In 2013 I found myself laying on a hospital bed and my body riddled with an extremely aggressive cancer.
Within two weeks I had lost over 20kg of body weight, almost all of which was muscle. And knowing the role that muscle plays in fuelling the immune system, I was pretty worried to say the least!
My mentor at the time, who is a world renowned expert in exercise science, came to visit me in hospital and later prescribed me with a training program.
During this initial time in hospital my strength training involved trying to walk, something I’d always taken for granted! Each day I’d walk a little further and eventually could walk down the hospital corridor without the use of the handrail. This felt like a big success!
After spending a month in hospital I was finally able to go home for a couple of weeks before my next chemo treatment. I’d been home for a few days when I received an email from my mentor asking how my workouts were going?
I replied explaining that I’d been feeling absolutely shit for the past few days but that I was hoping to get started on it soon.
His reply was very straight forward.
“Steve, you’re going to have many days you feel shit… you have cancer.”
“Strength training is your medicine, you must get that through your head!”
Needless to say I never missed a workout after receiving this email. Because my excuse had been taken away. Of course I was going to feel shit! Of course it’s going to be really hard! And I must do it anyway.
The lesson I learned that day I still think of often. Because if I accept that something is going to be hard straight up, or that it’s going to hurt, then when it becomes that I don’t have an excuse to not do it.
Throughout the following six months my treatment cycle involved having about a week in hospital getting chemo, followed by two weeks at home. So I had to make those two weeks count!
Usually the first week at home was the worst as my blood counts were so low due to the chemo and therefore I had very little strength or energy, not to mention wanting to throw up a lot!
In these times my workouts would often only last a few minutes, because that’s all I could do. I learned how much my body could take, and when I was up to it I’d push it extremely hard.
Throughout the months people noticed my body changing dramatically, I was putting on more and more muscle and looking healthier. This is not something that usually occurs whilst going through such intense chemotherapy treatments.
Many people were concerned that I was training too hard or too much. Some thought I must be spending my entire days in the gym.
It couldn’t have been further from the truth.
Most of my workouts consisted of just three exercises and the time spent under stress would only be a few minutes. However sometimes my workouts might take over an hour due to the amount of rest time I would need in between sets.
And I was only training in the gym three times per week. So that was only six small workouts every 21 days or so. And each workout consisted of very low volume.
So how did I build so much muscle?
Well a big part of it is muscle memory. Once you’ve gotten your muscles to a certain point, they have the ability to get back a lot quicker than the time they took to build in the first place.
The second part is that it’s not about how much we can stress the muscle that counts, it’s how well it can recover and therefore adapt to the stimulus of training.
My focus wasn’t to smash up my muscles and make them as sore as possible the next day. It was to create the stimulus in my muscles, then get plenty of rest, eat loads of good food, and allow them to recover and adapt.
I often get asked how I had the motivation to train when I would have been feeling so physically ill and weak.
I’ve never had so much motivation in all my life to train. And, it was certainly by far the hardest period of training I’ve ever had in my life.
The training was tough. If you imagine one of those mornings when you’re a bit sick with the flu, quite run down and tired, and you just can’t get out of bed. Well multiply that by about a million and that’s about what it felt like most mornings when my alarm would go off at 6am and I needed to get to the gym. Not to mention the workout itself!
But I was never not motivated. I had all the motivation I could ever need, I was fighting for my life. I knew I had to heal my body. I knew it was hard but it had to be done. Looking after my body and working to heal it was my full time job. It was the only thing that mattered.
Some lessons that I often share about this are:
1.
Accept that the journey to reaching your goals is going to be tough. You’ll have moments that will get real hard, days where the motivation isn’t there at all, times where you won’t want to continue.
If you’ve already accepted this, you’ll expect it. And when these times come they probably won’t seem as bad. And you’ll have the courage to push through them.
If you assume you’ll always feel motivated to exercise or that it’ll always be easy to stick to your meal plan, when things get hard or life gets in the way, you’ll most likely give up.
However If you accept straight up that it’s going to be hard, it’ll actually be a lot easier!
2.
You don’t have to train like a pro bodybuilder or olympic athlete in order to get results. In fact, quite often it’s when I cut down the training volume that a client is doing that they start experiencing much better results.
Consistency always wins. And it’s in the recovery where results are created.
Muscles don’t get stronger in the gym, they get weaker in the gym. It’s in recovery where they get stronger.
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