It's What You Make It

The one thing that has always stuck in my mind regarding workouts, any workout, is the 1 workout where someone always says before they start it. . .

"That doesn't look so bad. . ."




What starts out as not so bad becomes awful relatively quickly.  Take the quickness of the 500m Row for time, when performed, it hurts like none other.  By the end, pulls with your arms become similar to pulling a tug of war versus Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and you get to be Steve Buschemi.  It feels futile as you try and finish the distance.  Your legs can't push you any harder away from the fan blade in front of you.  By the end, you are a heaping, slobbering mess.  And you lay in child-like fetal position for what feels like days and lasts for mere minutes. 

What kills me is that in reality, it sounds easy, but it's what you make it, that makes it difficult.  So, what's the worst part?  Thinking about it, trying to game it, trying to figure out some weakness within the workout, some way to leverage what you may be good at to your advantage. 

My initial thought - don't think about it.  You complicate it.  All you need to do is do the workout.

Gaming it - Really?  It's not even worth it, just continue the movements, whatever they may be, and continue one step, one pull, or one push, one at a time.

Figuring it out - Go back to my initial thought - if you read ahead - you complicate the workout by thinking about it, just do it.

Leveraging - Not a bad idea, but in a workout, it's a great way to display those weaknesses - the weaknesses that we as Coaches want to to bring out in the athlete to develop the movement so it becomes a strength and you leverage no more.

So you've started the workout, let's use one as a example -

Hang Power Clean
3-3-3-3-3-3-3

That doesn't sound too bad, but here is the kicker, It's What You Make Of It.  So you can make it easy or you can make it really hard on yourself.  This can be applied to any workout, this just happens to be our example.  In this particular movement, the athlete is performing 3 Power Cleans from the Hang Position, the bar never touches the ground until the 3 reps are completed from each round - of which there are 7.  So regardless of the athlete, they push themselves, possibly going up in weight for a couple rounds.  If at the end the athlete is still able to perform the movement or isn't pushed to exhaustion, they have short changed themselves.  Your intensity can make you amazing, it will also get you further than any programming ever will.  If you half ass a workout, you half ass yourself.  

So I leave you with a powerful quote for the day, for the night, for the week. . .

“Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.”
- Mahatma Gandhi

-Coach Tony