The Carrot

I was talking with a student the other day that was coming across a common experience in GPP training. It’s that moment after all the early success is behind you. It’s often after you experience that mind shift from “I want hard workouts” to learning to want and care about things you didn’t know you wanted like skill, specific performance, etc.

It’s common for folks to forget why they are training, which in a program with goals and outcomes as broad as ours is understandable.

It’s at this point that I offer up two basic solutions. You can be driven by one or the other, or even both.

1. Dangle a Carrot – Specific short term goals give context. Why did I wake up so early this morning to get in to DEUCE to train for the 100th time? Oh, that’s right I want 40 pull ups by my 40th birthday. That’s why!

2. Live it, Don’t Die by It – This wonderful training is just part of what makes your lifestyle. There’s no emotional highs or lows. It’s just an incredible way to accumulate a lifelong professing fitness base, and after 10 years you’ll be bulletproof.

My personal scenario after training CrossFit for seven years is a combination of both. I surely am relaxed in my training and it’s more of a lifestyle practice than anything. However, my “carrots” include the idea of doing an amateur strongman event, which gives me specific motivation, strategies, and context for “what it all means.”

Do you have carrots dangling that keep you moving? Or, are you purely training a lifestyle through and through?

 

Logan Gelbrich

@functionalcoach