I was fortunate to travel to Los Angeles this past weekend to see a couple of Eddie Vedder concerts. (If you have never seen Eddie or Pearl Jam in concert, I highly recommend it.) I met up with my good friend Jason Ferruggia of Muscle Gaining Secrets fame. If you don’t know of Jay or his work, check out his site and products, they are top notch. More on that later.

We met in Santa Monica and hung out the first day, getting lunch and talking training. Jay is an encyclopedia of knowledge when it comes to putting on muscle and gaining strength. I soaked up as much as I could about the subject, while sharing my expertise on rehabilitation and getting healthy after injuries. Although I learned a lot in those conversations over lunch and dinner, my real lessons came on Sunday afternoon when I had the opportunity to train with Jay at Gold’s Gym in Venice beach.

During our training session, we didn’t say much, and didn’t need to. I took mental notes along the way. You see, what I learned that day can’t really be summed up in a book, or article, it had to be experienced first hand.

I am in intense person by nature. In fact, intensity is one of my top values in life. I do most things with intensity in one way or another. Besides our mutual love of training and good music, that is probably why Jay and I get along so well.

We trained for only 45 minutes that day, and that was more than enough. Jay does everything in the gym with the utmost intensity. I knew immediately that if I wanted to hang with him while training that day, I was going to have to up my intensity levels big time. Normally, this is not a tough task, but Jay and I were running on a few hours of sleep total for the last 2 nights. We pulled a 30 hour day and night when we first got to LA and only made up a little bit of that lack of sleep. Neither of us felt good physically when we got to Gold’s, but we were going to train anyway. Not training wasn’t really an option at that point. First lesson; there are no good excuses for missing a training session. Jay didn’t have any, and I couldn’t either.

The main lesson that I learned that day from training with Jay is that you have to go into every session with incredible intensity no matter what. Fatigue, lack of proper nutrition, and dehydration were all realities when we got to Gold’s, but were all forgotten about after the first set. Now this was not the most intense session I ever had, not even close, but the intensity was raised by both of us, and for good reason. Jay and I both know that in order to overcome the daily issues that can and do occur in most of our lives, we need to raise the bar so to speak and up the levels of intensity and work ethic. This is the only way to get results.

We hammered our way through our training session and ended by doing jump rope intervals outside in the 90 degree heat (yes, Cali had a heat wave in April.)

Take home points:

• Life happens and when it does, what will you do? Being too tired, or not feeling well, or hung over, or stressed out from life are all realities that hit many of us. What will you do?
• Train with intensity each time out. No matter how you feel, what your circumstances are, decide that you will train with the utmost intensity and nothing less. Want to know the real secret to making gains and reaching your goals? Go at it with everything you have each time out.
• Want to know everything you need to know about getting big and strong? Get Jay’s book. There are a lot of so called “Hard Gainer” experts out there, but most are phonies at best. Jay is the real deal. Look here to find out more about Jay’s products.
• Go to I-TUNES or wherever you get your music and check out Eddie Vedder’s Into The Wild soundtrack album. You wont be disappointed.

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