Completely relevant to modern day bodybuilding, and exemplified in the late article “I Hate Medium”. http://www.T-Nation.com/article/sports_body_training_performance_bodybuilding/i_hate_medium
Having had a bad nights sleep, and several interruptions I sat up last night and watched a late-night movie called Touching The Void, a movie based on a true story about a group of arctic climbers, one of whom gets trapped in a glacier after having had his rope cut by a fellow climber when they were both hanging in the void about to die.
This man did not die, but broke his leg when he hit the bottom of the seemingly endless hole. After several attempts of failingly climbing the sheer walls of crevasse he found a small hole which, again, seemed to go on forever.
He dug his way into a gap between two shelves of ice which continued horizontally until he saw sunlight. Excited, because he thought he would surely perish, having nothing but ice to suck on and a broken leg, he crawled along this horizontal shelf gap.
He recounts that he set goals of 20 minute sprints to get to a certain rock, or bump or unique looking area, and after four days I am sure not many people would have made the progress he did and survived to tell the tale back at base camp.
After four days of sliding along on his bum with a broken leg up and down a bumpy cramped gap in an ice shelf he found the sunlight at the end. He became delirious, disillusioned and sick by the fourth day, and if he had not made it he would have died trapped under the ice forever.
And it was lucky that he had gotten so far because the base camp heard the sound of his voice and dug through the shelf to find him shouting at the top of his lungs.
It is a really inspiring movie and I would recommend anyone of you to watch it. But there is a lesson to take out of this.
Through his pure and arrow-sharp determination he had made his way though glacier on short, sharp trips of 20 minutes, and had he simply tried to ‘get to the end’ he would not have made it nearly as far. He organized a short term goal, and then he executed it.
If we take this into context at the gym I am sure all of us could achieve great things, but many do not have this will power or organizational skills to do so.
You will hear “I have a specific goal of loosing fat”. But that does not get you where you want, you need to instead say “I have a specific goal of burning this many calories today, followed by this specific meal.”
Or instead of “I want to get big” you need to say “I want to do this amount of work in this much time, with my stop watch”.
Short bursts of cunning determination will get you where you want, because otherwise the journey is too far away for our short-term instinctual brains to handle.
Are you trapped in a glacier with no sunlight in sight? Are you with a long term goal, but no progress? I have given my advice, use it.
Logbook
Meal-plan
Calender diary of goals - faster? stronger? bigger? cutter? get more specific.
Forevernade