So its Monday again, you’re ready to make this week your bitch and get back to your training and diet because, this week is going to be different!
You did your groceries yesterday, you packed your gym bag ready to go and work isn’t going to be as crazy this week. Or so you tell yourself that…
We’ve all been here before, trying to make the same thing work again even though it didn’t last time. So what is it that makes one person able to stay the course through the same stressors in life that the next person faces and fails again and again?
This got me thinking, I’ve been training for the past 10 years in at least some capacity, sure there was time off for holidays, injuries etc. but overall there wouldn’t be many weeks in the last 500 where I wasn’t doing some training. What if I had lost that consistency in the middle somewhere? Newstrength might not have ever became a reality and I might not have been on this journey to help people become the best versions of themselves by exposing them to the difference embracing movement, learning and connection can have on their lives.
So what was it that kept me in the game consistently for this long?
There was definitely a few key points that stood out in my training life that helped me stay in it for this long.
Being part of a community
When I first started training back over 10 years ago we started in the shed with my two best mates; Tim and Mitch. We had no idea what we were doing but we just got stuck in and tried to push each other’s limits each and every workout. We were accountable to each other, no matter what straight after school finished we were hitting the weights and just making it up as we went.
It wasn’t long until we had Arnold’s Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding and were taking workouts out of that. Even now 10 years later, the three of us are all still training although we have taken different paths in our training.
Why was it so important that we did it together?
We had a great time, we got positively competitive, we wanted each other to do well but, we still wanted to win. We made jokes, tried out random strength challenges and built stronger friendships. I remember the day that we all had one bench press set up and were going until we all got to 300 reps, it was brutal but fun and then once we all finished someone had to get back on and add another 10 reps. I can’t remember how many we had actually done by the end of us pushing each other but I remember us all complaining of soreness the next few days.
We created momentum by being accountable to each other for so long. That in the odd days that someone couldn’t make it we still went anyway, and the guy that couldn’t make it was smashing out his own session later fearing that we would get ahead of them. Much like in team sports nobody wants to be seen to be letting the team down, when you train in a small core unit of people you don’t want to let them down either.
Finding a mentor
I remember when I first started getting into ‘serious training’ (didn’t I think I was cool), I finally signed up at a gym. After that first year of training in the shed, I thought I knew what I was in for until I walked into the gym and saw these HUGE guys training. Instantly I was back to being the little kid hanging out playing with the little weights. There was one guy there that we knew, Ivan. Ivan had taken himself from being a skinny built guy into a strong, jacked dude and it was all on the back end of smart, hard training.
Ivan took me under his wing, taught me so much about training and nutrition, and made sure to push me the whole way. I didn’t want to let him down, he was spending his own time teaching me his ways and I knew I needed to put in the work.
He made the process of starting up in the gym a much more positive experience, I got to learn from his mistakes, push myself to try and keep up with him and he made sure to not let my youthful enthusiasm put me in a position where I was going to get hurt.
Whether he knew it or not, Ivan was the perfect coach for me at the time. He was detail oriented, it was more important to understand the why’s and how’s of the training than to just turn up and bang out weights. This fed into my craving for learning more and set me up to be a true student of training rather than just someone who turned up to train. When everyone else fell off the wagon, I was too busy learning more and more and trialling out what worked that I was completely engaged in the process.
You see movies like the Karate Kid where Daniel learns his craft from his mentor Mr Miyagi before going back to succeed over the bad. Yeh it’s just a movie, but the framework of the story can be seen over and over again throughout history. As humans we need mentors to help us on our way, to teach us the tools to master our craft and to arise as the heros we are meant to live as. But too often we feel like we need to go at our path alone, we need connection to thrive and mentors are a huge part of us becoming the best version of ourselves.
Connecting to Your Core Values
We see all the time now people living out their lives following advice on what careers to pursue, what they should and shouldn’t spend their money on and what should make them happy. The problem is most of these people are getting advice from people who aren’t happy and aren’t living by their core values.
We often find this to be a common thread when speaking with clients who have made huge lifestyle transformations that not only had they changed their physical self but they also created the lifestyle that they wanted and focused on the things that were important to them rather than everything else.
For me I found my focus on living by my core values to be the piece missing whenever I felt down and didn’t feel like training. I personally have identified my values to align with pursuing movement, learning and connection but when one of these pillars is lacking attention, then it starts to impact on everything else in my life. For me I attached pieces of my values to my training to ensure that in completing my training I would be living by my values and drive me to being more motivated to train than to avoid it.
This became engaging in training methods that challenged me to learn skills like weightlifting and gymnastics, focusing on quality of movement rather than just training and creating relationships and connecting with others through finding other coaches to learn from, people to train with and creating a community of awesome like-minded people like we have at Newstrength.
Wrapping up
Feel like you can’t keep consistent in your training no matter how hard you try? Maybe a different approach can help you finally make the shift. Join or build a community to train around, find a mentor who can help you on your way and make sure to connect your core values into your training so your training builds upon your purpose in life rather than taking away from it. Connection is one of our key pillars of how we do things here at Newstrength so if you want to find out more about how you can work with us on making these changes in your training finally stick then click here and fill out the form and we will get in touch.