Philip Pape: Is it the person with the bigger numbers, or the person who's transformed their life and the positive psychology around it?
• 21:13
  Philip Pape: And so the person with the bigger numbers, or the person who's transformed their life and the positive psychology around it?
• 21:16
  Philip Pape: And so the most successful people and lifters that I work with or have had the pleasure to know.
• 21:22
  Philip Pape: They've got one thing in common They've learned to find satisfaction in their own journey.
• 21:31
  Philip Pape: They use numbers as tools.
• 21:33
  Philip Pape: That's all they are.
• 21:34
  Philip Pape: They're not measures of self-worth, they're just tools.
• 21:36
  Philip Pape: They're data.
• 21:37
  Philip Pape: They're motivated by getting better, not reaching a certain bigger number than someone else.
• 21:44
  Philip Pape: Sure, they want their own numbers to go up, absolutely.
• 21:46
  Philip Pape: We all have that inside of us and that can drive us.
• 21:49
  Philip Pape: But stop comparing yourself to others, and you know.
• 21:52
  Philip Pape: The cool thing Is that this thinking applies to everything your career, your relationships, your personal growth.
• 22:00
  Philip Pape: Stop comparing your chapter one to someone else's chapter 20 and focus on your own progress and everything will change.
• 22:08
  Philip Pape: So the next time you're in the gym and that voice starts telling you you're not strong enough, remember that you are not competing with anyone but yourself.
• 22:16
  Philip Pape: You're not trying to impress anyone but you.
• 22:18
  Philip Pape: You're not trying to lift someone else's weight.
• 22:19
  Philip Pape: You're trying to lift more than you could yesterday.
• 22:21
  Philip Pape: That is it, and that's not just good advice for the gym, that's a philosophy for life that I believe will serve anyone quite well.
• 22:29
  Philip Pape: All right, if today's episode resonated with you.
• 22:31
  Philip Pape: If you want more content that builds both physical and mental strength, join my email list at witsandweightscom.
• 22:38
  Philip Pape: Slash email or click the link in the show notes.
• 22:44
  Philip Pape: I love to write up and send out strategies in the email list to develop a mindset that will serve you not just in the gym but in every area of your life where you're working to improve, because your strength journey is again more than numbers on the bar.
• 22:56
  Philip Pape: It's becoming the person who shows up, who persists and who finds joy in the process of getting better.
• 23:01
  Philip Pape: All right, until next time.
• 23:03
  Philip Pape: Keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember the only person you need to be stronger than is who you were yesterday.
• 23:10
  Philip Pape: I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.