Posts by :
- Happiness (yes, I know… can I be any more broad???)
- Simplicity
- Inner calm
- Belief in the power of action
- Meditation
- Reading more, watching TV less
- Fighting and fighting hard against anything that even has a whiff of procrastination about it
- Keeping up with my blogging/writing. As a more concrete goal, I want to get an article published over at EliteFTS (if I can figure out something to write they would actually want to print).
- For my training/lifting – not placing any kind of self-limitations on what is truly possible.
- If you are looking to get in better shape or lose weight, DO NOT just join a gym if you do not belong already. Seriously. I am fortunate enough to lift in my own home gym as well as at a private training gym, but I’ve spent an enormous amount of time in commercial gyms and joining in early January is a huge mistake. Why? First, you will be lucky enough to join hordes of others doing the same thing, so the gym will be crowded beyond belief. Super fun! Second, I can remember being in the gym during this sad time of year, looking around and thinking with a sigh, “Man… 90% of these people will not be here in a month.” And that’s just the truth.So what to do instead? Find a smaller private place with a qualified training (preferably one with a NSCA certification, especially the CSCS cert). Will it be more expensive to follow this route? Hell yes. Will you actually have a really good shot of meeting your goal? Umm, hell yes again… and isn’t that the point of having the goal in the first place? I might even make an entire post about this later in the week to really hammer this one home.
- If you are in charge of managing, leading or supervisor other people, read this great post by Bob Sutton, Stanford professor and author of Good Boss, Bad Boss
and The No Asshole Rule
. It’s a short and excellent piece about what good bosses think. My favorite is #1 – “I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it feels like to work for me.” Pure truth.
- Look back before looking forward. Felicia Day (the pipe dream of comic book and gaming geeks across the globe) put up a great post about… GASP!… learning from what 2010 taught her versus focusing too much on what she plans on doing in 2011. And she learned a few nuggets that you can apply to just about anything in your own life. Nice huh? Plus it’s fun to read the comments from all the dudes have a full on nerdgasm from looking at her photo.
- log press (as many reps as possible in 1 minute)
- tire deadlift (as many reps as possible in 1 minute)
- front hold (holding a weight out at arm’s length for as long as possible)
- farmer’s walks (walking 40 feet with some serious weight on long handles, turning, and walking back 40 feet)
- barrel and sandbag medley (carrying a barrel/keg a distance, running back, carrying a sandbag the same distance, running back and carrying the final sandbag to the finish)
January 1, 2011 – The Obligatory “Kick Off the Year Right” Post
January 1st, 2011Today is a funny kind of day, if you ask me… which I am going to assume that you did by virtue of reading this post. Yeah, I am taking more than a little bit of license with that assumption, but seriously… I am whoop-ass incarnate and can pull that kind of thing off. Or at least that’s what I tell myself from time to time.
Anyhoo, the last few days are the time of year when people all around the world taking time to look back on the previous year and look ahead with a bit of hope towards the new year, most often in the form of making resolutions, goals and promises about all of the glorious things they want to do differently. The very notion of only reflecting and goal-setting once a year is anathema to a lot of people, but I don’t tend to get quite so fired up about the process.
First, I think it’s good almost any time we stop to think things over, so if there is a time of year where people decide to stop (even for a moment), I can get behind that. Second, I think all of us are very influenced by the calendar anyway, whether in our work lives (where goals, deadlines and all sort of shenanigans are completely calendar-driven) or in our personal lives as well (bills come monthly, taxes are done once a year, etc.). A continuation of that calendar-affected behavior seems fairly normal to me. That being said… if you just pick a single day to think things over and never consider it again during the year or don’t tweak your goals to accommodate changes in life, well then that’s just plain silly.
Plus, I actually like doing some resolutions. For reasons I have never been able to fully fathom, I tend to do well sticking to them, even when I don’t keep them in my face all year long. Weird, I know.
This year I am approaching it a little differently by thinking about overarching themes for the year and then building more specific goals and actions to go along with those themes. My big themes are as follows:
Happiness is really a big piece of what drives the other 3 themes, but my focus there is about doing what I can to find my own sense of happiness (i.e. from within as opposed to externally-driven) and doing my best to spread happiness to those closest to me. This notion of my liberally sowing happiness akin to a self-help Johnny Appleseed is really about something I’ve noticed about myself that, truthfully, I really don’t like. What is that? Mostly the notion that I will tend to have less patience and be less polite (at times, mind you) to my own family than I would be to someone who is either a stranger or fairly removed from me. That’s gotta stop… now. And yes, this photo on the right is a perfect example of pure happiness… well, that and complete idiocy on my part.
In terms of actions I plan on taking this year to get at some of these items above? I am still working out a more concrete list, but a few of them are:
There are more specifics here, but I am going to avoid going into inordinate amounts of detail to bore you to utter tears… umm, that’s if I haven’t done so already. I am one wordy sonofagun. Stunner, I know.
If you are performing your own goal-setting right now, I’ve been fortunate enough to either run across some nice links or even have a semi-original thought of my own to assist you through the process:
So to 2011, I give you my warmest welcome. My arms, heart and mind are all open… now it’s just up to me to make it special. God help me, I will.
Focused on Failure… And Why That’s a Good Thing
December 29th, 2010
Failure is a funny sort of topic to write about, quite frankly. I mean… just look at the word. Failure. There’s simply nothing attractive about it. It doesn’t feel good to say and God only knows it never brings with it a single glimmering positive connotation of any kind, shape or sort. It just sits there looking at you with this smug smirk of self-satisfaction because it knows you and it are not strangers to each other’s company. Oh no… we are all humans and it’s essentially hardwired into our genetic code to face many failures in our lives. Wait, if you are reading this you ARE human, right? Not some freaky-deaky Cylon? See, this is what I get for watching several seasons worth of Battlestar Galactica during my Christmas holiday break… I mean, unless you look like Tricia Helfer as a Cylon. Then we’re square.
But failure is something I’ve written about once or twice before on this very blog, mostly because despite all of the negativity associated with it, it’s really a pretty fascinating topic to me… whether it’s why we fail, how we fight against failure and, most importantly to me, how we respond to our own failures.
I am confident that part of my focus on failure is based on a book my Mom gave me several years back when I was going through a very rough patch in my own life. The book is by John C. Maxwell and it’s entitled “Failing Forward: Turning Mistakes Into Stepping Stones For Success” and it really shifted my thinking on how I view my own shortcomings, mistakes and failures. I’m not going to claim victory over failure forever and that I can walk away from my failures as if they never ever occurred… but I am getting a lot better at handling my mistakes for sure.
I bought the book again recently for my Kindle since I couldn’t find the original hardcover… I have to believe I lent it to someone at one point or another. Several passages within it struck chords with me all over again and I wanted to share a few of them.
First:
When achievers fail, they see it as a momentary event, not a lifelong epidemic.
Second:
Tell yourself, “I’m not a failure. I failed at doing something.” There’s a big difference.
In all honesty, it was difficult to narrow it down to 2 quotes from the book because I highlighted quite a few more than that. However, I think these 2 are timely and serve a bit of a key message as 2010 comes to an end and people begin to think with hope (hopefully!) about what lies ahead in 2011. And these two quotes link up with each other so beautifully to create a singular point on failure that bears a little time noodling over. So be prepared to noodle, my friends… seriously, prepare yourself. Get a comfy chair, a cup of green tea and a little Tchaikovsky or something.
The first point is about how failure is just that’s fleeting… if you approach it that way. It’s a singular event and a moment in time – it’s not the blueprint for how the rest of your life will unfold. Hell, it’s not even the blueprint for how the activity you failed at will always unfold… provided that’s how you look at it. Therein lies the challenge, no doubt… to isolate the moment as just a moment, give it thought and move on.
The second point gets to how whatever the failure was… it was an event… it was not you. But we all tend to view it that way at some point in our lives, don’t we? “I’m such a failure!” Ugh… just typing those words made my fingers feel dirty and in need of a hard scrubbing. Bleah. We personalize how we act as being an encompassing part of who we are… and isn’t that completely insane? Especially since we rarely tend to do that with a success, but damn… we will latch onto a failure like a drowning man clutching a life vest.
And that’s where these 2 points converge into a single notion… that while you will fail many times in your life, those failures are events unto themselves and are not YOU. If your failures truly do define you in any way, I would argue that they only do so by showing you were the kind of person willing to take daring enough actions that would risk failure in the first place. If you never fail… well, good Lord… did you ever really try in the first place?
That’s why I focus on failure… because if I am never missing, then maybe my targets are no better than a timid goal set without ambition, daring, verve or even imagination… and I don’t know about you, but that sound like a horribly boring way to shuffle through life.
So while I may not be a riverboat gambler when it comes to risk, I will seek to push myself and risk a few scraped knees along the way. It will give me something to talk about later.
Lessons Learned: My First Strongman Competition
December 28th, 2010When I first began lifting weights, probably during my freshman year of college, it was really about aesthetics. Unless I completely miss my guess, I think I was getting out of high school at around 145 lb. or so at my robust 5 feet 7 inches of dominating height. The rather small weight area at Fairfield U. was not glamorous, but it seemed liked it would get the job done for my purposes. I never had a plan or a clue back then and I’m wholly surprised I never did anything to damage myself permanently.
In the ensuing years, I became a little more knowledgeable, put on a few respectable pounds (currently up over 50 lbs. from my high school weight), read up on the subject more and began to create a semblance of a philosophy when it came to my own physical strength and conditioning. In fact, I truly believe… wait, scratch that… know that my best days are ahead of me in my lifting career.
The most interesting development of all is less about my physical state and more about my mental state for training. I tend to think of my physical training a lot more as it relates to my mind and spirit (and vice versa) than I ever have before. Lifting is not simply a physical act for me – it’s testing myself against my own preconceived ideas of what is possible… it’s seeing if something I once thought as out of reach (a weight, a kind of lift, a time sprinting up a hill) is really something continuously on the horizon or right at my feet, ready to be conquered.
Don’t get me wrong – I don’t stroll down the stairs into my home gym, put on Yanni and lift as if I were some kind of mild-mannered poet. Hardly. The philosophy is more for the time outside of the gym and is used to then drive the motivation inside of it. So when I walk in, I’m looking to bring intensity to each lift and attack whatever the exercise is with abandon.
Where am I going with all of this? Well, as the title of this post suggests, I did my first strongman competition a few weeks back. For those not familiar with strongman events, they are similar to those Met-RX World’s Strongest Man competitions you see on ESPN… except that’s the elite level of the sport with weights and events far beyond what I was experiencing December 5th up in Paxton, MA.
The event was Paxton Strongman 6 and was comprised of 5 different events:
I compete in the lightweight novice class which was for guys who have either never done a strongman competition or have only one done maybe one before. The funniest part is that for novices, they want to include as many people as possible so the weights used are lighter than “open” competitors and the size of the weight class is much broader… 230 lb. and under. I have no idea where else in the world 229 lb. is lightweight, but hey, there ya have it.
I finished in 9th place out of 12 competitors, which I guess is OK for my first ever competition… but in the end? It’s not as much about placing as what I learned from it all and how it’s generally applicable to a lot of every day situations. So here are my lessons learned from my first strongman competition:
You will be humbled. Embrace it.
The picture above was from the first event of the day – the log press. The weight is 170 lb. and must be cleaned up off 2 tires and then pressed overhead to a lockout position as many times as possible in 1 minute. I got 4 or 5 and the winner got around 11. When I was prepping for this event, I was closer to around 8 or so reps on this lift… but a funny thing happened on the way to this event for me. I was the last possible person lifting for this event out of everyone competing. See, they run all the weight classes side-by-side on these events so that 4 or 5 people go for the same minute within their class… but my class was last and I was the clean-up person in my class.
Technically, that’s an advantage because I know exactly how much reps I need to come in first place… but there is a wee bit of a snag for me because I had to wait longer than anyone else and I had never done this kind of thing before. To say I got anxious would be akin to saying a marathon is a brisk little jog to shake out the morning cobwebs. I was convinced I was going to puke when I was setting up to start this event. That’s not going to help anyone be focused on performance.
So what happened? I performed poorly and it made catching up later in the competition harder than it should have been. I saw guys who I am fairly certain I am better on this lift (and others) do better than me… and kudos to them for stepping up and performing well.
All of this taught me something important: when you get your ass kicked and do so in front of a whole bunch of people, accept it. It doesn’t make you less of a person or a failure or a loser. Being humbled like that is part of the fire that now drives me to do even better in my training because I want to do this again and really crush it. I’m not sure I would be pushing myself quite like this if I finished with an overall solid performance – I might have felt a little too self-satisfied.
This was not failure, my friends… this was a lesson in where true motivation is born.
Nike said it best: just do it.
When I first contemplated doing this contest, I was in touch with Matt Mills, owner/trainer of Lightning Fitness. I decided to sign up to train over at Matt’s place in addition to the lifting I do in my beloved home gym, Fierce and Mighty (which you have hopefully found as well on Facebook at the Fierce and Mighty page). Matt has done a few strongman competitions, winning a few along the way as welling as setting a national record for the log press (210 lbs for 15 reps in 1 minute… that’s absolutely sick). I hemmed and I hawed about doing a competition that was less than 2 months away and kept saying I wanted to be more prepared before I placed myself into the white-hot crucible of competition.
Matt relayed to me the same advice he had gotten before his first powerlifting competition: if you are thinking about competing, sign up and compete. It won’t be about where you place, but about what you learn when you compete (as this entire blog post is about).
And beyond that, there are few things that will focus your attention like an impending goal with a lot of public attention. All of my friends and family knew I was doing this and quite a few of them showed up to cheer me on. I really didn’t want to let them down and I think that, despite my own lack of satisfaction on my overall placing, it really made me push harder.
For people not interested in carrying around 170 lb. sandbags or deadlifting 370 lb. for 1 minute straight (which I hit for 19 reps, thank you very much!), you can use this same tool as well. Going on a diet? Book a trip to someplace warm where you want to wear a bathing suit. This can hone the focus of many, many people. Even beyond that, make public whatever your goal may be so your friends and family know what it is. That alone will make it far more challenging to give up on.
But regardless of what it is, do something to get yourself moving and started. Rare is the time in life when inaction is better than action, so take steps… however small… and get yourself going. Small steps make momentum and progress until you find yourself pleasantly surprised to look up and find yourself in a better place than where you began.
Press on, press on, press on…
I’m not normally one to quote the Bible, but there is always one passage that’s stuck with me (partially because one of my best friends from high school picked it as his senior quote). It’s Ecclesiastes 9:11 and it reads, in part
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race [is] not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong…
There were some very strong guys and gals competing that day in Paxton. None of them were are gloriously handsome as me, but I’m used to that… happens everywhere I go. Umm… wait, where was I? Oh yes… the competitors. But you know where I think a lot of people separated themselves from their competition? By how willing they were to push themselves just a little bit harder than everyone else.
For instance… when you are doing one of these events where you need to lift something for a minute straight, you feel like death by the end. No one walks away from that feeling fresh as a daisy – it’s hard as hell. But in the course of that minute, your mind begins to rebel a bit and wants to tell your body “Hey! HEY! Meat sack! This is your brilliant intellect up here! What in the name of all that’s holy are your DOING?!?!? This HURTS! STOP!”
The people who come out on top of these events are either able to make that inner voice quieter or push past it entirely. See, even if you keep lifting until they call time, if you give into that voice just a little, you might lose a few reps… and that might mean the difference between 1st and 8th.
You want to win? Step up to whatever your challenge is and never, ever, EVER lose sight of what you are looking to achieve. Keep saying it to yourself over and over. When you practice and prepare, say it over and over. Make it such a habit because when it’s game time and you feel nervous and everyone is watching… it will pay off. I wish I did more of this because I know I would have placed (and I kid you not) at least 3 or 4 spots higher than I did.
The longest of any of these events was a minute. That’s it. One, single, solitary minute. Your challenge may not be a minute, but for 99.99999% of the population… your challenge will NOT last forever. Press on.
So, those are the big 3 takeaways I had from all of this: (1) Embrace being humbled; (2) Action is always better than inaction; and (3) Every hard situation you will ever face will pass. Be courageous until it does.
And if there is a lesson #4 in all of this, it would be that blogging is good for the soul and I probably shouldn’t wait 4 months between posts. Press on.
Today’s training plan
September 6th, 2010
A little bit of deadlifts and some other general shenanigans. Need to do conditoning of some sort and with how beautiful it is today, it would be criminal to not do that outside.
That’s Just How You Play The Game… Right?
September 6th, 2010
A few weeks ago, two friends of mine came over for dinner and to relax a bit on a Monday night. It was nothing formal – just a little bit of respite from the week. One of them arrived a little later than the other and just a bit before 8 PM, came charging into my house and wanted to be sure we were all ready for the show at 8. Show? What show? Ladies and gentlemen… it came to my attention that we would be watching a little thing called “Bachelor Pad” that evening, brought to us by the fine folks at the American Broadcast Company. God help me.
“Bachelor Pad” is fairly similar to most reality TV shows where contestants are competing for some kind of cash prize at the end: there are roughly two different groups (in this case, men and women who did not make the cut in either “The Bachelor” or “The Bachelorette”) who compete in weekly competitions to gain immunity from being kicked off the show/out of the house/off the island, etc. There’s nothing remarkable in any of that – that’s the formula with the only real wrinkle being that almost every person on the show is really attractive and there are all sorts of… err… “romantic” entanglements.
Now, I try to avoid reality TV shows like the plague – I just find them absolutely awful on almost any level I can think of. I will allow for a bit of leeway on a show that is really structured more like an on-going documentary (such as past seasons of “Hard Knocks” on HBO or something to that effect), but things like “Jersey Shore” just make my skin crawl since it’s really just a glorification of the worst elements of people’s lives recorded, cut down to the juicy bits and plastered on TV for viewing like a train wreck of biblical proportions. I know, I know… that made no sense since there were no trains to be wrecked in the Bible, but don’t lie… you got the picture anyway. Don’t get sassy with me, my friend.
Wait, where was I? Oh yes – reality TV. And you thought you could completely get me off traffic, didn’t ya?
The competition shows are probably what bother me a little more than the antics of other reality programs because there is this common theme that runs through all of them that just makes me nuts: every act of lying, backstabbing and conniving is justified under the notion “Hey, this is just part of the game. I’m just doing what I need to do to win.”
*shudder* Nails on a blackboard every time I hear it.
Lest you think I’m being puritanical, I get the idea of hard-fought competition and it’s one of the things I truly love about sports and such. It reminds me of a passage from Vince Lombardi’s “What It Takes To Be Number One” speech:
It is a reality of life that men are competitive and the most competitive games draw the most competitive men. That’s why they are there – to compete. The object is to win fairly, squarely, by the rules – but to win.
On any reality TV competition show like “Bachelor Pad”, there’s always a focus on the win part and seldom more than a passing nod to the notion of winning fairly, squarely and by the rules… and maybe that’s just it. These shows really don’t have any rules about how you play the game. And why would they? A big chunk of the reason people are watching in the first place is to see the lying, backstabbing and conniving that occurs week in and week out. I guess that’s the “fun”.
But for me, it’s just nothing I can get behind. It’s like the old rap adage of “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.” Except here’s the problem: regardless of the game, every person has the opportunity to make choices for themselves and who they want to be in that game. And hell, you chose to be in the game (whatever that game may be).
I don’t rush to view shows like “Bachelor Pad” as yet another sign that we are steadily marching towards the Apocalypse – I’m just not that prone to Chicken Little thinking like that. I think every society goes through those kinds of moments where some new thing causes everyone to be convinced that everything is falling apart… and then it doesn’t really happen.
I just hate to think that our model for how to compete is increasingly becoming this kind of programming we see on TV, which would be sad. And while sports is not perfect, I think it tends to get competition right a lot of the time and at least there is something or someone keeping most of it in check.
So pick your arena of competition. Go out and seek to win. But never, ever try to sell me on the eggshell thin notion that how you compete is somehow out of your hands. The choice is your own.
Proactive Simplicity
September 5th, 2010Think of some of the best teachers you’ve ever had in your life. Go ahead… I’ve got loads of time to wait… umm… especially since by the time you read this post, I’ll be all done with it and not literally sitting around waiting for your pondering self. Win-win for everyone! But in thinking about those people, what were some of their most notable qualities that made them such good teachers? For me, I find it tends to boil down to two critical traits: a passion for teaching the subject and the ability to make the complicated simple. Boom – there ya have it.
With that in mind, I found it interesting as I read some of the negative Amazon.com reviews for the book “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey to see what exactly people were complaining about. The most common gripes were “It’s just common sense!” or “Typical self-help tripe!” and things of that nature. To me, these can almost be a form of an endorsement for a book of this nature (i.e. self-help or a new way of viewing your own world). Why? Because it gets back a little bit to about what makes a good teacher – are you taking a concept and making it simpler or more accessible? It’s certainly possible that the reviews could be spot on and you read the book only to find out that every page is full of regurgitated platitudes about doing good to others and being a better person. That’s just an annoying read.
But guess what? Not the case with this book (at least not for me). In fact, the gripes people had I found fairly amusing because they focused on the high level themes of each section “Put first things first” and “Think win/win” without delving into the author’s thought process behind those notions. That’s just flat out missing the point, my friends.
For me, I found a nugget that hit very close to home and gave me more than a few minutes pause as I read the book last night in bed. The first theme/habit of the book is “Be proactive.” Pretty simple right? If someone just told you that you needed to “be more proactive” and that was the extent of their advice, you might smile at them, give them a nod of acknowledgment and then walking away thinking “Thanks for that inspired pearl of wisdom, Plato. No idea how I could have continued life as I know it without that one!” Ahh, but there is much more to it than that in how Covey talks about it. Covey’s all about values being one of the true shaping forces for being a better person and a more effective one.
So that’s why this passage I read last night struck me:
The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of the proactive person. Reactive people are driven by feelings, by circumstances, by conditions, by their environment. Proactive people are driven by values – carefully thought about, selected and internalized values.
Huh… never quite thought of it that way. If you are a values/principles-driven person (and I try like heck to be exactly that), being proactive is not just a matter of going out and doing things without being asked to or having the circumstances thrust upon you forcing you to act. It’s much more than that – it’s acting upon your values as opposed to being driven by your feelings and impulses and the circumstances around you since that is just reacting.
This strikes such a chord for me because it puts such great importance on not being reactive… because being reactive means I would be letting circumstances dictate what I do as opposed to my own set of carefully considered values. When you look at being proactive in that light, it goes well beyond the rather banal notion of just telling someone “You know… you really should be proactive.” It gets more to the heart of the WHY and the why is always the more powerful piece of the equation. What would be the sense of taking the time to carefully construct where you find meaning in life only to ignore all of that and let the world dictate to you? It’s the kind of thing that makes me re-check myself a bit because the cost to pay for wanting a values-driven life is eternal vigilence… and yes, I totally stole that Barry Goldwater line and tweaked it for myself. I make no apologies.
So dismiss not the simple… especially if it is backed up by a depth that may not be readily apparent at a casual glance. Those darn casual glances… always leaving the wrong impression.
Unlike this handsome fella – always leaves a good impression. (Not mine – just a houseguest until tomorrow).
How To Make Your Prowler Sessions Super Fun
September 4th, 2010
The Fat Gripz for the pulling motion? Hoo boy. Definitely adds a great wrinkle to things. I keep looking for more ways to incorporate the Gripz into my program and they just keep on coming. A few more months, a couple of anchor tattoos on the forearms and a bunch of spinach cans… who knows what may unfold…
Just because it’s non-dairy creamer…
August 23rd, 2010
… I wouldn't begin celebrating just yet. Yuck.
Oww…
August 21st, 2010
And I'm the genius who looked at that hill and thought "Well this doesn't look too bad…" Hubris is an ugly thing, my friends. Avoid it.
Preseason
August 21st, 2010
Three weeks… just three weeks away 'til game time.