What happened to the word “train” in training? Did it get lost in the Smith machine? Or better yet the supervised step class (and yes I said supervised)? Why doesn’t anyone train? I’ve worn the EliteFTS ‘Train’ shirt numerous times in hopes someone would step off the Smith machine and squat in a real squat rack. But then again, that would mean I’d have to wait an hour just to use the squat rack because the Smith machine is talking to the step class about how the key to losing belly fat is doing sit-ups. And most importantly, lifting a five-lb dumbbell for an hour on top of a Bosu ball while kicking your leg up in the air and touching your toe with the weight is the ultimate fat burner. Wait! That actually might be impossible.

Hopefully, the majority of us walk into a gym every day. I commend you for getting up and doing something productive instead of stalking someone on some social networking site. But the majority of those individuals have no plan. For some reason, their goals are to either increase their bench or lose fat in the belly area, yet they continue to lay no foundation for their training session. How can you accomplish those goals if you don’t even have a simple plan for one training session or at least a baseline for future ones, considering you may actually discover a weakness and it needs to be worked on?

So listen…the only difference between an athlete who trains and you is the word “train.” We’re all athletes even though we aren’t pictured on television in a uniform. And that doesn’t mean we can’t train like we are. In fact, there are high school kids right now, probably at DeFranco’s training center, sprinting with a Prowler and working harder than some of those Sunday players. If you ever take a look around a gym, you will find some of the strongest pieces of equipment, yet we lift with them as if we put them together ourselves. That previous sentence doesn’t mean just machines. That also includes barbells with weights stacked on them, too. If any females are reading this and they think this doesn’t concern them, they’re completely wrong. My sister is 120 lbs of muscle and is more afraid of getting injured picking up a weight that is too light than a weight that is too heavy.

I’ve been lifting for about eight years, since the tender age of 16. Up until about two years ago, I was the Smith machine and spent my time staring at the step class and pretending I knew everything about lifting weights. I benched until the spotter behind me was getting more of a workout than I was trying to lift the bar. I squatted quarters with lots and lots of weight and enjoyed bragging about how much I could squat, which really wasn’t much and this was on the Smith machine. I didn’t know deadlifting existed, and I thought pulls-ups were for babies. I told people that I lifted weights every day for like three hours and that I knew everything there was to know. In fact, I could leg press with more plates than you.

Then one day I looked at myself in the gym mirror and saw the kid to the right of me pretending to bench 300 lbs as his three spotters lifted the bar up and down for him, grunting with his legs flopping in the air. And the kids to the left asking why the personal trainers look worse off than their own clients. I realized that there was something wrong with this picture. I asked myself, “What am I doing here? What am I training for?”

Soon enough, I became intrigued with Joe DeFranco, Dave Tate, Zach Even-Esh, Jim Wendler, Charles Poliquin, and Buddy Morris, and I realized that I was never training. I may know a few sentences of information in comparison to the novels that these guys know, but every day I realize I’m at the gym for a purpose and that is to train. It may not be for a powerlifting competition, bodybuilding competition, football game, soccer game, or any other athletic competition, but it’s for the true meaning of really being under the bar.

I hope you’re listening…

Just because someone is ripping out of their shirt while they do triceps kickbacks doesn’t mean they necessarily know what they’re doing. It also doesn’t mean that the guy leg pressing with all the 45-lb plates the gym owns is the strongest guy in the gym. If you’re able to define your purpose for being in the gym and can truly train for that purpose, you’ve done what almost every single gym rat pretends to do. It isn’t about how much you lift or how many hours you lift for or what magazine told you what. It’s about drowning out the rest of the world for that hour and competing with yourself both mentally and physically. So go deadlift, squat, and watch Dave Tate’s YouTube video on how to bench correctly. That video trumps this entire article. And training doesn’t include the step class or the Smith machine, just so we’re clear.

P.S. Purchase some bands and bring them to the gym. The trainers will think they’re running out of time with their functional training speech, and the gym rats will whisper, “Is that kid serious? That will screw up my max.” Then a week or two later, the trainers will walk around with the bands acting as if they designed the concept themselves, and the gym rats…well they will just continue to be gym rats because they can leg press more than you.