15% bodyfat? Nobody cares

WOW HOW MUCH WEIGHT IS THAT?

You have big muscles.

How long you train?

Wow.

You big man.

I’m spending this month working in the hospitals in Thailand, and an old lady came up to me in the gym and said the above to me.

Now I’m not being mean here, but I was training in Gold’s Hillside gym, and I was easily the biggest person there.

I’m not a ‘big’ guy. I’m 78kg, 175cm.

Back home, I am basically a LITTLE GIRL compared to some of the ‘chemically assisted’ bobblydilders in that gym.

Ironically, my home gym is also called Goldstar, (although I feel it’s unlikely that Raj from Heaton decided to franchise his gym out 6000 miles away to Kad Suan Kaew road).

It’s all relative. It’s important not to:

A) Get an inflated ego from an encounter such as the above. Big fish, small pond syndrome.

B) Feel too shit about yourself when you’re swimming with the bigguns.

The more you derive your self worth from your surroundings, the more you are setting yourself up for disappointment. This is consistently shown in the evidence. People’s happiness is MORE tied to their NEIGHBOURS salary than their own.

To rephrase good old Rudyard: “Meet with praise and criticism, and treat those two impostors just the same”

The most common insecurity I see from guys going on holiday is that they won’t be big or lean enough to look ‘good’ on the beach. Usually the guy who’s been training for 2-3 years, is 15% bodyfat and DISTRAUGHT that he’s not going to be 10%.

Dude. It’s not even that nobody else cares. Nobody else even fucking NOTICES.

As far as the untrained eye goes, you’re a guy who lifts. If you’re really unlucky, maybe there’s another guy who also lifts that is sat there scrutinising your physique, thinking that you should be 2 percentage points leaner. But did you really go on holiday and take your top off on the beach to impress that guy?

The colossal chasm between 15% and 10% bodyfat is all in your head. Instagram models never look as shredded when they’re off-camera.

Stop comparing yourself to others, or your sense of body image will be like a candle in the wind.

Want more on this?

Read this: https://propanefitness.com/body-confidence/

Listen to our podcast on ‘getting lean for summer’ for more on this:

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/modern-wisdom/id1347973549?mt=2