I’ll just leave that out of context for a moment… One of my favorite quotes from Bruce Lee begins
“Seriously, you might as well be dead…”
Every morning Bruce would run 3 miles at a quick pace, one morning he brought a friend who was much older than he was at the time. When they neared the 3 mile mark the friend began to ease up when Bruce told him they were going to run 5 miles instead. The friend quickly declared “Bruce, I can’t go five. I’m a helluva lot older than you are, and I can’t do five.” He said, “When we get to three, we’ll shift gears and it’s only two more and you’ll do it.” … Inspired, the friend decided to keep pushing until a few minutes into the last mile and he began to break down, Heart pumping, legs giving out, and fire burning in his lungs, he say’s to Bruce “Bruce if I run any more,” –while running-”if I run any more I’m liable to have a heart attack and die.”. To which Bruce simply replied, “Then Die” and pushed ahead. This made the Friend so angry that he finished the last mile. Afterwards, he confronted Bruce about it to ask him why he would say such a thing, Bruce replied:
Because you might as well be dead. Seriously, if you always put limits on what you can do, physical or anything else, it’ll spread over into the rest of your life. It’ll spread into your work, into your morality, into your entire being. There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level.
There are no limits
Can you accept that? Do you have the willpower to watch yourself go beyond what is supposed to be your capacity? The biggest factor in any athletes training is his or her mental strength.
Mental Strength is:
- The ability to endure physical strain past the point where your minds screams at you to stop.
- The ability to resist eating that handful of peanut M&M’s at a party.
- Staying calm when your primal brain wants you to react unregulated.
- Make choices that are consistent with your goals and values everyday.
In many athletes or weekend warriors that I work with, Mental strength is the only thing between them running a 10K with ease, having a six pack, or dominating a tournament. Somewhere along the way we decided that training meant going to the gym, sparring, lifting weights, doing steady pace cardio, and then coming home. Your training needs to start and end inside your head.
It is very common when working with people who have a good amount of weight to loose to get caught up in the process or how far they are from their goal weight. For example, when I graduated High School, I tipped the scale at just over 305 lbs , I had never run a full mile, and my idea of a healthy meal was Arby’s instead of McDonalds. When I decided to lose weight, I really got depressed at how long it would take me to ever see my abs. Eventually, I decided to focus on my progress day by day to make manageable and short term goals that I could attain. By doing this, I was training my mind each day, convincing myself that I would survive without eating cereal, cheeseburgers, or ice cream. And sure enough, each day my cravings went away, replaced by the rewarding feeling I had seeing my weight come off and my muscles grow.
Today, like everyone else I have new challenges and goals and obstacles. If you want a 350 lb bench press, you have to accept that it will be hard and do it anyway. If you want to lose weight, stop eating every time you get a craving, have the courage to tell yourself no and actually mean it! There are no limits, if a goal seems out of reach, break it down, get past your current plateau and move on to the next one. Each day you spend mulling over your current limitations is a day wasted.
“I’ll start on Monday” is a cop-out
Start today, start right now. Your body is capable of doing some pretty amazing things, build your Mental Strength and set a goal for today.
- Run a mile in under 7 minutes
- Don’t eat any cheese on anything
- Do 10 more push-ups in a row than you ever have before
Whatever your goal is, make sure it’s a challenge that will take effort and focus on your behalf. Do this every day and enjoy the positive impacts it will have on your life!
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