You don’t know allot of farmers do you ?
Yup, I always come back but, yes I’ve been in a rut several times. Getting pissed off with myself see me come out of my torpor!
What, do farmers not like beer? Nah man I’m kidding, I actually know way to many farmers that don’t fit the stereotype I just made.
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If we truly want to discuss the origins of strongman, it’s found in circus performers and traditional tests of manhood across various cultures.
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Lol on worries . My ears perked up since I farmed with my family until I was 27 and we sold. Regarding your issue don’t over think it sounds like simple burn out ride the wave and it will pass
I have frequent ruts and I get through them due to habit (next month I hit a decade of “serious” training) and a morbid fear of being pathetic.
I think this is just too important a part of my identity now.
I think both these arguments have merit. It’s all about about doing what you love, but there is a lot of power in sticking to a daily/weekly routine.
I’m of the opinion you will stick with a daily/weekly routine BECAUSE it is what you love.
My like @dt79 I absolutely hate training. I get up at 0440 4 days a week, to include on Saturdays, to train, because I love the results of training. If that love wasn’t there, I wouldn’t do it. Meanwhile, my house is a mess, because I don’t love a clean house as much as I love not cleaning my house.
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A History of Stone Lifting and Strongman | BarBend found this cool article about this
Yea I think habit is an important part of the puzzle
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I’m a financial markets guy. And while positivity (absolutely a word, stupid spellchecker) and love sound great, I’m here to tell you fear and greed is a much more powerful motivator.
As a small(er) guy, fear of being weak (by average standards LOL) means I have not been away from a gym for more than 2 weeks or so in 3 decades. Greed for more compliments from the average sheeple telling me how awesome I look is also an ancillary reward.
To avoid “ruts”, I try to take a week off from the gym every six weeks or so. “Deloads” don’t work for me because it’s the getting to the gym part that I find mentally wearisome; once I’m there and the adrenaline kicks in I am usually fine.
Two days a week is fine for maintaining. Iirc, the training literature from back when I studied the stuff indicates that some people can actually make progress while “only” training twice a week. The bugaboo of course is how intensely do you train?
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Now and again I find myself in a “rut”.
When this happens its usually if I have been training too hard, been busy with work and overdoing things in general. Auto-regulating has been a life saver. When feeling a little drained I now take a good 1-2 days off. Its not going to kill me.
Another thing that has helped is have a few different training goals. When I get sick of lifting, I will then concentrate more on my BJJ or do an extra cardio session, and vice versa.
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To watch 23 year olds running on treadmills?
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I usually find myself in a rut when I’m not busy enough. It’s just too easy to sit down and keep doing nothing.
Its times when I’m metaphorically drowning in work where I tend to adapt and grow. Half the fun of working out (at least at my age) is the challenge. Right now I’m renovating my house, merging with another company at work, and trying to take advantage of all the higher ups coming through to make myself known, so I’m pretty much slammed from 7am to 9pm monday-friday. and for some reason, this made me get back on schedule lifting at 5am. If you asked me 6 months ago I would have told you I have a life.
Give me a week vacation though? I probably won’t lift for a month, and regret every second of it.
I mean, obviously if you have identified that it’s the process that drives you, then you would want to find ways to make the process more interesting. But from personal experience and what I’ve seen, this is not a sustainable solution in the long run if you can’t find tangible goals in terms of results to sufficently drive you, and may even lead to setting yourself back by incurring injuries that you shouldn’t be incurring in the first place.
Just my opinion.
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Sadly, no 23-year-olds are running on the treadmill in my home gym…
See if you can get a 32 year old to run backwards on one. Should be the same effect.
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I’ll stick to being the creepy dude in my gym that eyeballs my wife while she runs on it.
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I ended up taking a 3 year hiatus from working out. Life got in the way and I just completely lost my love and interest in it. I was going through a lot of stuff I needed to work through, identity, mental health, career etc and I just separated myself from the attachment of being the ‘fit guy’ as part of my identity. I just didn’t care anymore. I was still relatively in shape, looked better than the general public and was healthy and started to view my obsessive nature with lifting as a juvenile and vain obsession so I just distanced myself from it.
When my wife and I moved into our new house I decided to build a home gym in the garage. Gradually I got back into it and realized that I can spend 4 hours a week on myself without it being the sole source of my identity. Once I detached myself from that, and viewed it as something that long term makes me better and healthier I stopped taking extreme approaches and extreme associations with fitness. I realized I am and will most likely always be a natural lifter with above average genetics. I’m not going to be a fitness model or an IG celebrity nor would I want to so why should my life revolve around a hobby. It’s now just something I do just as a hobby that has tremendous carry over and benefits to the rest of my life which oddly enough made me more consistent with it and more effective at it.
I guess to sum it up, once I stopped caring so much I began to remember why I do it and that I enjoyed it. Balance become the key for me. I spend time on this forum now mostly as just to feel apart of a community that shares the same interest and feed me some dopamine when I get bored on down time where previously years back it was a measuring stick or combative debate with others.
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