MUSCLE CHURCH: Our Father, the Iron

Mariusz Pudzianowski 5x World's Strongest Man Everyone jokes about carrying all the grocery bags in these days and yeah, a lot of people take it too seriously. Think of it a different way though...not trying to get a laugh, or be goofy or anything like that. You train all the time. You lift weights. You do cardio. You load up with protein and caffeine so you have fuel to perform as best you can. You stretch. You rehab. In short, you do everything you can to perform your absolute best! WHY DO YOU LEAVE IT ALL IN THE GYM??? Maybe carrying the groceries in isn't the greatest reason to train, but how often do you shirk away from exertion outside the gym? Flip the switch on that way of thinking right now. Do more. Carry stuff. Pick up awkward heavy things. Take the stairs. Park further away from the building. The gym is great but it's only a few hours a week, life happens 24/7 and the less you choose to do, the less prepared you'll be. Challenge yourself to perfor

I think that over time we attach meaning to things but don't often ask why something means a lot, we just know that it does. Over the course of my life I'm guilty of not letting myself get attached to things that I should because I've lived by the code that "everything is for sale." However, there are some things that have managed to get into my very exclusive "not for sale" category. I regret that there is a belt out there that was mine for many, many years and I let a friend hold it and he lost it in a move. I can't be too mad-I should've never let him borrow something so sacred anyway. However, one man's sacred is another man's optional-never forget that. What matters the most to you, might not mean anything to someone else and that's okay. We all have our loves and likes and there are times when we have to accept that something is just valuable to you and that's it. Which brings me to the subject of this post. You see this

Did you make it or did you give up? Blogs and self-help gurus abound with talk of defining your own success and what that means, and most of it is good advice. We should be looking inward, not outward, to determine what success is and what it means to us, individually, to consider ourselves a success. Sometimes I worry though, that defining your own success can easily just become a way of moving the goal posts to make it easier for you to stop pushing. Consider the person who wants to lose 50 pounds. They map out their plan, the do the work and they stay honest about all of it, but when the last two or three pounds don’t come off, suddenly the fervor to lose 50 pounds turns into the complacency of losing 47. The rationalization begins with, “well, close enough, right?” Then you start to dismantle why you wanted to lose 50 to begin with. This monolithic number, suddenly becomes just a silly little round number that doesn’t mean anything because you lost a

I won’t ever try to pass myself off as an expert in anything other than myself, but I want to share some of the wisdom I’ve learned along the way and hopefully from my lifetime of failing some of you can glean something useful. I don’t mind saying that I am a person who has failed in life repeatedly and will continue to do so, because so much more is learned from failure than from success. At all levels, in any industry, failure is the driving force behind evolution and refinement but in our society we still demonize failing and my belief is that the constant barrage of “perfect” people on social media further eats away at those who are just trying to do a little bit better. There is a cost for success, but not every failure is a true setback-I contend that most are not. Let us take a trip back in the time machine to me in the ninth grade. I was then a doughy 260-270 pounds without an ounce of knowledge about training or nutrition, but I was in weight lifting class because I

Those in the wrestling and meme communities know about Scott Steiner's infamous promo a few years ago in which he started calculating his chances of winning and gave a completely incomprehensible rant. This meme popped up and I look at it a lot when I need a laugh and I think that there is a universe out there somewhere in which Big Poppa Pump said this with a straight face. In improv they say "always commit." I've found that whether I was doing stand-up in front of a tiny crowd or wrestling in sub-par circumstances, keeping a straight face and never giving up on the scene always wins the day. Fans, whether they pay for a ticket or are cheering you in your personal life, deserve to see you give your best and for you to achieve anything, you have to give it your best. That means that when you are out there doing the work, making it happen, you keep a straight face, stand up big and strong and give it your all. Even if you start giving a wrestling promo that makes