…But half the battle is not enough.
How many days have you been too tired, too sore, too unmotivated to go 100% in your training, so you told yourself “I’ll just get through it today”? If you’re not mindful of that, you can slip into just getting through it too many times, so that it becomes the default.
Humans are wired to be lazy, but effort leads to happiness. Go figure, right? So with that in mind it’s important that each and every time we step inside the gym we aim to reach a little further. Our instinct, when we’re tired/drained/underfed/under slept is to half ass it. “Not today. It’s not right. I don’t have the energy. My X is sore from the other day.”
But what happens? You limp through the workout. You still get out of breath and into that nasty place, but you don’t perform too well. No great effort. No great result. Certainly no great satisfaction.
So what’s the solution? Simply whatever your 100% looks like on that day, give it. Our aim is to attack every challenge or opportunity with intelligence and enthusiasm. So the challenge can be that life outside the gym is draining your resources. The opportunity is that you can let go of all of that for one hour.
Don’t waste the opportunity you have of an hour of your time dedicated to improving your life, your release, or your sport by just going through the motions.
Comedy Break –
Nothing about this talks about the result of your hour. This is about process, effort, and attitude. The weights on the bar, reps on the movements, time in the workout aren’t what we’re talking about. We’re talking about attention and intention. What if your legs ache from lunges the day before squats? (I mean, what asshole Programmemes lunges before squats?) Percentage work mightn’t be an option. You may have to drop it by 10%. Or, you may miss your new 5RM. What to do in this situation? Well, you can change your focus to staying upright and really driving through your heels. Or, you can use this as an example of dusting off the “failed” 5RM attempt and attack the metcon with vigour.
There are days when you are well rested, well fed, bubbling with enthusiasm, can’t wait to train, have tapered perfectly, your warm up goes great, everything feels good, and you PR everything! These are the exception, and we all know it. Pretty much every time you step foot in the gym you’re not going to be 100% fired up. If you wait until you are, you won’t accomplish anything. Enthusiasm is going to come as a result of the effort you put in to do your best on any one given day. We all know the feeling at the start of a session of not really being into it, but by the end we’re really happy we got a solid workout in!
All it takes is that little push to start your momentum off!