Monday Motivation 3/18/24

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I spent all weekend in Birmingham at the UK Arnold Sports Festival. I saw unbelievable feats of strength, bodybuilding battles and upsets, and more sports than you can imagine.

But even with all of these amazing spectacles, the best thing I’ve seen is something we often talk about in this newsletter: community.

Whether it’s the strongmen and strongwomen, the CrossFit athletes, the bodybuilders or bikini competitors, or the medieval fighting, I saw people competing with each other, cheering for each other, and lifting each other up.

No matter what their sport is, it gives them fitness, but it also gives them a community.

And I love that.

We’ve talked in this newsletter about how face-to-face interaction and being a part of a community are just as important to living a healthy life as exercise. And we’ve shared some of the brutal statistics about how loneliness, which is on the rise more and more as people disappear from the real world into their screens, hurts your health.

So, seeing all of these fantastic communities developing around sports gave me great joy.

It really hit home when I met the founding members of the Pump app for a hangout in the middle of the chaos of the festival.

Here were hundreds of people who had traveled from all over Europe and the UK, who before this only knew each other through their comments on the app, which, while they’re the most positive comments you’ll find on the internet, still isn’t the same as meeting in person.

And it was unbelievable. They shared some of their biggest struggles — heartbreaking stories like losing both parents in a car crash at Christmastime — and some of their greatest successes. One gentleman lost 40 kilograms (for my American friends, that’s almost 98 pounds) while keeping a streak of 48 weeks of training in the app.

No matter what they shared, tragedy or triumph, they were there for each other. They supported each other. They connected. They were part of something.

And that’s all most of us really want, right? We want to be part of something, to have people care about us and lift us up when we need it.

You might be surprised that my takeaway from a giant fitness festival filled with oiled-up bodybuilders and strongmen carrying thousand-pound yokes is that we all need to find our community.

You’ve heard me say that I’m not self-made. But maybe I haven’t been clear enough that I owe my success to my own community.

One of the most important decisions in my life was joining the weightlifting team in Graz when I was 15.

Almost immediately, I was a part of something bigger than me. There were teammates who trained together and went to the lake together, with some of them bringing meat to grill on an open fire. There were mentors who would listen to our concerns and give us advice while reminding us to train our minds as much as our bodies. There were long conversation-filled drives to compete against other cities, to travel to watch the world weightlifting championships, and be inspired by our heroes in person. Above all else, there was community.

That community created a new world for me, separate from the world my parents created.

I felt free but I also felt supported. I didn’t have to just rely on the community where I’d grown up in Thal any more. I had another community that was all mine, that believed I could be a champion and fostered my dreams.

That was the beginning of something that became a common thread throughout my life: wherever I went, I wanted to create a community. When I moved to Munich, we built up our gym family, and we all went to the beer halls together at night and trained together during the day. When I moved to America, our Gold’s Gym crew was the new family.

I am not exaggerating when I say my dreams couldn’t have become a reality without my community. It’s why I’m still obsessed with connecting and bringing people together 60 years later.

There is nothing better than having people to share your victories and failures, to push you, to celebrate you, to console you — to just be there for you.

So this week, while you work on your fitness and try to be a little better every day, I want you to think about your communities. I want you to be a part of something. I want you to connect.

Have a fantastic week, everybody!