I'm going to let you guys in on a little secret and tell you why some of you, workout after workout and year after year, for seemingly no apparent reason, fail to ever make any impressive progress in the gym. There are guys who show up every day for years and seem to do the work! Yet, somehow they never go anywhere. They never build appreciable amounts of muscle, or impressive levels of strength, or really build any appreciable level of fitness at all. And I've seen these guys with my own two eyes many times over the years. The other day I talked about consistency when it comes to making progress in the gym and in regards to fitness in general. Consistency is the most important factor! Always remember that. Without consistency there is no progress. Effort doled out infrequently or inconsistently is absolutely irrelevant. Therefore, consistency is numero uno. Top dog. King of the hill. 

But there's another actor at play here. Another gainz goblin robbing you of your progress and ensuring that you remain small and weak for all time. An insidious actor. As I just mentioned there are actually guys who are very consistent. They have the consistency part down pat, in fact. They show up every single day but they essentially fail at the gym in spite of that. You've probably seen these guys yourself in commercial gyms because they're a dime a dozen man, hell, you might even be one of them. Spend a year or two in any gym and you'll see plenty of regulars several times a week and maybe even become buddies with some of them! And the cold, sad fact is that the day you stop going to that gym most of them will be in exactly the same place that they were the day you started going to that gym.

After that intro you probably already have a pretty good idea of where I'm going with this. This is a gut check. It's about effort, man. The WILLINGNESS to bleed for it, to accomplish your goals - or at least get closer to them. Now, I'm not saying that you should bleed for it, in fact, I would argue that if you're training properly you almost never actually will bleed for it. But it's the willingness to do so that separates the wheat from the chaff. It's a mentality thing that manifests itself in the average effort level that somebody is willing to put forth toward an endeavor over the course of many years.

And before we get too deep into it let me nip right in the bud the argument that's already on the seething tongue of every DYEL'er who isn't ready to be redpilled yet - and you already know what I'm going to say: 

On the flip side of that, you have people like Jeff Cavaliere, the infamous Athlean-X, with their BS claims of being able to "build muscle and burn fat and blah blah" all in just 5 minutes a day! 

It's sad and I hate to see it because if we could just change the narrative, even just a little bit - if we could just get the gospel out, spread the truth out to just a few more people then we're able to now then more people would eventually be able to see the light. They would realize that they aren't less than, and they are capable of very impressive progress too. It just takes more time and more effort and more heart than they've been lead to believe and conditioned to believe was necessary up to this point. 

So spread the word man. It's effort. If you aren't making the progress you want to be making then you probably aren't trying hard enough. Point blank. There's a difference between going through the motions and actually busting your ass. Unwittingly sandbagging your own perceptions of how hard you're trying is a real thing too, and it gets even the best of us every now and then. But ultimately the people who make the type of progress that you're jealous of were able to rise above the marketing gimmicks, realize that they had been BS'ing themselves, and pull themselves up out of that funk so that they could start ACTUALLY busting their asses, instead of just pretending to do so.