KLINGON WISDOM: MAKE A DECISION

I’m fairly certain I’ve shared this before, but if not, one of my favorite quotes comes from a mentor of mine, who was in turn a Star Trek fan.  One day, he shared the Klingon proverb “In battle, make a decision.  If it’s a good one, even better.”  That day was a monumental one for me, as it has in turn shaped how I approach life, and has accounted for a vast majority of the success I have encountered.  It’s such an amazing pithy saying that holds so much truth in everything you do in life, not just battle.  When pressed with a choice, MAKE one, for a wrong decision will ultimately be better than no decision.  Choose the road less traveled by, choose the well trodden path, take the high road, take the low road, just take A path so you can keep moving in A direction.

You're about to really train your conditioning by running the f**k away

No transition sentence in the above, because I couldn’t think of one, but hey, look at that: I made a decision.  Trainees are fundamentally CRIPPLED by an inability to make a decision, mainly because they feel there is some sort of ridiculous demand for them to make the BEST decision.  I’m not sure who told them this, but that man was clearly a lunatic and should be disregarded at all costs.  There’s no need to make the best decision at all here: if there were, we surely wouldn’t leave it up to you, the inexperience and uneducated trainee.  No, merely A decision needs to be made.  If it is good is dandy, but if not, it’s still A decision, which is better than NO decision.

Examples?  “What training program should I use?”  Who cares: pick one, run it until it doesn’t work, then try another one.  “Should I do high carb or low carb?”’  Doesn’t matter: pick one and try it.  If it doesn’t work, try a different one.  I can say with 100% certainty that making a bad decision and moving forward with it will yield more positive outcomes than making no decision.  Do you know what kind of progress you get if you spend 3 months refusing to go to the gym because you STILL haven’t found the optimal program yet?  Do you know how much further along you’d be if you just did 100 push ups a day for those 3 months?  That’s a DUMB program, and it’s STILL far more effective than no program.  Not only would your super optimal program have to overcome the damage of 3 months of sedentariness, but it would ALSO have to overcome the 3 month head start “sub-optimal you” achieved with their dumb, half-cocked plan.  The same is true of people that refuse to pursue some sort of nutritional program, some sort of training philosophy, some sort of coaching service, etc.  Just make A decision and go with it.

I genuinely don't know why this meme exists, but I'm glad it does

To say nothing of the immense value inherent in LEARNING from bad decisions.  Bad decisions are how we grow: through experience.  Your childhood was marred with bad decisions, as you (like all children) were incredibly stupid and inexperienced and never understood your parents’ warnings until AFTER the fact.  But man, the first time you touched that hot stove, you learned right quick WHY you should never do that.  The same is true when you try out setting a 1rm everyday of the week for 8 weeks, or max effort continentals, or the variety of other bad decisions out there.  You learn what doesn’t work, and, by extension, what does THROUGH these bad decisions.  What do you learn through indecisiveness?  Simply that you need to make a decision.

And this includes deciding on what the hell your goals are in the first place.  Were it not for my exceedingly low faith in humanity I would be absolutely shocked at how frequently I am asked “Should I bulk or cut?”  I, of course, have to stifle my disdain for those very words before I ask my inevitable obvious question “Do you want to be bigger or do you want to be leaner?”  And BOY does that follow-up question upset people, because apparently they want ME to decide their goals for them.  They have abdicated their future to a stranger: what madness is this?!  This is so incredibly simple.  If you want to be bigger, eat more.  If you want to be leaner, eat less.  If you want to get better at weightlifting, weightlift.  Running?  Run.  These are such obvious ideas: why will no one make this decision?

I'm sure this is exactly what this guy decided he wanted to be better at

“But I want ALL those things!”  Hey, that’s cool: me too.  Which one do you want the most right NOW?  Again: no one likes that question, because they don’t want to make that decision.  The battle is waging on, and they’re stuck deciding on if they want to use a mace or a sword or an axe or a spear before some ogre with club smashes unarmed skull in.  Folks, I’ve been training for over 18 years now, and that is through multiple injuries and surgeries: you get to spend a LOT of time doing this.  You will have no shortage of opportunities to pursue multiple goals, which means you don’t need to pursue them all at the same time. 

Think about that 18 years statement, realizing full well that I STILL have life left in me and more time to train: what if I spent 1 year pursuing a different goal.  Just dedicated myself to a full calendar year of chasing 1 physical goal?  I honestly don’t think I’d be creative enough to manage that without some overlap in years.  And meanwhile, how awesome can you get at something if it’s what you dedicate your sole focus to in the span of a year?  Hell, people can learn to play the guitar over a summer with enough dedicated practice time, people have lost an entire human being’s worth of weight in less than a year, you can accomplish AMAZING things when you make it your singular dedicated focus for a prolonged period of time.  And these skills don’t go away once built, assuming you return to them with some semi-regularity.  It certainly won’t require the initial build up that it once took.  This means, if you dedicate yourself to getting lean, and then don’t get too terribly fat again, it’ll be easy to get lean again.  Build a big deadlift, take some time away from it, and it won’t take long to come back to it.  Run fast, take a break, run fast again.  It’s all there: you just have to make A decision to pursue A goal at some point, and know that you can come back when the time comes.

I imagine being The Terminator means you can train for a VERY long time

The battle is on: make a decision.  If it’s a good one, I’ll be happy for you.  If it’s a bad one, I’ll still be happy.