Relentlessly push yourself forward
Posts related to the human body, strength, conditioning, fitness, health, food and all the other physical aspects of walking around this life.
I found out recently about a cool little t-shirt company in my town that does custom shirts… but in a different kind of way. They focus on putting a single word (or a mashed-up string of words) on super comfy t-shirts. The company is say something apparel and you can check them out at http://www.shopsaysomething.com.
I don’t think anyone will be surprised at my order pictured above. It’s what all the cool kids will be wearing this Spring. Believe it.
It’s a little brisk outside, but plenty sunny, so a-Prowlering I will go. I’m just happy that the snow has been cleared enough that I have some stable footing. Let the fun begin!
Just a little video action from yesterday. It’s interesting because I had been playing around with what I was doing on this lift of late, from not using a belt to doing full stops between reps… and then it hit me: stop trying to be cute and just lift the freakin’ thing. End result? A great set that I truly enjoyed… plus I got to let out a battle cry on that last rep. That’s just a good day any time you can do that.
I like a good commercial. There is something great about taking an attempt to get you to buy something and transcending that medium to make you think, laugh, cry or just get plain pissed off. Whether it was the famous Apple commercial from back in 1984 to signal their assault against the bland groupthink of personal computers or even last year’s Snickers commercials with Betty White. I just enjoy something well-crafted and memorable.
A commercial I’ve seen recently and had a bit of a chuckle to was from Planet Fitness:
Now, Planet Fitness has a very particular business model for their “gyms”… and yes, I placed that in quotes and you’ll soon see why. They have really low monthly rates and are incredibly proud of their “Judgment Free Zone®”. If you’ve never been there, this is how they describe it on their Web site:
As the most innovative health club brand in the United States, Planet Fitness is known for a lot of things – our absurdly low prices, our Lunk™ Alarm, and most of all perhaps, for our Judgement Free Zone® philosophy, which means members can relax, get in shape, and have fun without being subjected to the hard-core, look-at-me attitude that exists in too many gyms.
What does this mean in practice? Well, for starters, their dumbbells only go up to a certain weight because having more than that would attract the “lunks” in Planet Fitness-speak. They also don’t allow any grunting, dropping of weights or… apparently… “judgment”. And for that matter, they don’t seem to allow anyone who really and truly gives a damn either. Let me explain.
While no one really wants to train in a gym with guys (and let’s face it… the biggest maroons I’ve seen acting like complete fools in gyms are 99.9999% of the time guys) who are there to call attention to themselves by needlessly dropping weights, hogging up sections of the gym floor and just being a general jackass. However, what Planet Fitness is also driving out with their overly broad and… surprise!… completely judgmental approach is anyone who actually gives a damn about their training and is looking to improve. The guy in that video might not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but you don’t end up looking like he does without a lot of hard work and sacrifice.
Don’t believe me that some of these gyms are not for people who actually care? OK, let me throw this out to you then. Which environment do you think is better for improving yourself in? A place where you are surrounded by others that strive for excellence and consistently push themselves to be better? Or a place where we don’t want people to be TOO good because… gosh… then others may feel bad about themselves? The latter is what you get at a place like Planet Fitness. Me? I would rather lift completely by myself as I have done the last few years or find a group of likeminded people to surround myself with to push me each and every day I train. I couldn’t do this at Planet Fitness because if I suddenly let out any noise while lifting, I risk being kicked out. Instead, I would have to sit there quietly and never do anything that could possibly offend my purple and yellow overlords.
Are there people who are serious at Planet Fitness? Of course there are… just not as many as there ever COULD be. I’ve had the dubious pleasure of training in a few Planet Fitness locations before and I can never imagine going back there again. If you want to be surrounded by people who think the check-in-the-box of just showing up at the gym is good enough, then feel free. Have a ball. If you are only spending $10 or $15 a month, that might be fine for you and, in truth, some exercise is better than none at all.
But if you want to get results? Something tangible to show for devoting your time and energy to being fit, strong and healthy? Go elsewhere. Find a smaller training studio with a well-certified strength coach or trainer. Put the money down to get yourself to truly commit to making positive changes instead of just checking the box. Find a place that won’t set off alarm bells if you did a deadlift.
Reject the Milquetoast, my friends, and embrace the chance to be good or even great… not by anyone else’s standards… but by your own. Give yourself the chance to know the deeply incredible feeling of pushing yourself through a difficult training session and knowing when you’re done, that you weren’t content to just be average and passive. It’s not just good for your body, but it’s good for your soul.
Alternatively, you could just join a gym where you can ring their alarm every time someone who cares and might have a few muscles comes along:
Because why should anyone dare to aspire to be their best? It might just hurt someone’s feelings…
Reject the Milquetoast. Save your soul.
When 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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Three weeks… just three weeks away 'til game time.
An interesting thing often occurs when I sit down to write up almost any blog post I do… a gnawing sort of feeling that, even though I may like what I’m writing, I haven’t the slightest clue whether it will resonate with a single soul out there on Teh Interwebz. Needless to say, that can be a bit of an unsettling feeling because I do my utmost to ensure my blog entries are authentic – what you read is 100% pure me. Straight, no chaser.
In that way, I can relate a touch to the famous quote by Nietzsche, “And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” Now granted, I am not generally a big fan of Nietzsche’s work because what he wrote (these large and powerful texts full of bravado) stood in stark contrast to how he lived (meek and mild, blending into the background), but I do like the quote. He may never have intended in such a way, but it often feels like how it is to sit down, stare at the open screen in front of me on my Mac and think, “Holy crap… is anyone really going to care AT ALL about any of this?”
Fortunately, some people do seem to care and have been nice enough to say so. Thank you to all of you – you keep me going.
But there is the daily challenge for us all in many ways: looking ahead into a future we can only view as that same kind of darkly murky abyss where nothing is clear and a good long stare will bring about nothing but even more anxiety, hand-wringing and general bad mojo. Seriously – it’s science. I looked it up in the New England Journal for the Furtherance of Mojofication Studies. It’s a very scholarly periodical designed for superior intellects like mine.
That’s why I realize a little more every day that the greatest triumphs are rarely a singular shining moment of transcendent excellence (although they surely can be). It’s much more often a collection of smaller moments that will eventual grow, gain momentum and become something much bigger than you could really expect when first starting out.
To use a strength and conditioning example to illustrate. When most people begin a serious exercise program, the gains come along at a fairly rapid pace as your body basically soaks up the new challenge and adapts to it, week over week. However, this will slow or, if you aren’t terribly thoughtful in your approach, stop all together. Once you’ve been doing something a while, new improvements do not happen nearly as rapidly, but rather, they develop as a slow build. It’s only at the end when you look back you realize how far you’ve come and how much you’ve truly accomplished.
So for me, it’s just one blog post at a time and with each ensuing entry, hopefully something approximating a body of work will come into focus… and maybe a few more people will read it, tell their friends and so on. I am still in the beginner stage where I should be a little smarter about getting my site a little more “pop” – no question about that. But it still won’t change the fact that in order for this project of mine to grow… it’s a series of entries just like this one, day in and day out.
You may not have a blog, but I know there is something you are working towards as well. We all have that “thing” that stokes our passions. Put in the daily work as best you can. I’m doing my best at it and some days are better than others.
Step up to that abyss, but don’t waste your time staring into it. It only stares back into you and it’s not a staring contest you will ever win. Instead? Give it a quick wink and promptly kick it’s ass a little bit every day.
I seem to have my epiphany moments at odd times and a lot of them seem to come during my morning commute. While part of it is likely due to the fact that I almost always do that commute with no music or radio on, I think it’s also likely due to the fact that it’s easier to let your mind be open to think about things instead of watching the utter madness of how my fellow humanity drives. Come on, people… get it together out there!
My latest piece of highway inspiration caught me off guard a little bit, truth be told, because it stood on its head a lot of what I’ve been pondering in terms of creating a better life for myself… because the moment of clarity was all about how I need to possibly get myself out of balance to achieve balance. A tad bit counterintuitive, to say the least.
Up to this point, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I need to achieve some kind of well-structured harmony of my mind, body and spirit… and that’s still my end goal. The “A ha!” moment came with the stark realization that my process of achieving that goal was quite likely all out of whack. I’ve been in a mode of thinking that I needed to treat mind, body and spirit equally in my pursuit of the noble balance, but there’s a pretty significant chance I am not currently balanced equally in those 3 areas anyway. Maybe I am at 50% body, 35% mind and 15% spirit in terms of where I pay the most attention or where I have achieved the most amount of progress. Nothing about that would approximate the equally divided personal growth pie of 33.3%, 33.3% and 33.3%.
I can practically sense a few doubters reading this and thinking, “How is it a grand point of epiphany to think that maybe you need to spend more attention on the 15% and less on the 50%? That ain’t some kind of advanced nuclear physics, dude.” Too truth, my Doubting Thomas… too true. That wasn’t my clarity moment. Here is what I realized:
Maybe I need to throw a ton of time and attention to body… even if it is at a 50% point of progress. Seems a little odd, right? How is devoting more time to the area where I am the “farthest along” (whatever in the world that even means) going to bring along the two areas that are not quite where I want to be?
Here’s my thought process… and be forewarned, my friends… stepping into my head for even but a moment is gonna leave a mark… tread softly:
I think that if I put in a full commitment to the area of body and really buckle down, get truly disciplined and decide I am going to completely kick ass on all aspects of my physical developments for the next few months… I think there will be tremendous carry over to mind and spirit. It all gets back to my core belief that developing one area of mind/body/spirit and go a really long way to developing them all. The commitment to excellence and dedication to discipline I can put forth through consistent training, top-notch diet and a relentless attitude will allow me to prove to myself I can make progress when I commit. That proof will strengthen my resolve and, hence, strengthen my spirit.
This kind of single-minded focus I think will spillover into mind as well because this approach will force me to be smart and not just burn myself out like some kind of unfocused maniac.
And… in the end… if my body feels good and I know I am making progress, I already know this is the kind of confidence that improves my life as a whole anyway. I can hardly put into words how much better my life has been ever since I decided sometime in college and then in law school to really start getting myself into shape. It’s completely night and day.
But while I am still doing well, I think I’ve lost a little bit of the swagger and a little bit of the fun that goes along with it. I aim to get that back and in getting that back, prove to myself that just an overall improvement to the other spots in my life is going to be part of the package.
Will I completely give up on devoting time to my mind or my spirit? Of course not. That would make me a completely shallow and borderline boneheaded fool to do that… but instead, I am going to let them rise with the tides created through getting myself going on the physical part of my life. Plus, this is not a forever thing to devote this much more time and attention to one part of this little trinity. These things must be cycled to really make best use of the shorter bursts of focused effort lest you truly become horribly out of balance and just a very one-dimensional person (one of my worst nightmares).
Time to shake up the yin-yang and see what comes out on the other side… and I’m feel pretty good that the other side is only going to be something better. And more handsome… if that’s even possible. Seriously… have you met me? It’s almost unfair.
A favorite topic of discussion at my previous job was the topic of “all things awesome.” It always made for spirited debate in that neverending discussion throughout human history of what is awesome and what is just simply completely NOT awesome. It could almost stand to be its own branch of philosophical study: awesomeology. What always make the debate such fun is that there really is no way to create a precise, objective and well-defined explanation of what is truly is. There is no perfect formula for awesomeness… but if there were, that would clearly be awesome in its own right. Awesomeness is something you just see and know, in your heart of hearts, that it is something awesome.
One of my favorite thinkers in the realm of awesomeology is Jim Wendler over at EliteFTS. While you could peruse through an endless number of posts Jim has up at EliteFTS in the Q&A section or his own training log, I think I saw his philosophy on awesome was best put in a recent interview he did. In describing why he did certain exercises or trained a certain way, he explained he picked those things because they were awesome. In fact, it was basically his North star when it came to making decision on his training because he would ask himself a simple question: Is doing this awesome? If so, he’ll do it. If not, he’ll take a pass. And for those people who would ask, “Gee, Jim… but how would I know if something is awesome or not?” he had a simple, response (which I will paraphrase): Umm… if you have to ask if something is awesome, then it is decidedly not awesome.
Now how can you argue with that? Oh, I can see some naysaying about how you sometimes just need to do things to do them and there is truth to that. Cleaning the bathroom and other sundry household chores are not exactly reeking with awesomeness… but for a lot of other things in life? Those things that fall into far more discretionary activities? The awesome standard is really a pretty damn good one.
So for me, Jim’s view on weightlifting and training has shaped a decent chunk of what I do now. I follow his 5/3/1 training system, I use very fundamental lifts when I exercise (bench, squat, deadlift, military press, cleans, dips, pull-ups, rows, etc.) and I love my Prowler. To me, there are few things as painful as going to the local gym I have a membership for (a just in-case kind of thing… I have been there maybe 5 times this year) and lifting on machines or sitting on a piece of cardio equipment for 30 to 60 minutes. Yikes. It makes my skin crawl to think about it and when I’ve actually gone and tried it a few months back, I felt completely annoyed the entire time I was there. Not good times and certainly not awesome.
But in a larger view, I began to ponder a bit how much of what I do would fit within the awesome scale, whether my job, my social life, the activities I engage in and so on. It’s a pretty sobering piece of thinking to undertake because it’s ridiculously easy to fall into patterns of doing things just to do them. As incredibly brilliant and intelligent as we can be as human beings, we also seem to have a completely uncanny ability to fall into mindless patterns which we may not notice until much later, if at all. We might eat complete crap because we don’t think much about our diet. We might plunk down in front of the TV without even knowing if anything is worth watching and surf channels like a lobotomized monkey for 3 hours because… well… we’re not all that sure.
It’s in the sense that mindfulness seems to become more and more important in how I live my own life. For instance, I have written numerous times about how I will do something, enjoy it and then not get around to doing it again for months to only think “Huh… why did I stop doing that anyway?” Mindfulness, pure and simple. I think the awesomeness equation can fall into this same sort of vein: if you are not stopping on occasion to think about whether what you are doing with yourself is actually worthwhile or something you would be proud to tell your grandkids about some day… then why in the hell are you doing it???
So besides this jazzy shirt (which says “Proud To Be Awesome” and you cannot quite read because my pure jacked-ness caused some wrinkling in the fabric), I need to begin my own development of mindfulness reminders. Perhaps in the way that Notre Dame’s football teams has its sign as you head out of their locker room that says “Play Like A Champion Today” I need the equivalent on my front door at home that says “Be Awesome Today”… except the sign would need fire and dragons and explosions and muscle cars… because that would be AWESOME.