Written by Dorian Yates
08 March 2019

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Dorian Yates - Turning Negatives Into Positives

 

Today I want to talk about something that has applications far beyond bodybuilding, and that can drastically alter the course of one’s life. We all make mistakes, and we all have bad things happen to us. The difference is that some beat themselves up over their mistakes, while others see them as learning tools to get closer to their goals. Many people see setbacks as purely negative events, and often quit pursuing their goals after encountering them. Others see setbacks as opportunities. Here are a few “negative” events from my own past that turned out to have positive implications in the long run.

 

Never Cycling My Intensity

In my early years of training, my enthusiasm to be a champion bodybuilder was unbounded. Every time I went to the gym, it was war! I had to give 100 percent and beat my last workout with more weight and greater intensity. At this time, I was still working a very physical full-time job. It was all just too much for my system to recover from. About every two months, I would regularly get sick. It alternated between sore/strep throats and terrible colds. It used to frustrate me to no end, because then I couldn’t train as hard until I felt better again! My immune system was being badly repressed because I was stressing my CNS so severely with the constant balls-to-the-wall workouts. Eventually I figured out what was going on and started to take a couple of weeks where I would scale down the weights and intensity after about five to six weeks of going all-out. That’s just the balance that worked for me. Yours may be different. But had I never gotten sick all those times, I would have continued overtraining and I damn sure would never have become Mr. Olympia.

 

The Squatting Injury

When I started training in the early 1980s, Tom Platz was the man when it came to legs (and still is, after all this time). Tom built his freaky quads with ass-to-grass barbell squats, so that’s what we all did too, hoping our legs would at least vaguely resemble his. Early on, I had a small injury in my upper thigh near the hip that got worse over time. Once it was bad enough to require surgery to remove scar tissue, I knew that my squatting days were over. It might have worked wonders for Platz and many others, but with my particular structure and leverages, I simply never had the proper body mechanics to reap the benefits. I hardly ever felt the stress in my quads— instead it was my lower back, hips and glutes. The injury forced me to explore other exercises that became my mainstays on leg day: leg presses, hack squats and Smith machine squats. All of those gave me much better results than squats had. My legs were pretty good before, but now they started becoming very good. Had I never sustained that injury, I would have stubbornly persisted in squatting, and my legs would never have grown to their full potential.

 

Losing the 1986 British Championships

In 1986, I went into the British Championships looking great and feeling confident of a win and earning my IFBB pro card. I did win the heavyweight class, but lost the overall (and a pro card) to someone else. Without belaboring the point, it was a bad call and I really should have won. More than 30 years later, Peter McGough is still upset about it! But the thing is, at that point I really wasn’t ready to be a pro, at least not a good pro. Others in that situation might have felt bitter or cheated and just given up. I said, you know what? I’m going to come back next time so fucking crazy huge and ripped that they will have no choice but to give it to me! And that’s what I did in 1988. Had I turned pro in ‘86, I probably would have competed in the IFBB and not done very well, and might have hung it up at that point. As you can see, sometimes losing is just what you need so you can come back and win that much more decisively. 

 

The Biceps Tear

Obviously, the biceps tear never turned out to be a good thing, but hear me out. I tore my biceps six weeks out from the 1994 Mr. Olympia. As confident as I may seem, believe me that I had my strong moments of doubt. I kept thinking that may have been the end of my competitive career. Honestly, I was devastated. The easy thing to do would have been to skip the show, address the injury and come back again in ‘95. Instead, 24 hours after the injury, I made a decision. I said why not just press on and see how I look? Unless I really didn’t look near my best, it just didn’t make sense to quit when I was so close. I decided to do everything I could to get to the contest and do the best I could. If I didn’t win, so be it— but I would know that I had given 100 percent. You know the rest of the story. Looking back, if I had dropped out of the show, I tend to think it’s possible I may never have won another Olympia title. I would have lost momentum, and somebody else might have been Mr. Olympia for a few more years instead of me.

 

Before I end this discussion, ponder these examples of people who never gave up.

 

• Michael Jordan is considered by many to be the greatest man to ever play basketball. Yet in high school in North Carolina in 1979, he was cut from the basketball team and supposedly went home and cried in his bedroom. Had Jordan quit, you would never have heard of him— and certainly no one would be wearing Air Jordans!

 

• Walt Disney was fired from his job as a cartoonist from a Kansas City newspaper, and was told he “lacked imagination and had no good ideas.”

 

• A Baltimore TV station pulled a young Oprah Winfrey off the air, saying she was “unfit for television news.”

 

• Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank were fired from a home-improvement chain called Handy Dan that went out of business soon after. They started their own company— a little chain called The Home Depot.

 

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