Book review: Under the Bar, by Dave Tate

I finally  decided that I had waited long enough to read Under the Bar, by Dave Tate.  I have been a huge fan of Dave and Elite FTS for a long time and his sage advice has steered me in good directions in the weights room when I could easily have gone astray.

When I dived in, I was surprised to find it a slow starter.  I wasn’t surprised by anything he was saying and he wasn’t really grabbing me by the scruff of the neck.  However, I gave it a couple of chapters and soon found that he was just warming up.

In the early chapters, Dave puts the things he talks about all the time: honesty, integrity and attitude etc.  They’re important but you’ve heard him talk about them before.  When he gets going on education, criticism and risk management, though, be prepared to learn some new things.

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What will I find?

Like an old religious text or a self-help manual, Under the Bar has twelve chapters and covers twelve key virtues or beneficial attributes to help you succeed or at least live a better and more enjoyable life.  It also opens with a good handful of motivational quotes about each attribute.

1. Aim – Success demands singleness of purpose (Vince Lombardi) – Dave explains what it means to have an aim and how to structure writing down that aim.  He explains how to build a plan around reaching an aim and how to track progress against that aim.
2. Attitude – Weakness of attitude become weakness of character (Albert Einstein) – Dave gives some great examples of lifters who faced difficult situations but refused to allow previous defeats to influence later opportunities.  The bottom line is clear.  People who succeed don’t crowd their minds with past failures when there is a new opportunity to win.
3. Integrity – Faced with a crisis, the man of character falls back on himself (Charles de Gaulle) - I have always seen Dave as a man of great integrity and I think it comes across in the way he carries himself and his business.  Dave reveals that his secret in maintaining that integrity all of the time is always asking himself in any business interaction how he would want to see his company if he were the customer.
4. Honesty – Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom (Thomas Jefferson) – Dave explains why honesty is so important to him personally.  To me, honesty begins with being honest with yourself, which is why I picked the Thomas Jefferson quotation.  Most people who fail to achieve their goals fail because they can’t bring themselves to perform an honest appraisal of where they are at the moment.
5. Teamwork – It is amazing what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit (Harry Truman) – Dave explains the importance of teamwork in all aspects of life and tells some great stories about the Westside Gym.
6. Criticism – The work of the critic is of secondary importance and in the end progress is accomplished by the man who does things (Theodore Roosevelt) - in this chapter, Dave really demonstrates a powerful understanding of people.  He explains how criticism must be tempered carefully in order to achieve its goal of furthering the recipient’s goals.  And if you find that you don’t care about the recipient’s goals then you aren’t criticising, you’re heckling.  Without wishing to come across as being bitter, I wish (almost) every school teacher I ever met had read this.
7. Education – I have never let my schooling interfere with my education (Mark Twain) – I must admit that I was shocked when I learned how much Dave reads and how passionately he speaks about collecting books on topics that interest him.  He talks about highlighting and post-it notes between the pages with the casual familiarity of a man whose study is significantly better stocked than his larder.
8. Risk management – Courage is not lack of fear but acting in spite of it (Mark Twain) – Dave talks about different kinds of risk.  Most people see risks as things to avoid or unavoidable things to take, depending on their personality.  However, Dave recommends trying to classify risks to identify whether they are worth taking.  He sees (1) risks that you don’t need to take (because someone else will take them and show you whether they are worth it), (2) risks you don’t need to take (because they won’t yield the results that you need), (3) risks you can afford to take (because they are small and if they don’t work out then you can always make up the lost time/money), (4) risks you can’t afford to make (because the upside is poor and the downside is catastrophic), and (5) risks you can’t afford to miss (like working on something transformatory rather than something humdrum).
9. Perseverance – The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength or a lack of knowledge but rather a lack of will (Vince Lombardi) – using some personal examples, Dave explains why ultimately not giving up is more important than anything else.
10. Flexibility – It is not necessary to change.  Survival is not mandatory (W Edwards Deming) – Dave explains how every lifter’s plan must always eventually change.  And this applies to all things in life, too.  Life never plays out in the way we expect it to.  We must adapt if we are to overcome what life throws at us.
11. Execution – You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do (Henry Ford) – ultimately, we all have the choice to either sit back and watch other people do things that further their goals or to get on and do things that might (or might not) further our own goals.  The only thing we can be sure of is that if we don’t do anything, we definitely won’t succeed.
12. Responsibility – The reason people blame things on previous generations is that there is only one other choice (Doug Larson) – Dave lists 50 excuses he has used at one time or another in explaining why he wasn’t able to perform as well at a meet as he wanted to.  Ultimately, though, it was in realising that he was responsible for the circumstances surrounding all of them that made him proactive in preventing the same things happening going forward.

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Will I enjoy it?

Well, in my opinion, if you’ve ever picked up a barbell, you’ll find something in here to enjoy.  Plus, if you like your self-help books to be honest and upfront, then you’ll really appreciate the way Dave makes his points, using himself as an example.