Pursue what society tells you is superficial.

Once you find something you can’t pull away from – follow it to the end and watch it become more meaningful than you could have ever imagined.

This is an observation I made a few years ago.

I've always loved the idea of working out.

The thought of pushing myself and getting stronger always used to excite me.

But the people around me would always echo the same dull perspective.

People see building muscle as superficial.

They think they’re taking a higher perspective than the bodybuilder who only cares about looks – but ironically get trapped in an even lower perspective.

They get stuck in the shallowness of life because they’re never able to see what lies beyond it.

They can’t see that it leads to something deeper.

They don’t realize that by not following the shallow pursuit of muscle — they never reach the more meaningful pursuits of health, longevity and life enjoyment.

When you refuse to look beyond the superficial – you ignore an essential part of your health (which never ends well).

When you deny the importance of muscle:

• You shorten your life

• You destroy your energy and metabolism

• You let your mind, willpower and creativity decline as you age

When you can’t see past the superficial aspects of building muscle you put a limit on your health.

You also put a limit on your life.

I’m here to snap you out of it.

You Are A Bodybuilder

Everyone is a bodybuilder.

Some are just better at it than others.

As you’re reading this you are by definition building your body.

You are duplicating your cells, repairing your muscle fibers and forming new connections in your brain. You are a bodybuilder whether you like it or not.

How good of a bodybuilder you are is your health.

Health is just holistic bodybuilding.

The key word being “holistic”.

The thing with health is that everything connects. It's an unbelievably complex system of infinite parts all working together to create something larger than the whole.

You can’t reduce it down to its individual components like organs, cells and organelles or you lose the whole.

A live frog and one tragically put in a blender are not the same thing.

You can’t take away parts of your health and expect your life to be the same. 

Everything works together.

To improve one thing – you need to improve everything else. And if you make one thing worse – everything else suffers. 

This includes building muscle.

It’s an essential part of your health.

• It’s how you keep your mind sharp

• It’s how you breath and sustain your life

• It’s how you maintain good health as you age

If your health is the source of everything you do (and how you experience life at all)… 

If you think building muscle is shallow and superficial – do you think life itself is shallow and meaningless?

When you see building muscle as shallow and beneath you – you close yourself off to better health – to a better life.

When you can’t see past the superficial – you miss the underlying meaning and let your whole life suffer because of it.

You wouldn’t expect your car to function if you removed parts of the engine because you didn’t see how it affected the whole.

Then why would you expect your health to function by removing an essential piece of it?

Rejecting building muscle is arrogantly assuming that you know better than millions of years of biology – which you don’t.

This is what “intelligent people” miss.

They never bother to peek beneath the surface and as a result – get trapped in a shallow life by rejecting a part of their being.

They ignore the validity of it because they've built their entire identity around intelligence and seeing physical pursuits as beneath them.

They are willfully blind.

When you reject the pursuit of muscle – you reject your health.

You arguably reject life itself:

• You destroy your metabolic health - and limit the amount of energy you have for creating and doing the things you want

• You let your mind regress as you age - and prevent yourself from being in touch with reality and the people around you

• You shorten your life - and cut the amount of time you have on this earth short 

The bodybuilder who obsesses over his biceps is arguably more intelligent than the intellectuals who spend their whole lives in front of a screen.

Because whether or not he’s aware of the bigger picture – he's still acting it out.

When you open your mind and look beyond the superficial aspects… The deeper and more meaningful parts start to reveal themselves:

• Building muscle is how you improve your metabolic health

It’s how you maintain the battery that powers your life.

It’s how you turn food into energy and channel it into creations, experiences and works of art.

It’s how you do anything in life.

• Building muscle is how you prevent cognitive decline

It’s how you keep your mind sharp to move through and enjoy the experience of life.

It’s how you stay in touch with reality, the people around you and are able to gather wisdom.

• Building muscle is how you extend and brighten life

It’s the number one thing you can do for longevity and healthy aging. 

It’s how you extend and make sure you enjoy the time your consciousness spends in this form.

When you embrace the fact that muscle is a part of your health (and also a part of you) – something funny happens.

You enter the funnel of life.

Because muscle is just your health working underneath.

When you try to optimize your entire life for bigger arms – you’re forced to optimize your overall health:

• To increase recovery you optimize your sleep

• To burn fat you experiment with different diets

• To decrease stress levels your start meditating

Before you know it – what was once shallow has now become deep.

By pursuing what society told you was superficial – you reached the underlying meaning and complexity (that lies underneath everything in life).

The things that seem superficial look that way because you haven’t peaked beneath the surface.

A story that illustrates my point is Moses and the burning bush.

As Moses is shepherding his herd out in the desert, he comes across a burning bush that isn’t consumed by the fire.

With his interest peaked, he moves closer.

After a few steps, the air starts shaking and he hears God’s voice calling out to him.

God commands Moses to come closer. He abides, and after a while, he realizes he’s standing on holy ground. He takes off his sandals but nonetheless continues.

God tells him to move closer and closer.

When he is within touching distance, God himself appears before him, bringing him clarity on his purpose in life.

A burning bush isn’t that meaningful – but it’s interesting.

And it’s interesting for a reason.

It calls you further and further until you find yourself on holy ground.

Until God calls out to you.

In exactly the same way, building muscle might interest you. But you don’t really know why.

Whenever people asked me why it was I worked out so much – I never had a clear answer.

It was only later that the bigger picture started to reveal itself.

When something calls out to you, whether it be something superficial or not – you need to embrace it.

Because for all intents and purposes, it’s God calling out to you (it doesn’t matter what religion or branch of spirituality you belong to).

You need to follow the seemingly shallow pursuit to the end.

Because everything starts out superficial.

The perspective of life you have now was only possible because you had a smaller and shallower perspective as a child.

When someone deems a pursuit superficial – they usually haven’t looked deeply enough.

When something calls to you – instead of blindly taking someone's advice — pursue it with all your might.

Let it lead you down a road of increasing meaning and complexity until what was once shallow becomes deeper and more meaningful than you could ever imagine.

To put it another way.

Pursue. Your. Curiosity.

The System Of Your Health

You are a system.

The universe is a system.

Your mind, body and soul are working towards the goal that is you.

The stars, planets and galaxies are working towards the goal that is the cosmos.

Life is complicated. 

Everything and everyone influences each other in unbelievably complex ways (which is the reason for “the butterfly effect”).

The point is that you can’t manipulate a system without understanding every part of it.

Or it will very likely snap back in your face.

Think of an ecosystem.

If you remove one species because your perspective deems it as bad – the consequences are usually catastrophic. 

You might see the wolf killing the rabbit as evil, but by removing the wolf you are worsening the entire system.

Without a counterforce, the rabbit population grows out of hand.

They consume the forest's vegetation which starves the other animals and everything slowly collapses into chaos.

When you don’t see past the surface — you risk destroying the whole system.

In exactly the same way, to improve the system of your health – you need to understand it.

The easiest way to do this is by choosing a pursuit of health that calls to you.

• Bodybuilding

• Powerlifting

• Calisthenics

• Sprinting

• Weightlifting

The key is to devote yourself to a pursuit that is easy to track.

And one that builds muscle.

This way you’ll become forced to iterate on your training and lifestyle in order to improve your numbers.

• Reps

• Weight

• Bodyweight

Whenever your progress stagnates – you will have to examine your training, diet, sleep schedule and mindset in order to fix it.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

It will force you to master your health.

It will force you to understand the system that is your health.

Something you would never come close to if you went at it with the intention of understanding health.

Because reading mountains of textbooks alone won’t help you. You need something to apply your learnings to.

Think about how you learned your first language.

You didn’t go through thousands of textbooks, lectures and exams – you simply had no choice but to learn it – and so you did.

When optimizing your health becomes a necessary part of building muscle, you’re creating a behavior system in it of itself.

And the goal of that system is to fill your mind with the knowledge and experience necessary for mastering your health.

This brings up an important point.

You have to create a need to progress. You do this by tracking your progress.

Because if you don’t notice when you stagnate – you’ll end up lifting the same metaphorical weight for the same amount of reps forever.

More importantly, you won’t master your health because there is simply no need to.

This is how you get stuck in superficiality.

If you want to avoid mediocrity (which you do if you’re intelligent) – you need to track your progress.

For choosing a pursuit that calls to you.

You don’t have to choose bodybuilding, but why wouldn’t you?

• You build a base of high quality muscle that helps you in any other pursuit in life

• You can push hard without completely wrecking your body for days

• You create a positive feedback loop with confidence and training

• You can tailor exercises and programs to yourself without having to stick to a fixed pattern

Aligning The System Of Your Health

Building muscle and finding the deeper truth of life is a 3 step process:

• Identity

• Training

• Biology

When you align all of them you create the conditions for building muscle and reaching the deeper and more meaningful pursuits of health.

Let’s dive in.

Identity

“Our Self-Image prescribes the limits for the accomplish-ment of any particular goals. It prescribes the "area of the possible” - Maxwell Maltz (Psycho Cybernetics)

Your identity will determine your life. 

The people who succeed or fail in life were programmed for that outcome whether they knew it or not.

You can think of your identity as your programming.

It’s baked into your subconscious and will direct your actions towards attaining it.

If you have a failure type personality – your subconscious will direct your actions towards failure and vice versa.

The root of all sustainable behavior change is identity.

To become a healthier person, you need to first see yourself as a “healthy person”.

Otherwise your subconscious will always default to your previous personality while you bang your head against the wall trying to change your habits.

If you carry the idea that muscle is superficial in your subconscious, your mind will literally sabotage and prevent you from achieving it.

My whole first year of training was spent in this miserable state.

I never pushed my body hard enough to see any progress (even though I thought I did). 

My mind would serve up excuses such as ”having perfect form” or “not ego lifting”. 

If I ever wanted to see any progress, I had to literally change my identity. But I quickly ran into the big problem preventing people from changing themselves.

Your identity is programmed by the interpretations of your past experiences.

This creates a catch 22:

Your identity is programmed by your past experiences and your future experiences are determined by your identity.

If you’re perspicacious, you realize that this means you are doomed to repeat your past mistakes and never change your life.

Which is completely true.

If it wasn’t for one fact.

Your mind can’t distinguish between real or fabricated experiences.

It can’t tell the difference between something happening in reality or in your imagination.

In other words.

You can program your identity by using your imagination.

It may sound terribly made up, but it’s true.

You need to believe.

To succeed in reaching beyond the superficiality – you need to program your identity towards that goal.

You do this by creating a visualization habit:

Cut out 10 - 30 minutes to close your eyes and just imagine yourself as your ideal self (it works for other things than building muscle as well).

After about 21 days your mind will start to recalibrate towards your vision.

So be patient.

And let your subconscious carry you to victory.

I would highly recommend reading “psycho cybernetics for a deeper understanding of this concept”.

After you’ve programmed your identity towards your goal – you need one more thing.

Self education.

Where you are in life is a matter of what information you’ve had access to and how you’ve put it to use.

Self education is how you change your life (and arguably how you manage to do anything).

A mind programmed for success is useless if it doesn't have any information to act on.

So as with everything in life — you need to self educate.

I will try to shortcut your learning curve in the next sections – but you need to expose yourself to similar information often if you want it to stick.

It isn’t enough to read this letter once.

You need to study the information you take in.

Make it a part of your identity and you’ll transcend the superficiality of building muscle quicker than you thought was possible.

Training

Training is an algorithm – muscle is the output

If you’re not aware of the code you’re writing – you’re leaving your body composition up to chance.

(And the universe tends towards entropy)

When writing your training algorithm, you have to take 4 variables into account:

• Stress

• Tension

• Damage

• Periodization

If you want to build muscle (and improve your health) – these are not optional. It’s like trying to write a book but only using half the alphabet.

But to use the variables – you need to first understand them.

So without further we do… 

Let’s dive in.

Tension

Building muscle is forcing your body to adapt.

The tension you put on your muscles is the primary driver for muscle growth. It’s the load you put them through and the time they’re under it.

It’s more or less what training is.

By pushing your muscles to their limit – they don’t have an option but to grow.

The utilization of this principle is called “Progressive overload”. And it’s the most important concept in all of training (mental and physical).

Even the most complicated training programs (Cycling, Variable loading etc) all operate on this basic principle.

The concept of progressive overload dates back to the legend of Milo of Croton

In ancient Greek, Milo would throw a calf upon his shoulders and carry it around. He would repeat this everyday as the calf grew larger and larger until he was carrying around a 4 year old, full grown bull.

In everything you do – whether it be training or otherwise… 

You need to progressively go harder and harder. You need to keep carrying the bull.

A simple and effective tool for using this principle is double progression.

Double progression:

Increase the reps each workout until you hit about 10 or 12 – then increase the weight and continue the cycle.

The goal is to try and beat your past personal record every time you enter the gym, whether it be reps or weight.

You won’t always be able to beat your past record, but that’s just part of the journey.

You can get as specific or broad with this principle as you want:

• Go lighter one day

• Go for maximum intensity one day

• Do a different movement one day

However you switch it up – it all comes back to increasing the repetitions and then the weight.

When it comes to strength it’s a little bit different – but in this letter we’re focused on building muscle.

Note: If you want this to work, you need to track your progress. 

This way you can plan your workouts and actually progress.

Of course you can keep all this data in your head – but the mind can be used for better things than as a warehouse for information.

Keep a notes page on your phone with all exercises and your rep/weight PR next to them.

Stress

Stress forces you to change (for better or worse)

• Deadlines force you to get the work done

• Studying forces your brain to rewire

• Heavy weights force your body to grow stronger

If you’re not stressed, overwhelmed or anxious – you’re not changing.

And you’re not growing.

In the case of muscle – the stress we’ll focus on is metabolic stress.

When your muscles work hard for extended periods of time – you create a build up of by-products like lactate and hydrogen ions.

This creates a hostile environment inside your muscles.

Which is also known as inflammation.

The stress triggers genes responsible for muscle growth and forces your body to change.

In this case, by building larger muscles.

This is the metabolic stress pathway (it’s also known as “the pump pathway”). 

This is because the “bigger” your pump is, the more metabolic stress your muscle cells go through.

And the more muscle growth you’ll experience.

Chasing the pump is objectively one of the right things to do.

But it’s often doing the right things for the wrong reasons.

The reason most people chase the pump isn’t for muscle growth – but for looking bigger and feeling good.

But without knowing it – they’ve accidentally fallen onto the right path.

To incorporate metabolic stress into your training routine you need to push until you feel “the burn”.

This means that you will have to go pretty close to failure.

To do this, you need to use relatively light weights on a movement that doesn’t exhaust your cardiovascular system before your muscles.

Which means:

Use relatively light weights on isolation movements and go close to failure.

Think of leg extensions, bicep curls, tricep extensions etc.

The rep schemes can be anywhere from 12 - 30 reps.

My favorite way of doing this:

Do your regular sets, but incorporate at least one drop set on all isolation movements.

Drop the weight and keep up the reps until you can’t anymore.

This is how you stress your muscles and how you make them grow bigger.

To sum it all up:

Chasing the pump activates muscle growth as an adaptation to the induced metabolic stress.

If you want to find meaning in the deeper pursuits of health — stress out your muscles first.

Damage

To build your body – you need to destroy it first.

When you load your muscles and put them through metabolic stress – you create muscle damage.

When your body realizes the condition your cells are in – a signal is sent to the brain.

Your brain responds to this signal by sending the cavalry to repair the damage.

In the process, you experience something called supercompensation. Your muscles aren’t just repaired – they’re made stronger.

This is why muscle damage is one of the primary green lights for muscle growth (and therefore pretty important).

But if it gets too high it becomes a hindrance.

You can’t train as hard, your body won’t have time to super-compensate and you will feel completely destroyed (mentally & physically).

It’s a tricky balancing act but one worth mastering.

You do this by listening to your body.

Muscle damage appears in your consciousness as feeling sore.

To walk the way of hypertrophy, you need to manipulate your training for a slight feeling of soreness.

This doesn’t mean that if you’re not sore, you’re not building muscle.

As mentioned, the primary driver for muscle growth is still progressive overload. If you’re making progress in weights and reps – soreness doesn’t matter.

With that being said, your body is really good at adapting to the environment. 

Your body won’t change unless it has to. If it can keep the same amount of muscle, it will do just that. Because of this, it’s all too easy to fall into a perpetual cycle of staying the same.

If your progress plateau and you’re not getting sore anymore… Chance is, you need to increase the hypertrophy signals

You need some more damage.

This is how you do it:

Switch up your:

• Rep schemes

• Amount of sets

• Exercise selection

Think about going skiing or trying a new sport.

The day after, you feel completely destroyed because your body isn’t used to the new movement pattern.

It’s more complicated than Arnold’s famous claim of “shocking the muscle” – but it’s on the right track.

Don’t let your training get stale, keep switching it up.

Periodization

Training is cyclical in nature.

You can’t keep adding 5 kg to your squat every week and be the world champion by christmas.

No matter how much you want to – you can’t go balls to the walls forever. Eventually something will break. 

Your endocrine system (the hormone system) is just one example. It can only take 2 out of 4 weeks of heavy loading before it starts to suffer.

This will cause your testosterone to drop, your energy to plummet and your enjoyment of life to disappear.

When you keep red lining the body, you get to a point where you’re just spinning your wheels.

Training ceases to be fun, your libido disappears and you can’t enjoy life because you’re just completely destroyed.

You keep grinding in the gym but your progress either stalls or goes backwards.

It’s not something I would recommend.

This is where periodization comes into the picture.

In simple terms – it means programming the intensity and weights for different training periods.

And it always follows a predictable pattern:

1. A training cycle always starts with an adjustment period where you work at about 70 % of your maximum intensity

1. It then goes into a preparation phase where you work at about 75 – 80 % of your maximum intensity (this is where the majority of muscle & strength is built)

1. The cycle then goes into a peak phase where you work anywhere from 90 – >100% of your maximum intensity (this is where you set personal records).

1. Finally, the cycle ends with a deload phase where you barely reach 50 % of your maximum intensity (this is where you recover from the mountain of fatigue you’ve amassed).

You might wonder what the most important part of the cycle is?

The answer is all of them.

Without a deload phase you’ll destroy your mind, body and life because you’re not allowing your body to recover from the mountain of fatigue.

But without a peak phase, there won’t be any fatigue to recover from and you won’t make any progress.

Lao Tzu puts it this way: 

“Which organ do you prefer” 

While you could make an argument for any one of them – they’re all dependent on each other.

In exactly the same way, you can’t have a peak phase without a deload phase. And you can’t have a deload phase without a peak phase.

However, the one people often forget about is the deload phase.

As a result, they’re never able to fully recover.

Because they’re constantly neurologically fatigued – they’re never able to have a peak phase. It all ends in a perpetual cycle of staying the same.

You’re spending all this time in the gym that you’re not even enjoying – and you don’t get anything in return.

Again, it’s not something I would recommend.

As important as going hard is when building muscle – going easy is even more important.

This is how you do it:

Take a week where you either go super light (below 50% of your maximum intensity) or skip the gym entirely.

Though this is not an excuse to sit on the couch watching television.

You should still get your 180 minutes of zone 2 cardio, take long walks, stretch and get some calisthenics in.

But you need to follow the cycle of training and recovery.

• Adjust

• Prepare

• Peak

• Rest

Train for 4 weeks → rest for 1 → repeat

This is really the holy grail for training.

Get your rest!

Note: Beginners usually don’t need an entire week off because their intensity isn’t high enough to create significant amounts of fatigue. 

So if you’re just starting out – aim for a deload every 8th week.

Biology

Muscle is just your health working underneath.

This is where things start to become deeper and more meaningful (it’s also where it starts to get fun).

Even if your training is perfect – if your diet, sleep and lifestyle doesn’t follow…

You’re just spinning your wheels.

This is why when you try to optimize hypertrophy, you’ll start to:

• Improve your diet

• Perfect your sleep

• Scour the internet for health tips

Health is about getting the basics right.

Everything else is just add ons.

If you’re interested in mastering the other parts of your health – check out the previous letters dissecting each one.

If you’re not, continue on this pursuit and you’ll eventually get there anyway.

I won’t go into too much detail on overall health – but here’s the gist of it:

• Get 8 hours of quality sleep (Caffeine control, Sunlight, Diet)

• Get a high quality diet (Eat Meat & Fruit, Cut out Seed oils & Junk)

• Create a holistic workout routine (Walking, Weightlifting, HIIT)

If you build a foundation of health – you create the conditions for muscle growth.

It’s a foundation you will have to build if you want to see progress over time.

But one that will most likely fall into place naturally as you pursue hypertrophy.

Zooming Out

“The fool who persists in his folly will become wise” - William Blake

Most people who embark on the pursuit of muscle often don’t realize where it’s leading them.

As they continue on their journey, the superficial reasons fade out as the deeper fades in:

• The pursuit of looks turns into enjoying the experience of life

• The pursuit of strength turns into longevity

• The escape from insecurity turns into inner peace

What was once shallow has now become deep.

There is depth behind working out. 

It’s more than looking good or escaping insecurity. It’s a part of it – but not the whole thing.

Pursue what society tells you is superficial.

And it will turn into something more meaningful than you could have ever imagined.

Master the 4 cornerstones of building muscle:

• Tension

• Stress

• Damage

• Periodization

Fix your health and eliminate the perspective of seeing muscle as superficial from your identity.

And you’ll find a whole new way of life opening up before you.

One with more meaning, fulfillment and energy than you could have previously ever imagined.

That’s all for this one.

Press the button down below to catch future letters.

Thank you for reading and I’ll see you in the next one.