Ups & Downs In A Training Cycle

Every training cycle has its great times, decent times, bad times and times that make you wonder why you are doing this to yourself. Great times and decent times are easy to handle, they are fun and exciting and usually are because you are seeing progress. Those are super when they happen, but those times can be few and far in between. In reality a lifter may get 4-8 weeks out of the 52 week year that are great, and if you planned correctly at least two should be on a meet day. So what do you do with the other 44 weeks of the year? Not post them on social media? HA! As if.

Real training is hard. It always will be. If you are into hitting the gym 2-3 days a week and pumping up your biceps and calves then going home you don’t know the struggle, and that’s fine that’s your choice. But when you take something seriously and put everything you have into being the best, it will F**king drain you. No matter how much you love the sport, you will question your why. These times separate the good from the great and help you achieve your maximum potential or help you end up being the 50 year old guy in the gym talking about how much he used to bench in his day.

How do you deal with the shitty times you ask? Easy, you need an end goal. A meet, a max out day in the gym or something along those lines so you have something to look forward too after your 16 week program that runs you into the ground and challenges you more emotionally than physically. Embrace it, embrace the pain, embrace the suck and embrace that each day is a challenge to push your body further than you ever have. Embrace the grind of force feeding meals and long training sessions because you wont be able to do this forever. And when I finally hang up my belt and decide that I've had enough I don’t want to look in the mirror and think “man if I woulda just trained a bit harder I would have got a bigger total, or placed higher in that meet or got an invite to that big meet.” I want to look in the mirror and know that I left it all on the platform. I want to know that I gave it everything.

Moral of the story is work hard, eat a lot and pump some iron. If you want to be strong do it, don’t talk about it.