Top 31 Quotes & Sayings by Dan John

I don't care what you bench. I care if you have friends and family you love, a career that you love, and helped someone you don't know today.

Most new trainers agonize over the perfect workout, over-train virtually everyone and are the crazy purist idiots who embarrass themselves at restaurants trying to impress everyone with how clean they eat.

Please understand nearly every concept I hold near and dear has been stolen from others much brighter and better than me.

If something is important, do it every day; if it's not important, don't do it at all.

Their highs are too low and their lows are too high.

I said it was simple. Not easy.

There's nothing worse than when someone takes a community education course and becomes an expert on how yoga is the best way to burn the visceral fat that's housed deep in your abdomen.

Come, enter into my imagination and see me as I truly am.

The 9th grade was the best three years of my life. I was benching 85 lbs, drug free!

If you're spending so much time at the gym that your mail is forwarded there, you're not dedicated - you've got a mental disorder.

Look at your goals. Look at your behavior. Does your behavior match your goals?

As we're bombarded daily with new ads for pills, diets and ab-doers, we have to protect our wallets and our time.

The best tonic for soreness is to do the movement that got you sore in the first place.

The problem is yes, everything works. Doing everything at once makes you marginal at everything... at best.

Back in the 1970s, I ate a high-protein diet to get bigger and stronger. As a senior at Utah State, I weighed 218 pounds with eight percent body fat, and threw the discus over 190 feet. Then I got some advice from the people at the Olympic Training Center. I needed carbs, they advised, and lots of them. They pointed to studies done on the American distance runners. Being an idiot, I took the advice to eat like emaciated, over-trained sub-performers. It took years of high carbohydrate grazing to learn the evils of this advice.

If it is important do it everyday

Without challenges, the human body will soften. We thrive when we push our boundaries, reach goals, and blast personal records. We perform better, we look better, and we feel alive.

It's hard to peak when you've been training since 1965.

I think there are two keys to success. One is to show up. The other one is to keep going. Most people don’t keep going.

Just tell me what to do. I don't know where I'm going, but I know I don't want to be here.

I only judge people by the depth of their squat.

There are “bus bench” workouts and “park bench” workouts. A bus bench and a park bench look exactly the same, but your expectations sitting in them are radically different.

When things go wrong, simplify.

Here's an idea: eat like an adult. Stop eating fast food, stop eating kid's cereal, knock it off with all the sweets and comfort foods, and ease up on the snacking. And don't act like you don't know this: eat more vegetables and fruits. Really, how difficult is this? Stop with the whining. Stop with the excuses. Act like an adult and stop eating like a television commercial. Grow up.

If it's important do it everyday.

There is a price you pay if you want to train military personnel - they don't all come back.

Fat loss is an all-out war. Give it 28 days - only 28 days. Attack it with all you have. It's not a lifestyle choice; it's a battle. Lose fat and then get back into moderation. There's another one for you: moderation. Revelation says it best: 'You are lukewarm and I shall spit you out.' Moderation is for sissies.

Squats don't hurt your knees; what you are doing hurts your knees.

Well, I am a great believer in supercompensation. Short term overtraining leads to long-term success. I can hear the complaints about injuries, but, in truth, not too many of us suffer injuries that lead to surgery, according to those studies in the 1950?s. In fact, if you are not a druggie and have some common sense, I think you can afford to train harder than you think.

The Goal is the keep the GOAL the GOAL

Most champions are built by punch the clock workouts rather than extraordinary efforts.