Sunday, July 20, 2008

I Hate Excuses

There is a big difference between unrealistic dreams and challenging goals. Sometimes they are a fine line, but helping people reach their goals no matter how big or small can be very inspiring. On the flip side it is just as heartbreaking to watch people to be self destructive. A highly popular video that can't be played enough says it all...



Why bring this up? It is almost getting depressing to read training information on the internet nowadays. Ten years ago when I first began reading this new media for training information I could not wait to read an updated version. New updates meant new training information, at that time everything seemed new. The industry had yet to catch up with this new outlet for information. As the years have passed it has saddened me to see that now training information had fallen into "who's system sucks more" and "why you can't do this lift it is dangerous".

It becomes almost paralyzing to read such articles. And yet in the past few years the strongest people I have met are probably those that have read the least of these "must reads". Sure, we can all benefit from sharing and learning new ideas, but not at the expense of not trying to be innovative ourselves. This past year especially I have had the pleasure of meeting some great lifters that probably could not tell you about the motor neurons, the weakness of the labrium, or anything such as these. What they can share with you is how to be extraodinary.

In fact, it has made me think back to the past few years for myself. My life has changed greatly and so have priorities. However, I was inspired myself to look back at some videos over the past few years when fear wasn't as strong even for myself.









This isn't to say that learning is a bad idea. Obviously quite the opposite, with some great new ideas I have learned this year I find that I can almost still accomplish those same lifts even though I haven't been training them specifically. However, I find myself taking a break from the whole internet training side. Some may think that is odd or unprofessional, but in the upcoming weeks I hope to expose the contradictions that causes more useless debates and less on training.

2 comments:

Peter said...

Well said.

The keyboarding muscles are the easiest ones to exercise in the whole body, next to the tongue :)

There's the "paralysis of analysis," which is bad enough. Paralysis of intellectual debate is probably a subset of that.

I think you're spot on, and that the Internet can be a place to get inspiration and provoke constructive thought and development. But that if you find yourself spending more time with argumentative back and forth than you do with your own training, and getting a deeper sense of what does and does not resonate with you, you need to refocus.

Josh Henkin said...

Well said Peter!