K.I.S.A.S

JED WIGHTMAN     PERFORMANCE/SPORTS NUTRITIONIST       ADVANTAGE FITNESS LTD

This article has been written for Canadian Physique Alliance January/February Edition

So what do I mean by this acronym K.I.S.A.S. (pronounced Keesus)  in the first place? It simply means “keep it simple and succeed.”

A cousin of the acronym K.I.S.S. Some of you in fact already know that one, which came to me when I was a much younger man.

Hello everyone and Happy New Year to each of you. I trust that 2024 was a year of growth, progress development, and the furthering of your best possible self.

So, is it just me or did 2024 go by faster than any year previous? It seems that the older I get, the years seem to feel like months used to, 35 years ago. Something that really sticks out to me, over the last 25 years especially, and more prevalent since the unleashing Social Media, circa 2006 “Facebook,” is how extremely complicated people make, on a macro level, their lives, and a micro level, the multitude of things which make up the portions of our life.

Specifically when it comes to our physique, performance, recovery, and creating a result that, for most of you reading this, has much to do with presenting results to judges to be able to place higher than once before… Or high for the first time ever.

As a boy, I was fortunate enough to know someone who left me with one of the most powerful pieces of advice I have ever received. He, a man of few words, battle-hardened, stoic, and concise. Observed me struggling like I’d never before. He looked at me, yelled “Wightman,” I looked up immediately with a “yes sir,” and he responded with 4 short words. I can hear him now, like he was in my ear at this moment. “Keep it simple stupid,” he shouted, turned, and walked away. Now the way my mind processed this was rapid and helped me to sort out what was standing in front of me.

You see, I was overcomplicating things because I wanted the best result, the fastest I could be. I was ahead of everyone else, wanted mine to be the best. But in doing so, I tied myself in knots, was stuck, I would surely fail. Well, I squared away quickly, I saw through the complications I was creating, and I didn’t fail. It came in very handy over the course of my life. Especially being a coach for the last 22 years, teaching this to my clients.

But here’s the thing you have to understand, that the outcome of “keeping it simple” MUST be one that creates success for you. So K.I.S.A.S, keep it simple and succeed, does not mean, less focus, doesn’t mean do less constructive things in effort, or the intensity, or passion in the pursuit of what you’re trying to achieve.

So I want to talk today very specifically about the road to being big ripped and getting the best placing and result possible.

K.I.S.A.S. Guidance

Why did I say above the unleashing of Social Media? How does that connect to keeping things simple and not complicating what we are trying to achieve? This, of course, pertains to Social Media’s pervasive influence. I believe that it is most directed to the younger folks out there. The ones who see and have seen such prolific images and representations of physiques since they were children, Facebook first released in 2006. YouTube next, and growing up through Instagram and TikTok, and all of the other platforms that have been so heavily impactful on the creation of what these young people’s goals and ideas, and how to achieve them.

See when I was young. It was bodybuilding magazines, and you had to wait every month for one to come out. Or it was movies and books, and this is great, giving you an idea of a goal. But it was slow and limited in origin. Magazines. So when we looked at these guys, we knew this took a lifetime of work. Then started the slow process of the lifelong journey of creating this. Along with the books in the library, maybe you were fortunate enough to know of a great mentor in the gym or to be able to hire a coach, that was themselves successful in the field.

Now you listened, disciplined, ate, and you trained. Day after day month after month year after year. Some basic vitamins, minerals, and maybe some protein/creatine supplements. Simple, basic super effective, and you were doing something that because of the time that it took, made you want to pursue it even harder, more passionate, and were so much more fulfilled. Because of the arduous process; the toil day and day out, it was HARD AF but so simple!

You see, steroids weren’t even a topic of discussion for young guys. Seriously they aren’t, and if possibly when they were discussed, they were years later down the road, many years later when you had some really decent experience under your belt. Or maybe for many, they never were at all.

Then things changed fast, I remember working with competitors in the mid-2000s and it was all “I saw a post about a guy taking this and this and this and this (for a pro qualifier) what if I took these + 14 other things, I’d be bigger and more ripped than him, right? I’d win the national qualifier right? Literally, like out of nowhere. Then it trickled down to younger people, the hockey kids that I was training, the dryland athletes, the nutrition classes at the high school and hockey academy. Even the summer camps for speed, agility, and quickness.

All these not even 18-year-old kids were talking about taking some kind of performance-enhancing substance! No, I’m not saying they were taking them. They were talking about taking them. They knew a guy, saw a guy on Facebook this or that or the other, who was and so…

So fast-forward to today, and there are teenagers all over the Internet on more gear than pro bodybuilders were taking back in the day. There’s young guys who have pro calibre physiques that are not under 25, pulling out of the nationals again, because they are sick, their body’s falling apart.

If one is good, 10 is better mentality taking things that are not in their programs, that their coaches don’t even know about. In some cases dying. In the last five years this has gone from a small recognizable number of to a very high number, many. In a community that doesn’t have a ridiculously high number of people. If you were to say, compare to NCAA and NFL and NHL and WHL and NHL.

So clearly, I don’t see success in this, while there may be temporary rewards like a win or even a card. We see today the youngest person to ever turn pro. They keep getting younger, but are they and will they be successful competitive pros? What risk have they put their health at down the road. What kind of longevity does this create, none. So I ask each of you out there reading this, if we were just to keep things more simple. Would we not see a greater level of success?

You may be asking yourself, well what do you consider succeeding? And I guess that’s different for many people. But maybe one thing that we can all agree on, is that succeeding overall, means achieving your goals while staying alive, and having your health.

So to do what it takes to be the best, to place higher to get a hard work for and deserved win. Do it intelligently, The caveat is, take you time. Do we want just one of those wins, or do we want to have a series of those wins, and do we want those wins to go on for years and for us to look back when we are older, healthy, strong, and feel fulfilled with all of the work that we put in. Reflecting proud and living by example on all of the things that we chose to do when we were young, to get there.

Keep it simple, remove the influence that has been set into the psyches of many of us out there. Disconnect from the over complicated, from the exposure to these images, and the INFORMATION being confused with knowledge on social media. Coupled with easy access and availability of the things, that can have very much health harming consequences. Now even become more prolific, because of social media and because there is no regulation, there is little a referee to this. The mentality is that if one is good, five is better, and if five is better, well 10 has to be the thing!

We are over complicating things, and there is no success in that.

So, K.I.S.A.S. Stay hungry and driven. And we’ll see y’all on the next one!
ALWAYS FORWARD!