Words. Not Even Once

"Do or do not, there is no try" -Yoda

Read it and respect it for two reasons. It is true and it is Star Wars. If you don't like Star Wars then you can go stand in the corner and think about how your life is incomplete. Yes that just happened.

But honestly there is no middle ground. Just like the fact there are two types of people in the world, those who do and those who say they should do. Be somebody who does. Simple as that. You can talk about how you should eat more veggies and take less handle pulls, but until you grab that rabbit food instead of that illicit substance, you are no better than a couch potato who won't get up to change the channel and is stuck watching lifetime.

I cannot stand when people say they should do something. Stop wasting your breath say that nonsense and actually do it. It is a crazy idea, I know. Stop talking about squatting five hundred and the mad amounts of poon you slaughtered all weekend and watch how it does absolutely nothing to increase your sorry excuse of a squat and the fact that the only action your bedroom sees is tears of loneliness.

Start taking action to be better. I never listen to people. As a coach, as a friend, and as a person I can honestly say that I hardly ever listen to people. I observe them. You can talk all you want, but if you want my attention I better see you ask for it and and not hear you ask for it.

I am keeping this post short for the sole reason that there is nothing else to say besides do. I challenge you to stop yourself when you say you are going to do something and just do it instead. Let everything people know about you be defined by your actions. Let the squat talk for you, let the diet talk for you, let your smile talk for you (stupid but still it counts), let your hard work talk for you, let the fact that you don't stop until the workout is over talk for you, let your sweat talk for you, let your blood talk for you. After all that you can sit back and talk, but there will be no reason because YOUR RESULTS will say everything that needs to be said. Why you did that extra squat, why you chose that rabbit food salad and meat tornado you may be asked,  but you just sit there and let them wonder. They will watch and learn and see that no words need to be said. Words are dead, actions are in.

Stay hungry.

Adamas

I figured its been a while and my training has been full of ups and downs which in turn gives me some good fuel to write about. So the next few posts I will be writing about will be about thoughts and events occurring during my training now. I am explaining about them for a number of reasons, sometimes the last advice you take is your own so I ma hoping this will serve as a wake up to me, I know for a fact there are all sorts of other people experiencing the same things, and lastly, I am sitting here drinking my coffee and listening to hipster music so I figured all I need is an insightful blog post before all the hipster girls are at my door... and yes I just admitted to an addiction to hipster girls. One last thing, before any of you trash talk my thought process or training style, wait until further posts because I can guarantee what you will have problems with now I will address later, calm yo' tits.

So here you go, I like girls and I like kegs so lets just combine them. (If you are training as hard as I am kegs are nowhere to be seen in the near future)

So here we are in the middle of summer with time to train and lots of work to do. Any smart coach would use this time as a time to test their athletes, break them down and use lots of volume in their training. Going through this right now, let me tell you, it sucks more than being given socks as a birthday present. Everyday I wake up with my body crushed and my mind out of it. My body is not as much sore as it is physically exhausted an devoid of energy. I hate it but this is a necessary process in training. While we have all sorts of time we need to get rough with it and find that rock bottom. It does many things from a coaching stand point and for the athlete. It proves who really has a desire to get better and compete and weeds the ones lacking the competition desire out. Lots of people want to compete but not everybody wants to work to compete. Not to be an asshole about it but CrossFit of the competitive level is not for everybody which is fine. Most people want to get their workout on and be done which is great for them. But those trying to compete need to prove themselves having the desire to work for it. Secondly, this high volume part of training that wreaks havoc on us adds immense amounts of strength and allows us to embrace the suck. How fatigued we are now we will grow accustomed to so when it comes to a chipper we will push until we are dead then push some more.

This however is the most important time to push with everything you have. Your shoulders may feel like they have nothing left, you may want to walk out of the gym and go lay down and watch your favorite show, but forget that. Get right back down on that bar and pick it up. Do that final snatch, do that final squat no matter how much it wants to break you, you need to fight the urge to stop and break that bar before it breaks you. Somewhere out there is somebody who will always be doing that extra lift or extra muscle up not because they are better than you, but because they want it more than you do. 60% of these workouts are for the strength and conditioning, but the other 40% is questioning you to see how bad you want to win and excel. When you get beat at a competition and you can look back and say well that snatch I didn't do or that lap I didn't run would have helped. Good job there buddy you beat yourself before you even started your god damn competition. Train so you can look back and know there was nothing left for another squat so you can honestly say that day was the hardest you have worked yet. I don;t care i it is a light day, you still rip that bar and concentrate as hard as if you are trying to snatch 315 form the ground. Weigh does not change the workout or the thought process. It just changes the way the bar looks. Work load does not change EVER!

"Stay Hungry"

It has been a long while. Life has a funny way of keeping you occupied and having fun. That is if you are living it right of course which brings me to my first topic for today. Like what you do. It is as easy as that. Training for some competition or just getting your daily workout on should not be a task, it should be an admiration of yours. Whether you enjoy the beat down in the gym or the rewards after the workout, you still need to enjoy it. You need to be able to look back at the past few months of working out and with a smile say that it was worth it to be where you are now. It is not hard, but hard work is always rewarded. ALWAYS WORK HARD.

This is not to say that you will not enjoy every day of training. It is up and down and we can all agree upon the fact that every once in a while we have a day where a bar seems like the heaviest weight in the world or 400m seems like a marathon. Those are the days that matter the most. They define us as an athlete and a person. You need to separate manhood from boyhood. Somewhere out there is a person exactly like you that is doing that extra squat that you do not want to do, doing that extra sprint that you don't care about. They will be the ones faster stronger and sexier than you. BE THAT PERSON.

What defines greatness is not being great on a good day, it is pushing through every rep and pushing your hardest when you feel like you are tired and think that you cannot possibly go further. If your body is still moving when you set the weight down, pick it back up and let your body dictate when to set it down and not your mind. Doing sets of 5 to get through 30 reps. That is not your body talking, that is your mind picking a good number to rest. We do not get better listening to our mind. We achieve greatness from listening to our body and ignoring our mind.

When training and working out, push at the pace you want to be at, and when you start to fatigue and slow down this is when the workout really starts. This is the point that will separate us from the person that woke up this morning from the fit athlete we want to become.

We define ourselves and control who we are. If you want it bad enough, you will push that extra bit for it, but if your heart is not in it and you truly do not want it, then you will fail to succeed. Enjoy the pain or enjoy the results because if there is no enjoyment there is no fuel for greatness.

-Renaissance Man