Weights and Plates Podcast - #104 - DON'T QUIT WHEN LIFTING GETS HARD

Episode Date: October 17, 2025

In this episode of Weights & Plates, Coach Robert Santana breaks down one of the most overlooked elements of training success: mindset and consistency. Everyone wants to get stronger, leaner, or more muscular—but few understand that true progress takes years, not weeks. Robert dives into why most lifters quit when training gets hard, why “12-week transformations” are a lie, and how the real key to progress is showing up even when you don’t want to. He covers common pitfalls like program-hopping, unrealistic expectations from social media, and trying to “out-program” a bad lifestyle. If you’ve ever felt stuck, burned out, or tempted to skip the gym, this episode is the wake-up call you need. Subscribe for more episodes of Weights & Plates where we cut through the noise and get real about strength training, nutrition, and long-term progress. https://weightsandplates.com/online-coaching/ Follow Weights & Plates YouTube: https://youtube.com/@weights_and_plates?si=ebAS8sRtzsPmFQf- Instagram: @the_robert_santana Rumble: https://rumble.com/user/weightsandplates Web: https://weightsandplates.com

Welcome to the weights and plates podcast. I am Robert Santana, and I am your host. Today we're going to talk about, you know, a topic that comes up quite a bit, something we encounter quite a bit. And that is mindset. You know, I haven't done a mindset episode in a while. I talk about mindset throughout the show. And it's something that I spend a lot of time talking to clients. about and discussing the importance of it and trying to help people develop the right mindset

for training and developing healthy behaviors, typically around food and lifestyle, because I find that many people, they want to get from point A to point B. You know, either they want to look better. That might mean losing body fat. That might mean building muscle. Some people want to get stronger. They want to lift absolutely heavier weights. You know, I get a lot of that as well.

And there's a spectrum there. You know, some people just have some modest numbers in mind. They're not necessarily trying to compete in a sport. They're just in the weight room and they need some sort of milestone to work towards. And other people just want to be active and eat better because they want to be healthier and improve their longevity. The thing all of these groups have in common is they have to start out by training. There has to be a goal set. There has to be problems worked through.

and more stress has to be added than previously was. And this applies on the diet, too. You know, if you're a fat guy and you want to lose a bunch of weight, you have to reduce your calories. That requires sacrifice. You can't just go in at 350 pounds and eat the way you did to be 350 pounds. You have to change your eating behaviors. That's a form of stress on your life. That is an inconvenience you are now introducing to your lifestyle.

and that's not so easy for a lot of people on the surface many people believe that they just need the right information to achieve their goals and many people also believe that some pretty ambitious goals are more modest than they are part of this has to do with the media portrayal of what a given exercise program or a diet can do for you so back in the day as they say if you flip open a magazine, a fitness magazine, whether it's not necessarily a bodybuilding magazine, although those are more extreme depictions of this, you know, a bodybuilding magazine might have a 250 to 300-pound guy that's ripped on the cover. And he might have an article about the workout program he does,

the supplements he takes, which are plastered in ads throughout the magazine, and the diet he follows. And the reader has led to believe if he reproduces this exact system, that he's going to achieve that result. And then the other half of that is, many of the readers actually try to reproduce the system, but they don't actually do the program as written. And even if they do the program as written, they end up not getting the result for a variety of reasons.

But more often than not the former is the case. They don't do the program, and then they don't do the program, and then they might say the program does it. work or quit and try another program written by another guy in the magazine that's also big ripped and saying that he did it all with diet exercise and supplements. But we see this in publications that have more modest depictions of physique. So the ones that I recall were men's health, men's fitness. The men tended to weigh about 165 to 185 with visible airbrushed abs, probably, you know, under 13% body fat and lean. And the reader was led to believe that the exercise and diet program

outlined in that magazine, along with any supplements that were recommended, are going to give that reader the same look that the model in the magazine has. We've hammered this on the show, ad nauseum. The appearance of a human body is going to vary from one human to the next irrespective of training your appearance is heavily dictated by genetics training will alter it of course diet will alter it of course and then anabolic steroids will alter it of course you may not necessarily look like the guy on the picture in that article through hard work so why am i bringing this up for the millionth fucking time then nowadays on social media

you have the same phenomenon. We no longer have magazines at the checkout that people are reading in mass. You know, maybe people of older generations still read them, but most people are consuming fitness content on some social media platform. And you see similar things. You see ridiculous bodies, some that are altered through apps, you know, like they have the face app to change the way your face looks, I guess. There are photo and video editing apps.

that can alter your appearance, as well as all the other things that I've outlined. So the net result is when somebody is out of shape, they believe that if they do something that the person they saw in social media or the magazine or the actor in the movie did, that they're going to get that result relatively quick because many programs are sold as 12-week programs, 20-week programs. Maybe you get six months, I think that's rare. usually it's somewhere between 12 to 20 weeks to get the physique of your dreams. And that was bullshit 25 years ago. And that is bullshit today. It just does not work that way.

And for most people, they're going to bust their ass for years and years and years. And if by some miracle, very little goes wrong, you know, they might be, I don't know, 15 to 20 percent more muscular than they were at the beginning. It's funny. There's one thing that people both acknowledge and forget at the same time. They forget that muscle gain is very front-loaded in your training career. That means that you get the novice effect in the first year of training. So if you're a man, you might gain 20 pounds of muscle mass, you know, under decent circumstances or under the best of circumstances. Let's say that you're somebody who has good muscle building genetics. Typically, this would be a person who's going to perform at a high level in bodybuilding,

assuming he's willing to take all the steroids and do all the training. This guy is going to look muscular out the gate, and he might gain 20, 25 pounds of lean mass in the first year of training, assuming nothing goes wrong. By the second year, that number might be less than 20 pounds. By the third year, that number may be less than 10 pounds, and so on. So we all acknowledge that there's a point of diminishing returns. So if you have somebody, like myself, my baseline was 160 pounds at 17% body fat, 165 pounds maybe when I was 18 years old, just before my 18th birthday. So puberty was done because, you know, you get these guys, you get these bodybuilders that will put their before picture as them when they were teenagers surging with testosterone and growth hormone. They were going through puberty when they started lifting weights.

So you have the confounding variable of hormonal changes that can cause the same thing that lifting causes. But yet, but yet that's their before picture. Then they're after picture. They're a middle-aged man. So I've always found that silly and disingenuous. We're talking about somebody post-puberty, who's an adult male, starting to lift weights. I was 160 to 16% body fat. That means that I had somewhere in the 130 pound range for lean mass.

So if you look at what people have said about natural muscle gain over the course of a training career, assuming things don't really go wrong. Most of it is gained in the first five years and it becomes immeasurable beyond that. And then you have to also not get hurt while you continue to add weight to the bar in years beyond that. That also becomes a challenge. But let's assume you've overcome all this and you're able to. continue to push your body past its limits for 5, 10, 15, 20 years, the amount of muscle gain beyond the fourth or fifth year is minuscule. If you're a guy like me who started with 130 pounds of muscle as a young adult and I put on 40, okay, it's 170, but hold on, I don't respond well,

right? I'm not a natural bodybuilder. You know, some guys are. are. So I didn't gain that 20 to 25 pounds the first year, right? I also didn't train as well, but later on I did. So I'd say between my initial year of training and my first year of real training later on, I probably gained somewhere in that 10, 10 to 15 range, I'd say. When I was looking at bod pod results, when I did my novice linear progression, I'd gain seven. So I know I probably gained close to that, just fucking around in the gym and adding weight to the bar when I was 19. So we'll call it 10 to 15. But then after that, every time I'd hop in there, it was a few pounds here and there, you know. So all in all, I probably safely gain, I don't know, somewhere in that

20 to 30 range. You know, I probably have like 150 to 160 pounds of lean mass today. And I'm still setting new PRs. My body's still changing. So my results are quite plausible, but you have a lot of guys, you have a lot of guys that will sit there and judge the raw result, how I look, what I weigh, what my body composition is today, as a reflection of whether what I did worked or not. I'm not going to win a pageant because that's what a bodybuilding show is. I'm not going to want a powerlifting meat either. You know, I acknowledge that. But to sit there and say that I should have gained 70 pounds of muscle, right, which would have put me at 200 pounds of muscle and would have had me jacked in the mid 200s, that that's the standard, you know, that that's what should happen to a successful person, while also saying that there's no evidence that you can do that naturally. So we're in a weird time, ladies and gentlemen, but why in the fuck am I bringing all this up?

Well, I'm bringing all this up because many people, some of you listening, see people on the internet or in a magazine or on a bodybuilding board or in a Hollywood movie and think that 10 to 20 weeks is going to get you there, you know, with the right program, with the right diet, and that you shouldn't get hurt either. Well, the truth of the matter is 10 to 20 weeks gets you started. You're going to have to put in years, years. of hard work to change your physique into that. Now, sure, in 10 to 20 weeks, you can lose a lot of body fat.

But body fat, that's the easy part. The hard part is, you know, obviously lifestyle modification behaviors. You know, you have to not eat out as much. You can't drink as much. There are sacrifices that need to be made to lose fat. Some guys have a lot of body fat on their body and need to lose it. And they also happen to be muscular. Good for you if you're that guy.

But I find that most people aren't in any of these. extremes. They're typically skinny, fat, chubby people that aren't that muscular. Yeah, that's what you tend to see a lot of. I noticed this when I was doing research in my master's, and I was testing people's body composition. And I noticed that most people weren't extremely obese and thick and muscular, weren't ripped in muscular, and weren't ripped in skinny. They were somewhere in between. They didn't have a lot of muscle mass, but they weren't bone skinny. They didn't have a lot of body fat, but they weren't morbidly obese. You know, this skinny fat phenotype is probably the most common one.

I would venture to guess that's what the middle of the bell curve consists of when you're talking about body composition. You're probably not seeing a lot of men with 200 pounds of muscle mass or a lot of women with 150 pounds of muscle mass. So then what happens? You know, somebody like this comes in, they start working, they get the novice effect. It's great. Life is awesome.

Gains are predictable. You're making steady linear progress. And then, you know, maybe something tweaks, you know, not a serious injury that requires surgery or that puts you out for a year. But you get a tweak. You got to work through the tweak. Okay. Some people will work through it. Maybe they'll work through one.

Maybe they'll work through two. But then maybe the third tweak. They're like, how fuck this. I'm done with this weightlifting thing. It's just not for me. Or I need a different program. I need to do this guy's program now. because it has more volume and the weights lighter, right?

And then they'll do that, never, ever try to add weight. And then their body won't change, obviously. Or you might have another situation where life gets in the way. The person's not eating enough. They are starting to lose sleep for one reason or another. Or their job starts becoming more demanding. And they can't get to the gym as often. They start missing workouts.

Or they just start missing reps because the recovery. recovery is so poor, and their ego can't handle missing reps, and they're constantly having to reset and work back up. Over time, they get stronger if they stick with it. Well, what do most of these people do? Or the program gets boring. Sometimes that happens. Program gets boring. They say, eh, I need more exercises. I need to try something new. And they program hop for years and years and years. No PRs are set, and they don't really change very much. point is that a lot of you will quit when it gets hard. And those are the most common examples of when it gets hard. Either something tweaks. Reps are missed on a particular lift or more

than one lift. Lifestyle prohibits good recovery. So there's a lot of resetting there, either through traveling or through shit sleep or through an array of other reasons. The theme I'm seeing here is that when training becomes unpredictable and other sacrifices are necessary or problems have to be troubleshooted, many people quit. But many people also believe they need to find the right program. They think they can out-program their lifestyle. Let that digest for a minute. Can you out program your lifestyle? Can you out train a bad diet?

Let's start there. Can you run off calories to lose 50 pounds? Probably not. Some of you have tried. It doesn't work that way. Sure, cardio helps accelerate things. We don't know exactly why because you'd have to do a lot of cardio to burn enough calories to drop fat through energy expenditure. But anecdotally speaking, when people tend to do cardio, the weight tends to come off a little bit better.

However, you can't eat a shit diet and try to run off the extra calories. If you're eating 1,500, 2,000 extra calories, if your deficit requires a 2,000 calorie reduction because you're eating 4,000 calories a day, and that's just what your body needs to start losing weight, you're not going to run off 2,000 calories a day. Sorry to say it, you're not. Even at your best efforts, you're probably not going to do that unless you become a competitive runner. And then even then, you know, you got to draw the line somewhere. So it's the same thing. You can't out program a shitty lifestyle. You can't design a training program for lifting that's

going to offset sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation alters your hormones. It upregulates your stress hormones, downregulates things like testosterone, your metabolic hormones. And you train like shit. Your nervous system isn't functioning as properly. You're not firing neurons the same way. because you're sleep deprived, you're not going to offset that through programming manipulations, through adding more exercises. If you're not eating enough, you're not going to offset that. These muscles that you break down need more calories. You're not going to be able to push them to failure or lift heavy on low calories. It doesn't work that way. So what can you do? All I can't say enough, you have to show up. No matter what, you have to show up. And people don't

like to show up. So you want to quit. You want to quit because work got busy. You want to quit because your back hurts. You don't want to work through that. You want to quit because your program is boring and you're spending a lot of time on a handful of things and nothing's really changing except, you know, maybe the weight, maybe the sets, maybe the reps, right? Well, think about it like this. If you were playing the piano and you wanted to be a good penis, would you just stop playing the piano and play the drums. You know, if you wanted to become a good baseball player, would you put thousands of hours into swinging the bat and throwing the ball?

Or would you just suddenly get bored and, you know, start shooting hoops and playing basketball and doing that? The truth is that most things require a narrow set of skills to be mastered to account for the majority of the results. Now, there are other things. that people need to do to supplement that. You know, baseball players lift weights. You know, they follow a certain diet. They do general conditioning, you know, general cardio in addition to playing their sport. So there's other things that you need to do, but at the end of the day, a baseball player is going to play baseball. A basketball player is going to play basketball.

A penis is going to play the piano. A guitar player is going to play the guitar. You are going to lift weights and perform compound lifts. And you're going to try. and make them stronger over time. Sure, you can add single joint exercises. You can use cable machines. You can use plate-loaded machines like hammer strength machines. You can use kettlebells. You can use dumbbells, all that stuff supplements.

And when you make a muscle resist by producing more force, that muscle will grow to an extent. But to what extent? You know, this is another thing that I'm hitting on lately. Do you want more progressive overload or less progressive overload? which path is going to get you there. Obviously, obviously the path that allows you to lift the most weight. You know, you become a fat version of yourself.

You're going to lift more weight than if you were a skinny version of yourself because you're fat happy, you're anabolic, you have more leverage, and you're going to be able to continuously get stronger for a while. If you're skinny and eating less, you're going to have a much harder time. So even though the fat, is not muscle, the fat, the fat, it gives you leverage and it allows you to progressively overload longer, which means at the muscular level, you're also progressively overloading longer. Same kind of thing with a compound. If you squat, you can make a squat go up for years.

You can't make a leg extension go up for years. That tends to level off quick. Those little single joint movements become advanced very quickly for this. reason. But a big movement can keep going up. So even though the side dealt, the precious side dealt, even though it's not activating to the same extent when you do a press versus a lateral raise, it's producing more force every time you press heavier. It's also producing more force every time you lateral raise heavier. The difference is you can't keep lateral raising heavier. It levels off pretty quick. The press keeps going up. So I always try to make this distinction. right you have to keep pushing to add more which means your program is going to be rather boring

if you're serious about making progress getting bigger and stronger if you're trying to lose fat the same thing happens happens with your food you know things become a little less interesting when you have to eat foods that are reliably lower calorie if you are used to eating at restaurants and having a lot of variety in your diet and eating for flavor and taste, it's going to be very hard to control calories because many of the foods that taste really good are also very high in calories. So again, it becomes a matter of repeating a process thousands of times that is almost monotonous in a sense.

So that's the boredom factor. How about the getting busy factor? Because a lot of you listeners are busy. You know, I get a lot of guys that work, they have kids, they have families, et cetera. But they find some importance in this. So if you're one of these people and you find importance in this, you know, I think the first thing to realize is you're not a high school athlete anymore, if you were before. And if you weren't, you're not going to become one now. So you have to be prepared to throttle the program down just as much as you're prepared to throttle the program up.

So when you're starting out, we might be adding weight frequently, but then guess what? It gets heavy. You have to travel. You work late. and you're losing sleep and not recovering, and then the weight has to go down. So it almost feels as though you're on a hamster wheel of death because you're constantly resetting.

Well, you've got to zoom out. You know, if you weren't lifting at all, you'd be weak as shit and skinny fat. And over a long enough timeline, you get stronger doing this. You're going to be stronger doing this. You're just not going to be able to see that as frequently because you are trying to overcome lifestyle challenges,

like your job, which, you know, are more important than training. Nobody makes a whole bunch of money lifting weights, you know. So when you have to go to three cities in a week, first of all, don't check out and think because you're in another city, you can't train. There's plenty of commercial gyms across the world. There are gyms in hotels. Many of my clients will simulate the movements using hotel gym equipment, typically dumbbells. Sometimes they have machines there that you can use.

but there's always access to something. You just have to really want to do it. And I think just that action of showing up, you're moving that ball forward. You know, I always like to picture a big, giant boulder when I'm trying to chase a long-term goal. And some days I only move it a few inches,

but then some days I move it a few feet. You know, it just varies. Some days you can do more than others. The busier you are and the more things you are juggling your diet and training against, the less linear that process is going to be. So you just have to be. willing to accept that. In some ways, this is kind of like a hamster wheel, except you are moving

forward if you show up. I can't stress that enough. Now, what about injuries and tweaks? Because those come up a lot, too. Well, in any sport, you're going to tweak something. You're going to feel some sort of discomfort, some sort of pain. Thing is, a stronger person is going to deal with it at a lower severity and is going to recover faster. Bad news is, it's inevitable that you are going to experience some sort of discomfort lifting weights. And you're going to have to work through some things. Hopefully not for very long most of the time. I've never had somebody. You have to get surgery over something they did in the wait room. Not in mine, at least. You know, plenty of people have torn things, just lifting on their own ego lifting and not really getting

good form instruction. But if you are doing the best that you can to get correct technique, or if you're getting correct technique because you have in-person coaching, then your injury risk should be much lower. Can you measure that? Probably not, because how do you even measure good technique that's subjective, but we like to lift weights in a way that you're using the most muscle mass

through the longest effective range of motion that allows you to lift the most weight. So if you're following those three criteria, you're typically keeping your joints nice and stabilized because that includes more muscle mass in the equation. and if your joints are more stabilized, the connective tissues around them shouldn't injure. But they still can't because everybody's different. Some people simply just get hurt easier than others.

But what are you going to do? You're going to be hurt and weak or hurting strong. You know, I'm tired of this shit. You know, sometimes things hurt. You work through them, you rehab them, and then you keep going. What you don't do is you get hurt, you quit, you go AWOL, you go AWOL, you get. you get fatter, less muscular, and stiffer from not doing anything. So as the great Darren Deaton, a good colleague of mine and physical therapist says,

motion is lotion. You have to keep moving. You have to keep showing up. You can't let these roadblocks get in the way. Now, if your goal is you're trying to do a big transformation on yourself, then you're in for a long ride. There's going to be several years where you're going to run into some form of these problems, and you're going to want to quit.

And you have to figure out a way to keep yourself showing up because showing up is the number one most important thing you can do when trying to improve at anything, at anything. You know, I was a doctoral student once upon a time. Now it's been once upon a time, been out for a while now, finally. It took me a while to do that. I thought it would never get done. I kept showing up, and somebody told me the person who gets the PhD

is not necessarily the strongest student. It's the person with the most endurance, the person that keeps showing up. And I'd argue it the same in a lot of other things. There's a lot of talented people that drop out of sports as soon as it gets hard. There's a lot of talented people that drop out of sports because they get hurt.

And that injury sometimes is not necessarily career ending. They just don't like being hurt. But they are phenomenal athletes otherwise. And some people want to do other things. So is the best of the best, really the best of the best? Well, I'd say, yeah, because they kept doing it, you know. Potential energy is not kinetic energy, right? So what somebody could have potentially done, well, it hasn't been done.

So, you know, I'm not going to discredit the best of the best, but one of the things that they all have in common is they keep showing up, even when you factor in the high level of baseline talent, the people that win tend to keep showing up. So that's something that people at the bottom who will never be that great should also do. If you keep showing up, you're going to be less shitty than you were if you're at that bottom 3%, right? Might move you up a few notches.

The whole point here is to get better. And you don't get better by just doing the easy part and then not showing up because you don't feel like it. The most important thing that any one of you can do, is show up when you don't want to show up. Attempt the workout when you don't want to attempt the workout. That's where all those psychological and neural pathways are built. And whenever something else gets hard, it's unrelated, you push through it.

You know, you tend to see this transfer into other areas. Anybody can go to the gym when they feel great. I'm recording this podcast on pretty low sleep. I don't want to do it. I mean, I want to do it. I want to talk to you. I want to put information out there. to guide you in the best direction and I want to coach people that I can't that I may not

never directly coach this is my way of doing that but I you know frankly a little exhausted you know I spent the day at a seminar learning about dog training I had to train a client before that which meant I had to wake up early and Fridays tend to run late for me so you know I'm a little bit on low sleep but I'm here recording this right I wish I recorded it sooner It wasn't because I didn't want to. My point is, I, for the record, want to put the content out. I enjoy this. But physically, I don't want to be on a mic right now in front of a camera with a lit-up room.

I want to be sleeping. And I'm not. You know, I just had some coffee. And here we go. You know, now we're talking. So right now, as I'm telling you to do this thing, I'm doing this thing. I'm here when I don't want to be here. I would rather be lying in bed, taking a power nap, or watching a,

show with my dogs or maybe going for a walk as I wind down. But this thing has to get recorded. Somebody needs to kick you in the ass and tell you, hey, you need to get back in there, work through that back tweak. Or you need to go into the hotel gym or the 24-hour fitness down the block or anytime fitness down the block and get you want to maintain all the hard work you've put into training, you know. You want to stop at that grocery store and get get some beef jerky, some canned fish, some dairy products, some fresh fruit so that you can hold yourself over before that dinner you're going to have with your colleagues in another city, right?

And you're going to do all those things when you're tired and when you don't want to do them, right? You're going to keep working out even though you haven't made progress in three months because you keep losing sleep. You have a small infant. you have a job that just downsized its workforce and has doubled your workload, and you desperately want to skip a workout, but guess what? You're going to do one lift a day. Even though you don't want to, you're going to go in and squat.

I didn't want to squat last night, but I did, you know. When I got back from my dog sport competition I did last week, I didn't want a dead lift on Monday, but I did. Loaded all the weight on two, missed three reps. I wasn't mad about it. because I traveled, didn't sleep well, I was in a hotel, you know, I was stressed because I had to do, had to compete, so there's nerves associated with that. But I came back. I loaded the bar up. I had some residual, uh, what is it, dopamine from competing and doing well. You know,

I, for the record, I got my certificate. I was competing in Protection Sport Association, PSA, for my protection dog certificate, my PDC. It's the entry level certificate. You show your dog, and if you pass all the tasks, you get certified as a protection dog. If you want to trial your dog for a title, then there's level one, two, and three. I have not done that, but I got my entry level cert. And, yeah, I got back here. I got my work done. Then I woke up Monday, dragging a bit, you know.

There's such a thing as a sleep deficit. So if you lose sleep so many days, your body, we'll make up all of it over time or we'll try to. And I had not made it all up, but, you know, I was feeling pretty good after the competition. I loaded all the way down, I got five reps out of eight. But in two weeks, I'll probably get eight out of eight, you know, or maybe three or four. You know, it might take me some time to bounce back from all this shit. But the point is, people, I'm doing things I don't want to do, you know.

I'm doing things I don't want to do. I don't like missing workouts. I think this week I benched five days in a row. I almost did a six, but I think that'll be fine. I think I'll get myself back on schedule by the following week. But yeah, I benched five days in a row. I still loaded up my deadlift. And then I did my squad at the end of the week, and I was still dragging.

So why do I do that? Because I never regret it. When I keep working through things and showing up and marking that off the checklist, it feels good. It's gratifying. and it will be for you too. But you just got to manage your expectations. You know, to look better, feel better, and move better.

That doesn't mean you're going to get on a magic program for 12 weeks and get the result that the guy in the picture has. It means that you're going to be troubleshooting a lot of fucking problems and not just, you know, what type of plates to add and not just whether you should do dumbbells or barbell. You know, those are easy problems. The hard problems are, why was it easy last week and it's hard this week? And the hard part is being honest with yourself about that and saying, well, you know what?

I slept like shit this week, drank and was on a plane at the beginning of the week. So it's going to be hard. And then the next week it's hard. Well, why is it hard? Well, I haven't went this heavy in a couple weeks. Now I got to reset. And then by then, you're three, four weeks in. You're like, man, I haven't made any fucking progress.

Why haven't I made any progress? Well, because you did a bunch of traveling, you didn't eat as well, you didn't sleep as well, and now you're just getting back to a place, you know, then you hit a few PRs and then the whole fucking thing starts all over again. Are you sure you want to train? Let me answer that. Yes, you do. I think you do want to train. Lifting weights is a great thing for you. It's a net positive no matter what happens. But just understand. This isn't your full-time job. There's going to be ebbs and flows. Even if this was your full-time job, there's going to be ebbs and and flows. Life is about ebbs and flows. You have to be just as non-reactive to the valleys as you are the

peaks. So when you hit a PR, you know, you want to cherish that, but you generally want to just let it roll off your shoulders because, you know, a few weeks from now, a weight you got before might be heavy or you might get hurt warming up because you slept on the wrong side of the bed. You know, all sorts of shit can happen. That's life. And the less reactive you get in either direction, the better you get it dealing with it. You know, there's people that work in the financial industry that are making and losing large sums of money depending on the day. And they have to be cool about it. You know, they lose six figures.

Okay, 10-4. Roger that, as David Goggin says. They make the same amount the next day or more. Roger that. You know, I'm going to pass that on to this. You know, you're going to have great workouts. You're going to have shitty workouts. You're going to have strings of good progress.

You're going to have strings of flat progress. Treat them all the same. Treat them all the same and make sure you are still showing up and not fucking quitting. That is what this episode is about. And I can't say it enough. You know, the thing that separates people who succeed, they build the body they want. They lift the weight they want to lift. They lose the body fat.

They want to lose and keep it off. beyond five years follow-up the thing they all have in common is they don't quit they keep showing up and they show up when they don't want to show up when they are tired and they're dragging and shit's aching and they know they need to go they show up when they have that back tweet they're in there they're doing empty bar rdLs to move things through range of motion it hurts like shit but by the end of the workout they're like i hurt less and i'm glad i showed up they missed the rep three weeks in a row. They reset. They missed the rep again. They reset. They try a different program. These are the winners, man. That's what it looks like to win. You're working through a bunch of

annoying shit for periods of time, and you're cool with it because you're enjoying the process. You're like, why isn't this working? Okay, I'm going to try this. Why didn't that work? Okay, I'm going to try this. And you keep course correcting. And over time, things improve. And then you learn things and things become a little bit more predictable on the macro scale. You're not so uncertain about what's going on. I've been doing this a real long time and I'm still making progress. And when I look back on my life and my training career, the number one thing that I have learned is you have to keep showing up when you don't want to. You have to lift the weight when you're dragging ass for non-specific reasons. Some days I walk in the gym,

I'm dizzy, I'm tired, you know, I'll, you know, drink some water, some electrolytes, but I'm just dragging, man, and then I hit a PR. Other days, I feel great, and I miss two reps. You know, there's no rhyme or reason for it. I treat them all the same now. That's basically what's happened. You know, the good days, I treat like the bad days. You know, I miss rep them like not there today.

So understand whether it's lifting weights, learning a musical instrument, working your way up in your industry to become successful in your career, making more money, writing a book, whatever it may be, people that are successful will all tell you that you keep showing up and you keep that big giant boulder moving further and further and further, even if some weeks it's a millimeter. As long as it moves, as long as it moves, all those little micro movements add up over time. I think I've beaten this topic to high health. I hope this episode has been useful to you. If you've been acting like a pussy, I hope this has been a wake-up call that you have to show up. You're going to roll out of bed right now because you're about to go to

sleep or you're about to watch TV. You're going to go do at least one of your three lifts. That's your homework. You can go in there. You're going to bench because you don't really feel like squatting right now, but you were about to skip the whole workout, so you'll compromise on bench. And then maybe on your way out, okay, well, maybe I'll just do a set of squats. Or you'll come back the next day in squat. But if you just thought about skipping a workout, because one of the things I described happened, I challenge you to get your ass back in there and do the fucking workout. Just do the fucking thing.

Get it done. Do it with 20% less weight. the bar if you have to but get it done if you're hurt do it with the empty bar and do more volume more reps or more sets move that range of motion get the blood flowing motion is lotion if you're sitting in your hotel room playing on your cell phone put that fucking thing away go to the hotel gym do some fucking squats with the dumbbells do some lap pull downs if they have a cable pulley machine do some dumbbell bench presses okay or use that put that phone to good use and open up google maps look up the nearest 24 hour gym most cities have one you know go there uber take a

motorized scooter use your rental car get something done maybe do 70% of what you would normally do so you can get out faster right but stop with this quitting shit skip and workouts quit because it's hard, you know? Of course it's hard. Life is hard. No one ever regrets doing hard shit. And you won't either. So if you're having this fucking problem where you're in a tough spot in your life

and training is getting hard to do, well, if you're still going to brush your teeth, you should still do your squats and your deadlifts and your bench presses and your chin ups. If you have to spread them out, spread them out. But it's routine maintenance at the very least. And if you have a good run, ride that wave as far as you can, enjoy it. Okay, because it may not come back for a while.

But before any of that, commit to showing up no matter what. And I leave you with that. Thank you for tuning into the Waits and Plates Podcast. You can find me at Waitsandplates.com or on Instagram at the underscore Robert underscore Santana. That's T-H-E-R-Robert underscore Santana. If you like what you see here on YouTube, smash that subscribe button. If you're not on the YouTube channel and you're listening through audio and haven't hopped on the YouTube bandwagon, you can find me at www. www.com slash at weights underscore and underscore plates.

Thank you so much, and we'll have another one for you in a couple weeks here. You know, you know, You know,