I've made every excuse there is.

Too tired. Too beat up. Too busy. Bad sleep. Bad day. Bad knee. That last one was actually real. The rest were not, and I knew it even while my mouth was moving.

It took me too long to figure this out. Longer than I want to admit. I spent years building a case for why the workout didn't happen, why the lift got missed, and why the meet went sideways. I got good at it. Real good. And the whole time I thought I was explaining. I was just quitting with extra steps.

I'm not writing this from up on a hill looking down at you. I'm writing it from the bottom of the pile of excuses I made myself. Everything I'm about to say, I earned the hard way, by being the guy who used all of it first.

Here's where I want to start.

A reason is why you can't. An excuse is why you won't, dressed up nice, so it feels better going down. The problem is that they wear the same clothes. They sound the same coming out of your mouth. The only way to tell them apart is to get honest, and getting honest is the one thing an excuse is designed to stop you from doing.

The List

I've been collecting these for decades. Not on purpose at first. They just piled up, mine and everybody else's, from lifters who missed a max, blew a program, bombed at a meet, or just didn't show. Read through them.

My gym owner won't let me use chalk. My gym doesn't have the equipment I need. I don't have time for extra workouts. It's hard to get to the gym four days a week. It's hard to get away from work to hit a meet. My sleeves kept bunching up. The bar fell out of the groove on that last rep. I used to be able to do that for three. I had to use a crappy bar. I didn't have good spotters. The rack was too narrow. The J-hooks were set too low. I didn't get enough rest between sets. I felt rushed. My wraps were too tight. The meeting started too late. The meeting ran too long. The meet ran too fast. The flight drained me.

Keep going.

My coach screwed up my peak. My partners weren't motivating me. Too many distractions in the gym. The weights weren't official. The bench was too high. The bench was too low. The bar didn't have a good grip. The bar was too sharp. My singlet rode up. My belt didn't fit right. The weight cut killed me. I didn't have my ammonia caps. I didn't have lunch. I ate like crap all weekend. I didn't sleep at all last night. I don't have enough money. My spouse doesn't like me training. My car broke down. I was sick. The rain made my joints tight. My shoulder hurt. My coach had me go too heavy. My coach's program sucked. I forgot my sports drink. My supplements didn't work. My triceps strength never came around. My body weight was off.

I could keep going for another two pages. I've heard all of these. I've said most of them.

I didn't collect this list. I lived it.

Find What They Have in Common

Now read the list again. Slower this time. There's one thing every single one of them shares, and once you see it, you can't unsee it.

Take your time. Read between the lines. Go past the surface.

Found it yet?

Let me help. If I used every excuse on that list, then the one thing all of them have in common is me. The person making the excuse is always the common denominator. The responsibility always comes back to the one who made it.

Let's walk a couple of them, because this is where people want to argue.

"My coach had me go too heavy." Okay. Who picked the coach? Did you live up to your potential that day, or did you check out mentally the second the weight scared you? Could you have told him it was too much and adjusted? You had a mouth. You had a choice.

"My car broke down." Who bought the car? Do you keep up on it, or do you drive it into the ground and act surprised when it dies? Could you have called somebody for a ride?

I had a training partner roll his car into a ditch two weeks out from a meet. Full wreck. He got to the gym anyway. He asked the officer at the scene to drop him off. That's the difference. Same event, two completely different responses. One guy makes the meet. The other guy has a story about why he couldn't.

The excuse is never really about the bar being sharp or the rack being narrow. It's about you deciding, somewhere underneath the words, that this wasn't important enough to fight for. That's the whole game. It wasn't important enough, so you made one up.

Nobody at Westside Cared How You Felt

I trained at Westside Barbell under Louie Simmons for years. If you want a place that strips the excuses out of you, that was it.

The guys in that gym had every reason to quit. Bad backs. Torn everything. Reconstructed joints. Full-time jobs. Kids at home. Long drives. Real problems, not the imaginary kind. And they showed up. Not because they woke up feeling great and inspired. They showed up because they said they would, and their word to the crew meant more than their mood that morning.

Nobody in that gym cared how you felt about the workout. You could feel like garbage. You could be sore, tired, and in a bad spot in your life. Didn't matter. The work was on the board, and the board didn't move because you had a rough week.

The bar doesn't care either. It never has. It weighs what it weighs. It doesn't know you slept badly. It doesn't know your boss is a jerk or your knee is barking. You load it, you get under it, and it responds to exactly one thing: whether you do the work.

You want the real difference between the people who make it and the people who don't? It's not talent. It's not genetics. It's not who had the easier road. Plenty of gifted people wash out, and plenty of ordinary ones grind their way into something serious.

The people who make it quit arguing. They don't wake up and debate whether today is a training day. It's already decided. The decision was made a long time ago, and every morning after that is just execution. The people who don't make it re-litigate the whole thing every single day, and the excuse is just the closing argument.

Motivation Is a Liar. Consistency Isn't.

Here's what nobody wants to hear. Motivation is short-term fuel. It burns hot, and it burns out, every time.

When you're young, motivation feels like the whole thing. You see a big lift or a hype video, and suddenly, you're ready to tear the gym apart. You go in hot, maybe hit a PR, and you think that fire is what it takes. Then a week goes by, or a month, and the fire's gone, and you're standing there wondering where your discipline went. It never left. You just confused it with excitement.

The strongest people I've ever known weren't the most fired up. They were the most consistent. I've watched them train through injuries, failed business deals, funerals, and years when they didn't even like being in the gym. Some days, they trained angrily. Some days, they trained out of pure habit and nothing else. But the common thread never changed. They trained.

That's the part people miss. You don't have to feel like doing it to get it done.

They're not the guys screaming through every set or posting quotes. They're the ones who quietly walk in, do the work, log it, and walk out. Day after day. Year after year. They don't miss, and they don't need a reason. It becomes who they are, almost automatic.

Everybody wants the secret. They think it's a supplement, a program, some hidden recovery hack. It's not. It's repetition. It's showing up and doing the right thing when nobody's watching, and nobody cares, because most of the time nobody does. Discipline is boring, and that's exactly why it works. Boredom builds monsters. The progress you're chasing is hiding inside the monotony you keep trying to escape.

Life Will Still Hand You a Few

Now I'm going to turn on my own argument for a minute, because if I don't, this turns into a lie.

The same lifters who scream "no excuses" the loudest are usually young, and life hasn't loaded their bar yet. In your twenties, training is the center of everything. It's your identity, your therapy, your escape. You schedule life around training instead of the other way around, and it's easy to say no excuses when you don't have any real ones yet.

Then time starts adding plates you didn't ask for. Family. Work. Injuries that don't heal like they used to. Bills. Responsibilities that don't come off the bar when you're done. They stay loaded. And whether you like it or not, they change how you train.

That's not a weakness. That's real. Missing a session because work genuinely demanded it is not the same as skipping because you didn't feel like it. Cutting a workout short to make dinner with your family is not the same as bailing to sit on the couch. Some days, progress isn't more weight on the bar. It's just showing up when you had every legitimate reason to skip, and you showed up anyway.

The strongest lifters I've known didn't quit when life got heavy. They adjusted. They kept the standard and changed the plan. That's the difference between a reason and an excuse, one more time. A reason makes you modify. An excuse makes you disappear. If life hands you something real, you adjust the program and keep going. You don't get to use it as a permanent exit.

The honesty has to cut both ways. Don't dress up an excuse as a reason to let yourself off. And don't beat yourself into the ground calling a real reason an excuse. Both of those are just different ways of lying to yourself, and both of them cost you.

What To Actually Do

So here's the work.

Stop negotiating in the morning. That argument is a trap, and you lose it more than you win it. Decide the night before. Lay it out. When the alarm goes off, there's nothing to debate, because the decision has already been made by a version of you that wasn't tired and looking for a way out.

Get honest and name it. Out loud if you have to. When the excuse shows up, and it will, ask the only question that matters. Is this why I can't, or is this why I won't? A reason survives that question. An excuse falls apart the second you say it plainly.

Then show up, do the work, and save the speech.

Because the workout doesn't get easier when you explain why you skipped it. Nobody remembers your excuses anyway. They don't remember how many injuries you had, or how many times you bombed, or how good your reasons were. They remember what you did, and most of them won't even remember that. The only person keeping score on the excuses is you, and every time you make one, you get a little weaker and a little better at explaining.

I know both of those guys. I've been both of those guys. The one who built the case, and the one who finally shut up and got under the bar. The second one is the only one who ever got anywhere.

Live, Learn, Pass On.

Dave Tate / elitefts