Sometimes you meet tiny guys who come up to you at bars or at the gym and want to talk about body building. I guess they gotta be real bored, because when I'm working out or hanging out at bars, I'm too busy doing other things to talk about exercise. Anyhow, one of these guys bugged me this weekend at a bar, and since he knew a friend of mine, I gave him a few answers. I suspect some of them surprised him quite a bit.

"How much do you bench?" Not that much, I told him. "But how come you're so big and I ain't?" There are a couple of factors to keep in mind:

• If you bench a lot, that's great, but if you just perform one or two sets with few reps and then consider your work done, don't be surprised if you don't gain much muscle mass. It's not really a question of how much you bench, but of your exercise program as a whole. You can't max 15 reps x 3 sets, so why max out at all?
• You're not going to gain weight just because you drink gainers. In fact, I tried oversizing the portion of my gainer. No real gain. Gainers just help your body quickly heal up after hard work out so that you can--that's right, go home and eat. Fail eating, fail building mass.
• If you are already slim by default and want to become big, chances are you're like me and have a high metabolic rate. This means you'll have to eat more than other people to gain any mass at all. You'll also have to eat more often (see my food odyssey for example).
• Consistency is the key to success in every field. Many guys visit the gym irregularly and expect to see fast results. It doesn't work that way, unless you have superior genes. Especially the tiny guys who want to get big quickly often see muscle building as some kind of socialization activity instead of what it really is: a lifestyle.

I didn't feel like preaching to him what I already knew by experience. Other, more successful muscle builders could do that much better. Instead I told him he should pay more attention to cooking and less to weight. It's not merely the feeling of energetic freedom when lifting heavy things that make me want go to the gym. It's the feeling of doing a part of a larger lifestyle scheme, of fitting a performance into a bigger picture, where food, long walks and mental clarity form the philosophy of tiny becoming big.