Doing my best.

I’m at the gym one day last week, feeling tired, and feeling slightly depressed, and feeling low after my first sets. I think about quitting.   Let’s call it a day and just move along.  I didn’t have it today.  Right?  What if I keep going and hurt myself?  I’ve worked out a little.  Something is always better than nothing, right?  I don’t want to hurt myself but I want to improve.  How can I improve if I quit?  Hmmm.

 I have to keep trying.  I can’t give up and just throw my arms in the air wondering why I’m not getting the results I want.  No.  Keep going.  Keep trying.  Keep working.  Don’t quit on myself today.

I see an old guy, maybe 65+ doing his ½ variation on a chin up.  Not bad.  He’s still trying to work out.  What is more profound is his t-shirt.  It says:

“The pain of accomplishment is not nearly as hard to bear as the pain of quitting.”

Wow. I’m committing to doing the absolute best I can do today. 

 I start to believe in myself. I start to self-talk:  I am a champion.  I can accomplish this workout. I could keep going.  And I did.  I reset a personal best for volume moved this workout mesocycle. 

Over reach.  What is over reach?  Typically in a program one wants to create stimulus for adaptation and then a differently active period to allow the adaptation to take place.  Usually it takes a minimum of 3 weeks to set a load / stress pattern on the body and then a 4^th week to allow a de-loading or tapering period for the body to catch up to the stress it’s undergone. 

In the 3^rd week or the week before de loading, typically one wants to increase the load / stress pattern.  Maybe you add volume / intensity / movements or maybe you lose some rest period or any other number of permutations.  The point is doing a bit more than what you’ve done. 

My workout last week, I thought I overloaded. This was the first time I actually overreached and had the overreach neurological experience of exhaustion. 

The last 4 weeks or so, I’ve added maybe 10% on my running each week and I’ve added maybe 5 -10% on my total volume moved.  This week, I’ve added an additional 5^th set to my workouts and the first workout was hard but not impossible. 

Today I hit impossible.  I wanted to quit.  Really badly.  But I didn’t give up on myself.  I realized that I was finally experiencing over reach in the way that I’ve not yet experienced it. 

Why haven’t I had the over reach experience in my workouts before?  I remember a mentor telling me that it should feel like hell.  It should feel like an impossible task.  To contrast, the taper or restitution week would feel great.  Now I’ve typically had wonderful taper weeks.  That’s no problem. 

That day last week was a rare victory.  Not only did I keep my head in there and complete my work but I set a new PR for the meso and I walked away with a great deal of satisfaction.  Was it pretty?  Hell no.  There were points at the workout I changed the rest period from 30 seconds to 45 or more between sets.  But I kept trying.  I kept pushing.  I succeeded.  I won.  I earned that workout.

Consider over reaching in your own workouts.  How can we do what we do better? 

Mo-tate.  Motivate your life to Motion.