Janitor reluctantly wins regional weight lifting title – Again!

Hello everyone.

A couple years back, I made an arrangement with one of the largest Gold Gyms in the world to swap some professional photography services for a membership in a gym that normally I would simply not have been able to afford. Several others did that too, and it was in this gym of movie stars, CEO’s, vice presidents etc., that I met a massive but quiet unassuming gentleman who was studiously pretending to be a janitor.

This rather large but quiet gentleman had the ability to move silently and quite invisibly around the gym. You never noticed him until an errant weight left to long on the floor suddenly wasn’t there anymore. Solid rumours indicated that the gentleman was highly consistent in winning regional and even national body building awards.

Weirdly enough, none of the other guys in the gym could remember this so called janitor ever having a strenuous workout. Sure, he was moving weights around the gym all the time, but all of us were doing that and wonders of wonders none of the rest of us were winning anything.

The talk even said that the body building janitor was on steroids and into illegal weight gain drugs. The more he won, is the strong the rumours grew. I was shooting ( with a camera ) many of the top models in the gym by then so I was more or less at the gym daily. It was easily four plus weeks before I thought I caught him working out one night.

I couldn’t help myself, so I thought to query him as to how he managed to win, win, win and yet this was the first time I had ever seen him just finishing a workout.

“How can you continue to win regional and even place nationally in such a consistent manner if you don’t lift weights?, I blurted out

I thought he was going to give me the evil eye, and for sure my heart stuttered as I imagined he was going to get seriously angry. Instead he pointed at the sweat on the seat and coolly said, “drugs particularly steroids were for fools, don’t believe the rumours”.

This seemed like the opening I was waiting for so I watched him expectantly, thinking that he was about to let me know what was going on. In vain, apparently since he left that space with a spare weight in his hand. It was pretty well a month later before I could get his attention again on the topic.

This time, I found him studiously doing a preacher curl with one arm as he examined the striated muscle group. As he finished, I went to him and exclaimed ha ha, so you do lift after all. He looked at me oddly, and as if continuing the conversation from a month earlier, he said, I never claimed not to.

This time I pestered him to tell me his secret. I even intimated that he waited until we had all left the gym before training hard just like the rest of us. Again, he laughed gently and this time he said “Ok, I will tell you”

What he said then was quite extraordinary – He quietly revealed that he monitors his heart beat both at rest and at play. After some time, he knows exactly what his heart rate should be when his body is at complete rest ( explained as not rebuilding muscle ) He said most people work a different set of muscle groups daily, but that his difference was based on more.

Quietly, he then revealed that the difference was in the workout interval.

He works out, monitors his heart rate and never works out again until his heart rate is back at “rest mode”. If that takes 2 days or 3 or 4 he doesn’t care. He simply waits. When his heart rate is back at “rest”, he intensely works out a different muscle set.

And this is how this quiet unassuming janitor wins regional tournament after tournament and places high on the Asian body building charts while the rest of the guys scratch their heads and wonder when or how he trains.

So what? Was this just another jock story of Cinderella being found by Hollywood producers? or is there some deeper thread hiding in here somewhere? Truly the morale of the story was not really not about the weight lifting ( or lack thereof so don’t sweat that ). It is really about how through learned tunnel vision we can sometimes forget that there can be more than one way to “skin the cat”.

Are you are yearning for change but planning on doing more of the same thing that got you to this point? Would it be kind of us to assume that perhaps that change that you are looking forward to, simply isn’t going to happen while you are continuing to do more “of the same”?