When I first started out I remember thinking to myself that I wasn't going to let anyone push me around. The funny thing is, I've always been the guy that gets pushed around. Being the youngest of four brothers, I used to get my butt kicked anytime I spoke out of line. It's probably the reason why I took up bodybuilding in the first place, to try and get back at my brothers. Funny thing is I'm now a lot bigger than them, yet I don't hold anything against them, in fact I should really be thanking them!
So staying low in the gym is one of the things I did when I first started out. I didn't want people to think that I was somehow better than them, even though I knew I was, just not quite there yet! It would take me 6 months of heavy training and eating like a baby whale, before I had some guy come up to me and ask me how long I had been at the gym for?
Even though I saw him every time I trained, he obviously had realized that I even existed, which is perfectly understandable due to the fact I wasn't really worth acknowledging back then.
Start Getting Noticed
I believe we go through 3 stages of change - first people just ignore what changed you are trying to create and secondly, which we'll talk about now, is they try to resolve the changes to bring them back to what they were. That's what happened to me. Some guys noticed that I was making huge improvements, so they wanted to set things straight and bring them back to what it was previously. I had a couple of fella's tell everyone I was on juice, even though I knew I wasn't(and I knew they were for that matter)
So I just ignored it. I had some dudes push me out of the way when I tried to use a bench once and I still just ignored it. I was determined to show them, but I wasn't going to start a fight with them because I was still too small, so I vowed to train even harder and eat even more and as a result, 3 months later I had put on another 15lbs of pure straight muscle. I had gone from a puny 130lbs to a thick broad 180lbs.
The Third Stage Of Change
Now the third stage of change is when finally, people start accepting that a change has taken place. This is where I am now. People now know that I had to work but butt off to get to where I am, so instead of bringing him down, because they can't get the same results, just accept it and start asking him how he did it. That's what started happening, I had a bunch of people asking me how I got to where I was in such a short period of time? Do you know what I do? I just IGNORE them!
