The Billionaire You'll Never Accidentally Become

There's a conversation I've had more times than I can count.

Someone finds elitefts, or they walk into the gym, and they tell me they want to build some muscle. Lose some fat. Feel better. And somewhere in that conversation, without fail, they drop the line.

"I just don't want to get too big. I don't want to look like a bodybuilder."

Pat Davidson said it best on Table Talk #410, and I've thought about it every day since.

The people who look like bodybuilders dedicated years of their lives to it. Controlled every meal. Structured every training session. Built their entire existence around a single physical goal. You don't end up looking like that by accident. You don't look like that because you started doing three sets on the hack squat twice a week.

Pat is a PhD. Former strongman competitor. Currently in contest prep for a bodybuilding show. He trained MMA in a basement in Massachusetts, delivered fish on Cape Cod, read Westside tapes on VHS with a notebook to write down every word Louie said. He spent close to a decade coaching elite and general population clients in Manhattan. His perspective is earned. This conversation went places I didn't expect, and what follows is what I think matters most from it.

The Meathead Bell Curve

I've described this in different ways over the years. Pat put a shape to it worth explaining here.

You start out knowing nothing. You pick up a magazine. You start learning. The bell curve slopes upward. You accumulate information. You learn the bigger words. The vocabulary gets sophisticated. The bias gets bigger. You start talking to impress others in the room instead of actually helping anyone.

Most people get stuck up there.

Pat called those people gurus, and not as an insult. Someone so dug into their own bias that they never deviate from it can accumulate enormous value within that lane. Louie was like that. You always knew what his framework would say. That predictability made it more useful, not less. If you understood the bias and could filter what applied to you, there was gold in there.

The rare ones keep going. They start coming down the other side of the curve. They realize the complicated stuff isn't working with the people they're actually training because those people can't process it. They strip things back. When they get to the bottom of the other side, they've traveled the whole path. They know why the complicated stuff doesn't always apply. They're grounded in the basics. And they can actually help people.

The problem is you don't know you're on the curve. You legitimately think you know everything there is to know about maximal strength. It gets reinforced because people keep coming to you for it. Someone does something different and gets better results, and you dismiss it. If you stay around long enough, you eventually see something to it.

The Ground Spectrum

One of the most useful frameworks Pat uses is the ground spectrum.

Every sport, every athlete, every exercise exists somewhere on a line that runs from lowest ground to highest ground. Lowest ground would be springboard diving or halfpipe skateboarding. These athletes spend most of their time interacting with air molecules. Their skill lies in balling up, rotating, and moving through space with precision. Highest ground would be powerlifting or interior line play in football. These athletes resist being turned and tumbled by the highest external forces possible.

The thing that makes a great powerlifter is precisely the thing that would get a diver killed, and vice versa.

More muscle mass means you're less able to move freely through certain ranges. The body that won't get tumbled under a max squat isn't the body that's going to rotate and spin through space with precision. These aren't failures of training. They're the cost of the adaptation.

Pat maps exercises onto the same spectrum. The highest ground would be the hack squat or leg press. External support, controlled pathway, no demands on stabilizing through space. Lowest ground would be a rotational split squat variation that puts the center of mass lateralized over one base of support. In between lives, everything else.

For growing quads, you probably want to be on the high-ground end of the exercise spectrum. Try to hack squat and not feel your quads. Even someone who's never seen a weight room in their life, if you put them on that machine and show them the picture on the side, they're going to approximate the movement, feel their quads, and be sore the next day. The probability of the right tissue getting the right stimulus is extremely high.

That's not a coincidence. That's the principle at work.

What Actually Grows Muscle

Pat was direct about where the science and real-world application currently agree.

Stretch position matters. The mechanical profile that best drives hypertrophy loads the tissue when it's long. When the muscle is stretched, you want the most force on it. Most classic free weight movements work that way. The squat, hinge, and press all feature higher torque positions as the muscle lengthens. That's why they've built muscle for decades.

Back training is a notable exception. With most free weight pulling movements, the high torque position is where the muscle is short, not long. This is why machines and cables can help with back development that rows and pulldowns often don't. You need stretch-position loading. Free weight rows don't always deliver it.

Someone like Jordan Peters, one of the freakiest bodybuilders alive, trains almost exclusively on machines. That's not laziness. That's applied logic working from the same principle.

How to Train People Who Don't Actually Care About Training

The part of this conversation I kept coming back to was Pat's breakdown of working with general population clients. These are successful, intelligent people who are physically incompetent in the weight room. They come once a week. Sometimes once every two weeks. They see some other trainer doing something exotic across the gym floor and wonder why their session looks basic by comparison.

These people are driving a Buick. You don't take a Buick to a drag strip. You drive it normally, signal when you change lanes, and keep it maintained. The job of a trainer with this population is to gradually expose them to what effort actually feels like, raise that floor, make it the new normal, and then build from there.

The accountability parallel Pat uses is worth repeating. He tells his clients he's their accountant for their body. You don't do your own taxes. You pay someone who knows where the complicated stuff lives to handle it so you don't end up in a problem you can't fix. He keeps them away from the bad decisions and threads the needle through the part that actually works for where they are.

I've trained the elite. I've also watched what happens when you apply elite methods to people who have no business being near them yet. The result isn't impressive. It's an injury, frustration, and someone who stops showing up.

The White Whale

Pat went somewhere personal in this conversation that I recognize completely.

He's in contest prep right now. That goal is putting rails on everything. He goes to bed on time because the numbers demand it. He cooks his meals because the numbers demand it. He shows up to train because the numbers demand it. The goal is making all the other decisions for him.

He talked about what happens when he doesn't have that. Between competitive pursuits, just kind of working out without a target. He drifted. Got fatter. Got regular. Someone getting on him about it was enough of a spark to flip back into obsessive mode.

He referenced Moby Dick. Ahab has to have the whale. Without the whale, he can't exist. I understand that completely. The question of how to train without a goal, without the white whale to chase, is something neither of us has figured out. We talked honestly about the fact that we ask our clients and our audience to do something that neither of us knows how to do ourselves: train just for health, just for longevity, just for function, without a result to chase.

That's not a solution. It's an honest observation. What I do know is this: if you need the goal, find the goal. Even if it's small. Even if it only matters to you. The goal is what makes the rest of the structure hold together.

What to Take From This

Pat Davidson is the rare kind of thinker who has done the full circuit. He's been on the high side of the bell curve. He's come down the other side. He still competes. He still learns. He still questions his own assumptions with enough honesty to admit when he was wrong.

His application of the ground spectrum, stretch-position loading, high-ground exercise selection for hypertrophy, and table tests as movement benchmarks is not simple in theory. But in practice, it strips away everything that doesn't serve the person in front of you, and it works from the most grounded principles you can get back to.

That's the job. Find the big picture. Build the boxes. Operate from there.

The billionaire analogy stuck for a reason. Most people are nowhere close to accidentally looking like a bodybuilder. They're not even accidentally becoming someone who shows up consistently. That's the real hurdle. Not the fear of the extreme outcome. The fear of putting in enough sustained effort to get anywhere at all.

Start there.

Live, Learn, Pass On.
Dave Tate / elitefts