Thanks for your support.
Last week, you helped us raise a ton of money for a great cause. I don’t know if it’s possible to explain how much that means to us, but I’m going to give it a go.
I’m going to go ahead and be honest: I took this whole thing far more personally than I’ve taken anything else GMB has done in the past. Not to say I don’t believe in our products – I do. Not to say I’m not moved by the notes we get from people who send us emails to say thank you after improving their health – I am. I love my job, I love our company, and I love the people who are drawn to what we do.
But for some reason, this just got under my skin in a way I’m not used to and forced me to consider the role strength plays in my own life.
We all have pain and trials and difficulty, and it takes real strength to get through some of them. Yet, we never have to do it alone. Nobody I know is strong enough to make it through life alone. When our strength is tested, we often rely on the strength of others to help us.
The following is quoted from our Pump Up Japan campaign page. You may have read it, but I want to ask you to read it over again and consider the role this definition of strength plays in your life.
Gold Medal Bodies is a company that we founded on “real strength,” which we define as being able to do what we want — and what we must — anytime, anywhere. Being strong is not a novelty for us. It’s a duty to our families and our world.
Right now, there are hundreds of thousands of Japanese men, women, and children who are putting their strength to the test.
They’re facing physical, mental, and emotional challenges that you and I cannot fathom. Many have had their homes and livelihoods destroyed. Many more have lost their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, sons, daughters, and pets. Just to carry on under such circumstances requires a strength most of us will never have to muster.
- To open a notebook in the middle of a community shelter and begin doing math homework, even though you have no idea when you’ll next set foot inside a classroom.
- To walk two hours to the next town and stand in line for two more hours to check the log book for any word that somebody has seen or heard from a family member who’s missing.
- To return to the place your house once stood and search for anything. Anything at all.
This kind of strength is something you can’t get on an elliptical machine. It doesn’t come from using a certain type of exercise or number of sets or reps, and you can’t build it with all the protein in the world.
Yet, it’s exactly what we had in mind when we founded GMB.
Lest you think this is getting a little melodramatic, consider that the mind and body are not separate entities, but two sides of the same coin. This isn’t about metaphysics or some kind of New Age stuff — it’s simply that training your body to adapt to difficult and evolving challenges is one of the very few things you can do proactively to prepare yourself emotionally to deal with unpredictable situations.
Of course, you can never really be prepared for a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami, but now that you know a little more about what strength means to us, maybe you can see how Pump Up Japan fits that context.
Just as we rely on others to support us when we need a little extra strength, it’s our duty as humans to stand up and be strong for others when they need it too. And we did. You did.
I’m proud that we raised a lot of money, but what I’m most proud of here is that we gathered our collective strength to add to that of people who need it. I like to think that the training we do plays a positive role in developing that. I know that the community we’ve built together has helped make me stronger as a person.
Thank you.
We’d love to know what role strength plays in your life. How about leaving a quick comment below and telling us about it?
And when you’re done, check out our GMB Manifesto, which more thoroughly outlines our approach to building the skill of strength.
In 2008 our town had a devastating flood after a stalled weather system dumped more than 10 inches of rain in 24 hours. The river flooded higher than a 500 year flood in a tsunami like wave. The clean up and rebuilding cost probably close to a billion dollars. Our basement was completely filled with water; we spent the night listening to the river flow through the basement window. It stopped about 3 inches short of flooding the first floor. That same year I lost more than 40% of my business in the economic upheaval; my husband lost his job early in 2009.
But in August 2008, I also started training for a triathlon. I trained 10 hours weekly on average. After we finished our basement, my husband started working out on a regular basis. We both realized later that the physical and mental demands we had from the cleanup after the flood had toughened our bodies and minds, and we didn’t want to go back to complacency again. Through adversity and necessity we adopted an approach to our lives that focused on strength, resiliency and simplicity. We are in better health, feel younger, and have a lot less concern for material things: real strength that continues to develop and evolve.
I watch your videos, keep an eye on your site and jumped to respond when you offered your most recent video compilation of exercises with all proceeds going to help the victims of the most recent tsunami. I believe in people who believe in people. And those are the people I seek out and support. Your unselfish plea for help for OTHERS in desperate need shows YOUR strength. I will take strength of character over physical strength anyday and you have displayed it in spades. Bravo
@juliabsteiner Thanks, Julia. That really means a lot to us.
@nancytmurphy That’s it, Nancy. I love this:
“Through adversity and necessity we adopted an approach to our lives that focused on strength, resiliency and simplicity. “
It was a privelage to buy the package, indeed if anything I felt guilty that I should receive something so valuable for money that should have been donated anyway. I think the human values clearly underpinning your products are what makes them stand out. For me strength is very simple; as an older dad it is about being able to pick my kids up and carry them down the street without effort, to be able in a few years to take part in sports days well into my forties and to hopefully also be able to serve my community, locally and globablly. Living in Scotland where we are blessed with weather that rarely excites but even more rarely destroys, the images from Japan really did seem from another world, but of course they weren’t, they were our neighbours and I applaud your efforts to help build on the extraordinary resilience already shown.
My family lives in Japan. I was here in the U.S. when it happened. I could not get through to them for three days. At the time, I felt that what I was going through required real strength. Then once I got through to my 11 year old daughter, I quickly realized that I was wrong. She said she went through 41 earthquakes during those 3 days. Of course that includes aftershocks. She was home alone for the first three hours of them. She said ” Dad! I am fine! People have died and are hurt real bad. We need to help them.” And there it was…True Stength. I held a local fundraiser that weekend in Utah, we brought in RInpoche the Tibetian Lama. Our yoga community and wellness tribe came together with a $3800.00 Donation to the Red Cross. And I will be traveling to Japan in July to set up a program to bring my community to help rebuild theirs. So Great Job!
@EricCoy That’s fantastic Eric. Thanks so much. Keep us up to date with your program and let me know if there’s any way we can help.
@juliabsteiner Thanks Julia.
@scfinlayson Thanks so much. Strength for family and the world. Word.
@EricCoy Boy can I relate. We were in the US at that time also. And those first few days I couldn’t get through to my family were rough. Way to go with the fundraiser Eric.
Good thoughts, Andy. Strength is mental more than physical. It’s the mental toughness to achieve more than the body wants to do, and it’s based around the team. That motivating training partner, family member, or fire team that you would die for that allow any of us to achieve greatness in our lives, if only for a moment. Each finger on the hand is easily broken individually, but when combined into a fist, the combine result is far stronger than the sum.
Well put. It’s about moving away from a life focused on hedonic opulence-more, bigger, faster, cheaper, now, to one of quality, resilience, adaptability, endurability.
Good comments, guys. Thanks.
Strength has always been the sort of thing that you know it when you experience it.
When Smeone is strong you see it in everything from their tone of voice to their body language. The same can be said for weakness. Even strength that is used to over compensate for a weakness doesn’t do a good job of hiding it.
I think when strength is viewed as more than just physical, that’s when great things happen. Thanks to the GMB crew. Keep up the good work, it’s very much appreciated.
Thanks, Jason!