Training Mindset

The Generation That Figured It Out: How Growing Up Gen X Built the Way I Train

Gen X didn't have YouTube, apps, or coaches on demand. We had a bar, a rack, and the stubborn refusal to quit — and that built something most lifters today never find.

Nobody Was Coming to Help You

I grew up getting beaten up.

Not metaphorically. I mean actual kids roping me with a tetherball cord and kicking me into the ground while other kids stood around laughing. I had learning disabilities. I was labeled slow, put in special education, and called a retard by a school principal to my mother's face. Every system that was supposed to help me told me I didn't fit.

That was the 1970s. That was Gen X.

There's a conversation going around right now about why Gen X doesn't engage with the generational wars playing out on social media. The short version: they don't need to. They were raised by circumstance to handle things without asking for help, without broadcasting their feelings, and without waiting for the world to catch up to them. Divorce rates peaked when we were kids. Both parents working was the new normal. A lot of us came home to an empty house, let ourselves in, and figured out the afternoon alone. Nobody was hovering. Nobody was checking. The unspoken rule was: you'll figure it out.

And we did.

I didn't know at the time that this would shape every aspect of how I train and how I think about training. I just knew that when my dad got me into a private powerlifting gym at 13, something clicked that never clicked anywhere else. The gym was the one place I could be in charge. The one place I got to decide whether I succeeded. Not a teacher. Not a coach screaming at me about plays I couldn't memorize. Not a world that had already made up its mind about what I was worth.

What Training Looked Like Before the Internet Told You How to Train

Here's what you need to understand about learning to train in the 1980s and into the 1990s.

There was no YouTube. There were no apps. There were no online coaches, no DMs, no forums where you could post your form check and get forty replies in an hour. There was a bar, a rack, a few old guys who'd been doing this long enough to have opinions, and whatever printed material you could track down.

That was it.

If you wanted to get better, you read. I tracked down every Russian training manual I could find. I consumed everything available on strength and conditioning. I drove to seminars. I called coaches on the phone. I networked with anyone who had more experience than I and would give me five minutes. For nearly a decade before elitefts ever existed, this is what self-education looked like. Not because I was unusually disciplined. Because there was no other way.

You couldn't Google it. You couldn't watch a technique breakdown on your phone between sets. You had to put the work in, stay wrong for a while, make mistakes, and slowly correct them through trial and error and by paying attention to people who knew more than you did.

I had fifteen years of training under my belt before I ever listened to Louie Simmons. Fifteen years. When coaches tried to redirect me before that, I didn't want to hear it. Not because I was too proud, but because I had built something through my own effort, and I wasn't about to hand it over to someone who had never lifted what I was lifting. When Louie walked up to me at a meet after I'd missed my squat and asked if I'd like some advice, I said yes. He'd earned the right to the conversation. And what he showed me in sixty seconds changed everything.

That's the Gen X relationship with information. You don't take advice from someone just because they're offering it. You take advice from someone who's been in it. Who's lived it. Who has something real to offer and not just a credential or a platform.

The Mentality That Made It Work (And What It Cost)

The self-sufficiency that Gen X built into its bones is a real thing. It is not a pose. It is not nostalgia. It is a genuine psychological operating system developed through years of being on your own and figuring it out.

In the gym, that translated directly into a certain kind of lifter.

We didn't need someone to tell us it was time to train. We didn't need a program that told us exactly what to do every single day with no room for judgment. We didn't need external accountability systems because the accountability was internal. You showed up because you said you would. You pushed because the bar didn't move unless you pushed it. Nobody gave you credit for effort. The weight either went up or it didn't.

I went from the kid everybody beat up to the kid nobody wanted to mess with. The weights did that. Not because I had an optimal program or a certified coach analyzing my movement patterns. Because I showed up, worked harder than everyone else in the room, and refused to stop. A coach told me once, late at night after a practice when I was still running wind sprints alone in an empty gym: if you keep working harder than everyone else, you will never lose again. I picked up the pace. My legs hurt. I kept running.

That moment mattered more than any training manual.

What Today's Lifter Has That We Didn't

Walk into any gym right now, and you'll see a 22-year-old filming their warm-up sets. That's not a criticism. Access to technique feedback, programming resources, and actual coaching is better right now than it has ever been in the history of strength training.

The information exists. More of it than you will ever need.

What I see missing is the Gen X piece. The part that says: stop waiting for someone to tell you what to do. Stop looking for the perfect program before you start. Stop paralysis-analyzing every variable and get under the bar.

The most common problem I see with newer lifters is not bad information. It is the inability to execute without external validation. They've been conditioned by a training culture that has an answer for every question before they've had time to develop the instincts that come from actually doing the work and failing and adjusting and doing it again.

My generation didn't have the information advantage. But we had something that's harder to teach: we trusted our own experience because that was the only tool we had. You couldn't outsource the suffering. You couldn't consult a database when something hurt. You had to figure it out and own the answer, and that ownership created a relationship with training that didn't need to be managed from the outside.

What the Bar Still Teaches If You Let It

I've been training for over four decades now. The landscape has changed in ways I couldn't have imagined when I was a kid cutting through yards to get to a gym that smelled like chalk and old iron.

What hasn't changed is the bar.

The bar still doesn't care what you know. It doesn't care how many followers you have or what certification is on your wall or how good your form looks at 60 percent. It responds to work. It responds to consistency. It responds to someone showing up long enough, seriously enough, and honestly enough to let it teach them something.

Gen X didn't ask permission to train. We didn't wait for optimal conditions. We came home to an empty house, figured out the afternoon, and when we found the gym, we stayed there because it was the one place the world couldn't take away from us.

That is still what separates lifters who progress from lifters who spin. Not access. Not information. Not equipment. The willingness to get in there and figure it out.

Live, Learn, Pass On.