No road is too long for him who advances slowly and does not hurry, and no attainment is beyond his reach who equips himself with patience to achieve it. — Jean de La Bruyere

Picking up from last weeks post here’s three more lessons from Dynamo Barbell.

The attitude you take to the bar will usually determine the outcome, build on your successes

One of the best lessons I’ve learned from the company I’ve been keeping is that my attitude that I carry into a workout or a lift will almost always determine how well it goes. Kade’s serene calm when approaching a huge deadlift, Jay’s aggression and dominance before dropping into a big squat, and Willie’s fearlessness in the face of a challenge no matter how reckless all share a commonality; they lack doubt.

Regardless of the outcome time and again watching them it’s the same, there is no consideration of failure there is only the thoughtlessness of the present that time and practice has prepared them for. Now understanding that this doesn’t happen overnight, it serves the lesson that the practice(training) prepares us for the game(PR’s), and so practice should enable you with the confidence to succeed.

Your training though at times challenging should have the focus of enabling you to gain momentum through a string of successes, nothing more, nothing less. If it’s not, and you’re shitting the bed come game time then it’s time to reconsider how you tackle your training.

Remember where you came from, take pride in your accomplishments

Progress moves at it’s own frustrating pace. It took two years of training at Dynamo for me to get my first 400 lb squat which is somewhat embarrassing in powerlifting especially for a 240 lb man. There’s many factors that play into the difficulty of my progression (the first and foremost being myself). It’s serves a good reminder though that 4 years ago I couldn’t even squat onto a toilet without my knee feeling like it was going to blow across the room.

It doesn’t give me license or excuse to feel sorry for myself or not perform, but it’s a good reminder that I worked fucking hard for that accomplishment and I’ve come pretty far from where I was. No one else did the work for me, it sure as hell wasn’t handed to me, and it’s mine.

No one will really give a shit about my squat but me, so the one person who needs to take pride in it is me.  You need to know where you come from sometimes to know where you want to go.

You can take all the expert advice in the world but at some point in time you need to figure out you

Especially with the internet there’s no lack of “coaches” offering “expert advice”.

According to the internet I am lucky to be able to walk on two feet without needing to spend 40 minutes on mobilityWOD. There’s some good advice, there’s some terrible advice, and most of all for the general population there’s a lot of unnecessary advice. I’ve spent a lot of time with warmups, mobility drills, and stretching, and what it showed me over time was that I could probably go without 99% of it.

What I needed first and foremost was to get stronger so that I could find stability so I could gain mobility to perform without injury, in that order.

I’ve also spent alot of time considering queues for various lifts like “knees out”, “chest up”, “push through the floor”, “bend the bar”  and the list goes on. This works to an extent but you can only queue so much until some day you just need to pick the goddamn weight up.  The point is that all the advice, drills and queues in the world can not make you figure out what you need, you do this by trial and error. The only person who is accountable to your success is you.

So if you find yourself in a position like me, where you are spending more time listening and watching than lifting, it may be time to reconsider your plan of attack and as Mark Bell loves to say, spending some time lifting like shit.
 
That’s it for this week, I leave you with this video that has some serious gems from the one and only Mark Bell