NOWHERE TO GO BUT UP

Stalling and a general lack of progress is a crippling fear among the training populace.  Trainees are constantly scouring their sources to look for the secret of continued progress, and constantly self-analyzing to determine if something they are doing could potentially be setting them up to stall, or not progress as fast as possible.  Above all else, the trainee seems to want to never encounter a situation where their training isn’t working.  But why?  Stalls are a blessing, stagnation is a gift, ineffectiveness a joy.  Why is that?  Because now you know what DOESN’T work.  When you identify that, you now have a fantastic baseline to operate off of, because your current approach is failing, and it’s time to do something different.  And that is the joy of failure: when you reach rock bottom, you have nowhere to go but up.

This show was awesome when it was good

Why is that a good thing?  Because rock bottom is the very idea of freedom.  Think about how enslaved you are to the process when it’s working.  You have the faintest of idea of how all the pieces of the process come together, and are operating off a mere hope and a prayer that you continue success.  “But I am well researched!” you say?  How much credit are you giving yourself here on your mastery of human biology and exercise science?  Do you truly have a formal education in it, or are you a mere hobbyist who has read many an abstract and consumed much media on the topic?  I dare say, if the former, you would recognize just how incredibly limited we, as a species, are in understanding the inner workings of our own biology.  We are just now scratching the surface on some basic concepts of how the body operates, and still much of it remains a mystery where, at best we have correlations and observations to guide us.  …but I digress.  The point is, when things are working, it is fear of deviation from the path of success that compels us to act and, in turn, we become stagnant.

But in the face of failure?  NOW we know what doesn’t work; what we’ve been doing.  So now what?  Now we do whatever we want!  There are no more rules to govern us, because the system has FAILED us, and thus we owe it no more loyalty.  It is anarchy of training: anything goes, there is no right or wrong, there are no morals, there are no values, all that matters is to break from the old purely for the sake of doing something, ANYTHING, different than before.  Now is the opportunity to become wild and stupid.  Now we can try that training protocol we read about that seemed way too crazy to actually work (Super Squats anyone?  Or Deep Water?  Or HIT?  Or GVT?  Or Bulgarian?  Etc etc).  Now we can do high carb, low carb, no carb, paleo, keto, IIFYM, super clean, etc.  Now we can do ANYTHING, because we have a baseline of what DOESN’T work established, and as long as we quit doing that, we are making steps toward progress.

Maybe we need to give this a FEW more tries, just to be safe

And what if that next plan fails?  How fantastic: we found something ELSE that doesn’t work!  Do you know how valuable that data is?  For us to be able to continue to rule out ineffective processes?  By determining the ineffective, we determine the de facto effective.  By ruling out those things that will not work for us, we get closer and closer to finding out what is truly effective.  Once again, being at rock bottom is freedom, because we have the ability to continue experimenting, testing, and discovering.

And what are the implications of this notion?  It applies not just to training, but to competition as well.  If you compete, and you come in dead last…you have nowhere to go but up!  When you take first, or place well, you find yourself bound to the protocol of success, and the battle to remain at the top begins.  The pressure mounts, the self-reflection and doubt begins, but for those who have hit rock bottom?  They have the absolute and total freedom to try ANYTHING else.  I came in 4^th in my first 2 strongman competitions and 6^th in my next one, and I had been using the same protocol throughout them.  What I was doing wasn’t working…and I now had the freedom to try something, ANYTHING else, to succeed.  And in doing that, I experimented and found what works, and took second in my next and first in the competition after that, and have since always placed in competition.  Failing in competition was a benefit, because through it I discovered what DIDN’T work, which got me closer to figuring out what does.

Sometimes learning can be painful and frustrating

Failure is freedom.  This is something that needs to be embraced and understood by all trainees.  So many are crippled by the fear of failure that they end up FAILING because they refuse to fail.  Let the insanity of that sink in for a second.  Out of fear of the risk of consequences of experimenting, trainees will stick with an ineffective program simply because it’s the one they know versus trying something new and different and learning from the process.  You will have a LONG time to train.  A failure that takes you off course for 3-6 months is just going to be a blip in the grand scheme of things.  Meanwhile, the lessons you learn from it will be invaluable, and in that 3-6 months of failing, you may very well save yourself 3-6 YEARS of banging your head against the wall trying your absolute hardest to make a failing program succeed.  When you’ve hit rock bottom, you have nowhere to go but up, and honestly, that’s a pretty good direction to start heading.