EMOTIONAL INVESTMENT
My friend and colleague from Austin, TX, Tod Moore, has a great take on the training lifestyle and mindset. Anyone who has every trained like a maniac for something can relate to what he is talking about. In our training careers, we all have ups and downs, but the key is to stick with it. Tod is also a coach with Military Athlete.
Tod Moore on Emotional Investment:"You can't push the river"
Simply put it means if it isn't going to happen, you can't make it happen. You can't magically create fitness, it only comes from hard work and dedication. Even when you have fitness sometimes it will fail you. You will miss lifts, get beat on work capacities and suffer on stamina days. Some days you will be the best, other days you will be the worst.
Our training sessions are difficult by design. Sometimes they may seem overwhelming and almost impossible. This isn't random, it is to
help the athlete develop the mental fitness that must be trained side by side with their physical fitness. We want our athletes to view our training sessions as work, and attack them with a workmanlike attitude. With time this workmanlike attitude will drown out fear and pain. It will quiet the voice in your head that says you can't keep going, that this is too hard, that it is too much. All in all it keeps you from being too emotionally invested in any particular training session.
While this is great in theory it is something else entirely to develop it into a practice. This proves to be especially true for competition driven athletes. Competition can be a great thing for achieving results, but if it isn't monitored or controlled more often than not it can breed disappointment and discontent. Most people can't compete without bringing emotion into it. Bringing a high level of emotion
into the gym day in and day out is extremely exhaustive. This becomes unhealthy and usually leads to an athlete "burning out" or getting injured. Everyone is emotionally invested in their training, but you have to be able to check that emotion and get your work done. To drag around any extra involvement in training is simply too taxing. It produces a mental and physical fatigue that can't be left in the gym and will eventually start to affect you in the outside world.
What we do is hard, because of its nature you have to be dedicated and invested, but we also have to objectively view each training session as just that: a training session. If you have a good one, great, if you have a bad one, that's great too, because you have another chance in a day to do it again. Don't lose sight of the bigger picture, the gym is just the gym. Gym numbers, Fran times, shit like that doesn't matter in the outside world. The only thing that matters out there is that you are physically and mentally fit and able to perform.
In all of my years training I am sure that I have had some great sessions. If I didn't I wouldn't train. Funny thing is I can't think
of a single one off of the top of my head. However I can remember all of the "other ones." Getting pulled in warm ups. Missing lifts. Having total breakdowns. Dragging in so far behind everyone else on a stamina that they where already changed or had left the gym. These memories don't haunt or dissapoint me. They don't make me feel like a failure. These are the moments that made me better, these where the times where I developed my strength and my mental fortitude to continue. I learned something about myself in each and everyone of these sessions, this is how I learned to improve, to be better than I have ever been before. This stuff isn't supposed to be free, its a hard lesson. If it wasn't you wouldn't learn it. This is the stuff we want you to leave the gym with. The knowledge that you are better leaving than when you came. The confidence of knowing that even on your worst day you are still better than most. The attitude that whatever obstacle is sitting in front of you, you will overcome it.
