I did not receive pre-approval prior to writing this.
I didn’t even ask.
I didn’t want to risk not being able to share his story.
And given that he - like so many of us - would prefer not to have the spotlight shined upon him, I thought he might say something like “that’s cool, but you don’t need to do that”.
So my hope is that he doesn’t mind me saying these nice things about him publicly because I think we can all learn a lot from this story. I apologize in advance.
Brian Kane, known by everyone as BK, just celebrated his 1500th session with us at The Fort. It’s the most by any member in our history.
BK came to us like so many people do. He was referred by a friend who was already training with us. And, before long, BK, that friend and a few others in that crew were all working out here.
Brian is the sole survivor.
A life-long “big kid” Brian was recruited and played college football in his home state of Wisconsin where he was placed squarely on the offensive line.
A couple of concussions later, BK decided that saving his brain was probably more important than a scholarship and quickly dropped out of the sport.
By the time he moved to New York and walked through our door he was untrained and weighed over 300 pounds.
As you might expect, he was already quite strong. But his mobility was rough (doing a full depth squat or any single leg movement was a real challenge) and he was deconditioned.
As the months went on, things improved. He developed a crazy ability on the SkiErg, often landing on the top of the leaderboard and gaining the nickname “Ski God”.
There is no real need to detail BK’s training but there are two things from his journey that I’ve observed that I think are really valuable for anyone who takes on a training program - particularly if you are new or feel like you are far away from your goal.
The first is that consistency is really the name of the game.
I’m not going to claim that BK never missed a session or took a vacation, but for the past 5+ years, come 8AM, he’s been in the gym 5 days per week 95% of the time.
People very much underestimate the benefits of persistence and overestimate the value of a few great efforts. Yes, your training should be focused and demanding enough to be meaningful, but if BK would have ended his life with every workout and suffered physical or emotional burnout he wouldn’t have lasted 6 months.
I really appreciate how yoga and meditation and piano refer to their sessions as practice. I wish our style of training would do the same thing. Because any single session performance (outside of competition) is fairly meaningless for most of us in the big picture. You just need to slowly build capabilities over time. The longer the better.
You’ll be amazed how those small stones can build into a giant wall.
There is a mid Drew Barrymore/Adam Sandler movie called “50 First Dates” in which Barrymore’s character wakes up each morning with no memory of what has happened to her in the past and she has to spend the day rebuilding connections and routine.
Training is the exact opposite of this. Every day you are stacking capabilities and results. One day highly impacts the next. Be like BK. Stack as many days as you can. There is no replacement.
The second is that even though he had struggles and limitations, I never witnessed those things have any impact on his approach or attitude.
He never got down. There wasn’t any negative self-talk. He didn’t seem to internalize any of it to the point where he felt like the struggles were character flaws. He just goes about his business, stacking another session onto his pile. Happy to get in the gym and be slightly better at the end of the session than he was when he walked through the door.
I am a big believer that you should actively focus on your workout and try to get value out of each session. But, as stated above, you certainly don’t need to go all out all the time. And, further, you have to come to the realization that your challenges and limitations don’t define you.
Is it great that you can’t squat below parallel or only bench press 30% of your bodyweight? No. But these are things that can be worked on and, in almost all cases, be improved. Very little in life has a direct work-to-reward ratio as training. It’s certainly not perfect but if everything in life so diplomatically rewarded efforts with the appropriate results I think people would feel a much greater level of overall satisfaction.
And this brings me back around to BK. I’ve buried the headline here a bit by not mentioning until now that he has lost about 110 lbs since training with us.
But perhaps it’s appropriate that I placed it where I have because, for the first 800 sessions or so, that isn’t what happened. Like I mentioned, he got stronger and fitter but the body composition changes were a later addition to his improvements. It just took some time to click.
It’s just like driving from New York to California. It’s a long drive and you can only really see 50 feet in front of you at a time. You need a map and the belief that you are going to get there.
And that is really the power of showing up at 8AM 1500 times.
You take that first step and you keep committing to the belief that you are going to end up somewhere.