On Wednesday, May 27, 2015, I have a small anniversary to mark: exactly 10 years have passed since my first translation, “How to build quality muscle”, appeared on fitness.ee. Looking back, a staggering amount of work has actually been done in the form of various articles and translations. Honestly, I’m even surprised at how much has piled up. I confidently believe I was a pioneer in Estonia when it comes to publicly covering quite a few training topics. This is backed up by the fact that today, when I read Estonian-language training literature, I often recognize many English training terms, topics and approaches that I brought into use. I apologize if I’m doing anyone an injustice, but I don’t remember anyone on fitness.ee talking about 10×10, Smolov, 5×5, pull-ups as a topic, progression, timed sets, set tempo, chains, sled drags, strongman training and so on and so on and so on before my translations and pieces. There are plenty of these things. I’m not saying I invented them, but I can say fairly confidently that, before my translations and articles, I couldn’t really find anything about them to read in Estonian in the training literature.
In a sense, “bringing ashore” all those uncovered topics reflects extremely well my indescribably wild desire to train, develop, progress, do things differently and step “out of the box”.
For some reason I have always liked translating and writing about training more than about nutrition. I’ve kept a rough tally, and by now my own articles, pieces and translations come to somewhere around 550, which works out to roughly 50-55 pieces a year. Of course, the publishing frequency hasn’t always been regular. Also, when I occasionally stumble on translations/articles from the first years, I can now see clearly how shaky the beginning was. But that’s just how development goes. Only one thing actually brought me to translating and writing articles: the wish and drive to acquire knowledge about strength and bodybuilding training that I could then put into practice myself.
Although my first translation came out on May 27, 2005, it was actually preceded by a whole year of groundwork. In 2001-2004 I competed in categories with 3-4 men, usually placing third/fourth, and at that time I couldn’t even think about making it to the overall. Over three years it became clear that I was doing something very wrong, or not doing things the way they should be done at all. The men, both on stage and backstage, looked somehow dry, “wooden” and “blocky”. I felt I needed to read and educate myself. Honestly, I completely lacked knowledge about what to eat or how to eat. On the training side things were better, although in hindsight there was plenty to discover there too. Of course, when I started out I wasn’t exactly outstanding in mass or proportions, but it was quite clear that getting into shape was held back directly by a lack of knowledge. I skipped the autumn season of 2004, with a firm conviction and a plan to show a new level of my contest condition in the spring season of 2005. Since I had no internet at home, I went to the Rakke library, searched for various English-language articles, paid to print them out and went home to translate them with a dictionary. I remember that the main site I landed on was Bodybuilding.com. And so it went, again and again. That’s where my first understanding began to form of what to eat, how to eat, when to eat, how to train, why things are done the way they are, what the pre-contest period involves and so on. That’s how it all began…
My story is certainly a good example that you won’t get anywhere without knowledge; I believe that myself. It has always seriously annoyed me when people say “athletes were at the gym when the good Lord was handing out brains”. And yet quite a few of those who spread that claim have turned up on my doorstep one day, asking this “dumb athlete” for advice on “how to eat, what to eat or how to train so that body weight starts to drop”.
So, with my genetics, I can’t imagine I would have got anywhere without knowledge. Knowledge is certainly not the only important component when striving for progress, but it is certainly just as important as genetics, willpower and a big capacity for work.
If I’m completely honest, by now I have in a sense written myself out. Over 10 years I’ve tried to cover the whole spectrum of the training world through my articles on fitness.ee. While it all started with translations, as experience, knowledge and practice grew, my own thoughts gradually started to appear too. To a large extent it all culminated in the book published at the end of 2014. Over the last 3-4 years there has been a tendency, or a feeling, that if I’m going to write, I’d rather write from my own knowledge and experience, myself and directly. Of course, there is good material to translate, but as my experience grows, it seems to me more and more that the material worth translating keeps getting scarcer. There are certainly still a few things I could say, both through translations and in my own words, but a large part has already been said. Honestly, I no longer want to produce my own experience just to languish cheaply in the vastness of the internet. It seems to me that these days everything on the internet is done for “clicks” and “likes”. I’m not sure people are still able to delve into the substance of earnest, heartfelt writing at all. So let all that be for people who read books. A book has an entirely different value; in my view it is far more timeless than writing on the internet. Presumably, the work published online from now on will be mostly translations. Unfortunately, I no longer enjoy translating as much as writing myself. One reason is certainly also that, although the aspects of training, nutrition, recovery and psychology are generally covered in the English-language articles that have already been published, it often seems to me that these articles are superficial and somehow “for sale”. It’s so ordinary, and there’s simply so much of it. Through my own writing I have always tried to reflect on many of the things that theorists usually can’t bring out in their general “sales article”. Such written-down experience has always seemed somehow sincere, direct, very informative and useful. Maybe that’s also why some man’s blog sometimes seems more useful, informative and interesting than 25 articles produced for sale put together. The charm of writing as a practitioner lies in the fact that I can perhaps put into words and address those sensations and nuances of training that have received very little attention or that people simply don’t know how to explain. This, in my view, is the difference between a theorist and a practitioner, an expert/writer. A theoretical expert simply cannot address certain things, because in training, in many cases you have to experience something first before you can explain it or offer an opinion on it. Progression is perhaps the first good example that comes to mind of fitting theory and practice together. In theory, it’s easy to say that you just add weight or extend a set with the same weight and keep progressing. In practice, things aren’t that simple, and I believe that even in the whole of Estonia there aren’t very many coaches who know how to put together a sustainable, results-producing training progression.
I experienced the same phenomenon myself during at least the first five of those 10 years of translating. I had acquired knowledge and some kind of overview of the subject, but putting theoretical knowledge into practice and making it real is a topic of its own.
Anyway, 10 years, a nice number. We’ll see how long I keep going, because we all grow, mature, develop and change…
Besides getting my back sorted out, my other big dream is to get a couple more books between covers in my lifetime.
Thank you to everyone who has given me positive feedback on both my articles and my book!!!
Author: Janar Rückenberg
Come and train! ArtGym
