Your Narrative Determines Your Results | Alexander Juan Antonio Cortes

When I started personal training, something you realize very swiftly is that training is not a physical job; it's a psychological one. And people's limitations that they have, they're not truly physical limitations; they're mental limitations. Everyone's body has a story, and most of what people think about themselves is self-limiting. So, your self-limiting beliefs correspond with your self-limiting physical capabilities.

Your self-talk, your mindset, your stories—whether they be limiting, whether they being empowering—your personal history, everything you've grown up with... At any given time, the body you are in is your entire life lived to that point. You are where you are right now because of how you lived.

If you are going to change your future, you have to change what you think of yourself in the present, and you have to change how you think about your past. The past is always going to try to prove itself. So, however you have acted up until this point, you are probabilistically going to continue acting in that way.

Periodization, when I discovered it, it made me realize that most of what people do in life, their attempts at bettering themselves, it's just throwing shit at the wall and hoping something sticks. If you're really serious about it, you're going to take the time to figure out that continuum before you embark on that journey.

If you're going to fundamentally change who you are, you have to legitimately visualize thinking to the future and consider, who do I want to become 5 years from now? 10 years from now? What do I want to be capable of doing? You have to create this future picture... and it has to be concrete.

If you want excellence in something, it's not even really about the enjoyment; it's sort of about the difficulty in just getting there and having to continuously break yourself down and try to reach a new level. Does that feel good? Not really. But does it make you feel something that you don't get anything else? Absolutely.

Success is almost like its own force ... It has a power that way, but it's fleeting. It's fleeting, and it requires a cost every single day if you want to keep it going.

I would say, for those people who truly identify with a particular passion that way, that's their nature. They have found a thing that makes them who they are, and you can't negotiate with what your nature is. Yeah, you can discover it, you can experiment with it; you can't negotiate with it.

You cannot separate mentality from physicality. They are very much, ideally, one in the same. It's the same thing.

I'm not passionate about fitness. Despite making a career out of fitness, I'm not passionate about fitness. But I do love to teach, and I realized a long time ago that, regardless of whatever state my life is in, I always want to be teaching something.

Fitness is one of those conundrums. You can play at fitness, you can try to be fit, you can try to be dedicated. And then you cannot be it, you can ignore it—but then you're going to pay a cost for it.