The Blue Pad

In high school there was a blue pad that you could clip on to the bar to protect your upper back from the bar while you did squats. 

For anybody that has gotten into lifting, you know that the knurled center of the bar and simply the weight of the bar on your spine bruises you at the very least and can tear open the skin as your body acclimates to the new pressure. 

The purpose of this blue pad is to protect you from this acclimation period and allow you to be more comfortable while you lift. 

As freshman - we thought this was the greatest invention ever. 

That was until upperclassmen referred to this glorious invention as a “pussy pad.” Insinuating that anybody that leveraged the luxurious cushion was not man enough to be in the gym. 

This immediately altered our perspectives. 

We embraced the pain of the body adapting to the lifts that we were doing - taking pride in the bruises, the ripped skin, the new calluses. Any pain was a sign of growth and that growth was a sign that you weren’t a pussy. 

This mentality has largely stuck with me in my life. 

I can’t remember the last time I used one of these pads, but I know that it has been since high school. I even was reluctant to put a yoga mat between myself and the belt clip on a hip thruster machine due to this pride. I succumbed when the metal dug further and further into my hip bone and I couldn’t tolerate the pain of increasing the weight. 

I’ve silently judged others for using straps and cheating on their lifts. If your grip strength isn’t strong enough to bear the weight, why are you lifting it?

How ignorant. 

It took hiring a coach to challenge my deeply-rooted perceptions. 

He encouraged me to use Versa Gripps as I identified that my grip strength was failing on some of my lifts before the muscles that I was targeting were fatigued. When you are trying to optimize muscle growth in each trip to the gym, this is a huge point of failure. 

So I bought the grips and tried them for the first time ever today (technically yesterday as I write this at almost 1:00 AM). 

The difference of not being bottlenecked by my grip strength shocked me. On numerous pull lifts today, I was able to do more reps at the weight I was failing at during the same lifts last week and even had to bump the weight while sustaining the rep count.

I thought it may just be a placebo after my first set of single arm lat pulldown but this continue into my chest supported lat rows, single arm cable lat rows, hanging leg tucks, overhand lat pulldown, and T-Bar chest supported row. 

The improvement across lifts showed me that I had been ignorantly impeding my growth due to a high school perception that had refined itself through college and into my adult life. 

Now I am left wondering, if the support and technology is available to us to help us reach our goals faster, why would you not use it?

Damn. Who would have thought that Versa Gripps could lead to such a profound revelation? 

What makes this realization even crazier to me is that I realized this on my first exercise and wrote my idea down while I paced around the gym between sets. 

While I am now clearly sold on the value of these grips - this has caused me to take a broader look at my life. 

How many times have I had the ability to leverage support in my life but been stubborn and chosen not to?

I immediately think of the times that I have rejected coaching in the gym because I had been coached for free in high school and college and “knew what I was doing.” 

Hiring a dietitian and bodybuilding coach has showed me how ignorant this line of thinking was. The amount of tweaks that I have made to my lifting form and adjustments due to the increased reliance on machines instead of the olympic lifts used to teach explosiveness for football was humbling for me. 

I was forced to drop weight on my lifts to prioritize my form, speed, and mind-muscle connection. This has increased my ability to target specific muscle groups enabling me to increase my muscle gains while drastically cutting my body fat (12 lbs over the last 6 weeks) in a sustainable way for the first time in years. 

Had I refused to pay for the support - I would be stuck at 253 right now, loathing my pudgy midsection and not feeling nearly as confident in my work ethic nor my physique. 

While your goals might not be remotely relevant to my experience in the gym, this is still applicable for you. As you reflect on my description, you may have identified goals that you have where you could accelerate your performance by allowing yourself to be supported by others. 

While I talked about buying Versa Gripps and paying for a personal trainer, you don’t always have to pay for this support. 

We live in a phenomenal time to be alive with the readily available nature of information. Pair that with successful people seeing the power in creating their brands on social media and you have readily available support for the low low cost of your time and having to tolerate some ads. 

You can identify just about any successful person who has achieved some version of your goals and spend hours and hours with them by listening to long form content that features them. They may even have a YouTube channel where you can spend even more time with them, subconsciously and consciously learning how they view the world. 

If this isn’t your speed, you can spend time with them in books (I love a good autobiography) or audiobooks about them or surrounding successful people in their fields. 

I was hanging out with Kevin Hart today, Viktor Frankl yesterday, Will Smith, C Bum and Matthew McConaughey (I had to Google his last name as I absolutely butchered the spelling) the day before. I have now spent hours listening to each of them, learning from their life experiences and piecing together how I can apply it to my life. 

Their willingness to share their journey has supported me in crafting my mindset in pursuing mine. In gaining a better understanding of the effort that I am going to have to put in to achieve my goals and to get remotely close to the levels of success that they have achieved in their lives. 

But with their support, I can see some of the potholes that they stepped in. I can avoid some of the same pitfalls while creating the life that I want to lead. 

You have the ability to do this too. 

Don't wait years like I did. Don't let outdated mental frameworks dictate your growth trajectory. While I can't say for certain if the pussy pad would have made a difference, I know without a doubt that I would be significantly stronger if I had leveraged tools like lifting straps or coaches after I quit playing football. 

It’s okay to have the humility to recognize when you are reaching limits that you aren’t sure how to overcome. Identify where you need support, seek it unapologetically, and watch how much faster you move toward your goals when you're not handicapped by the weight of your own pride.

The strongest people I know aren't those who refuse help—they're the ones who strategically leverage every available resource to become better versions of themselves.