By Dave Chesser
I’m not an English teacher but today I want to teach you some American slang. In America, we love our barbeque, especially in the South where I’m from. And everyone who knows barbeque will tell you the secret is a really great sauce. Now tastes will vary. Some people like it more sweet, some like sweet and spicy, and a lot of people like different types of hotness in their sauce. But whatever the flavor, a thick and strong sauce is always preferred.
So with that background, I want to introduce to you the American slang phrase “he brings the weak sauce.” Trust me, you will get lots of chances to use this phrase in discussing weight training.
If a good barbeque sauce is thick and rich then anything that weakens the sauce is not desirable. It’s considered weak. So if someone says about another guy “he brings the weak sauce” then the meaning is no matter what the group does, this one guy always tries to reduce the effort. He doesn’t contribute to the group and make it stronger, his presence weakens it. If as a group you want to race to the top of a hill, he will say it’s too high and his legs hurt. If you want to see who can do 100 pushups the fastest, he will complain that’s too hard. This type of person says “wo mei you liqi” and “wo hao lei” a lot. Yuck, just hearing that makes me want to take a shower to wash the weakness off me.
If you discuss strength training or other hard types of training with anyone in the general population, you will run into this immediately. “Why do you work so hard?” “Don’t you know that will hurt you?” “Why don’t you come to my yoga class, instead?” They “bring the weak sauce.”
I expect this from the general population, but hearing it from so-called trainers really makes me sick. Where’s the hard effort? Where’s the pushing to get a personal record? I want someone to scream at me and tell me I can do another rep. I want to see people trying so hard that their face is red. I want to hear grunting and see people straining to get to the next level.
But what do I see instead? Foam rolling instead of exercise, poorly done TRX half rows instead of pullups, toy kettlebells that my 7 year-old daughter wouldn’t use, and quarter squats being taught by “weight training experts.”
Basically, I see a lot of people that “bring the weak sauce” even within the fitness industry.
So you have two choices, you can “bring the weak sauce” or you can man up and make an effort by killing it in the gym. If you choose the latter, you will join us in making ourselves and our community stronger. And boy do we need it!