Sirtitan’s BodyBlog

Failure… It’s frightening isn’t it??? …especially when you spend hours, days, months, & years preparing.  What’s more discouraging is some put in so much effort and lose while others succeed with just a mediocre performance.  But you can’t measure effort can you?  You can’t see effort.  The only person who can feel it is you.  So you’d be inclined to think that the difference between success and failure is like flipping a coin.  But it’s not a gamble.  Yes, on any given day you can win or lose due to unforeseen circumstances.  But what am I trying to get at:  To never quit!  Quitting is guaranteed failure.  I’m a firm believer that if you work hard consistently and learn from your failures, in the long run you will succeed at whatever it is you are trying to accomplish  (assuming your goals are realistic).  I like to tie this in with one famous theorem in math:  The Central Limit Theorem —>  Basically, in the long run, everything converges to it’s true mean.  So how do we minimize the anguish associated with failure?  How do we set ourselves up for success? Goal/Objective setting is the first thing that comes to mind.  In grad school I had a professor who always said, "Life by the inch is a cinch.  By the yard it’s hard"  When you set goals that are attainable and are inches within reach, your probability of succeess increases drastically.  Then you set the bar alittle higher after each successful trial, you add some more weight on the bar, you cut some more sugar out from the diet, you run an 1/8 mile longer.

I quote Al Pacino in Any Given Sunday: "Because we know when add up all those inches, that’s gonna make the f-ing difference between winning and losing!"

Yesterday’s workout was tough.  Two hours are sleep isn’t nearly enough for a mere mortal to have a good workout.  That was no excuse to just give up, and in the end I set a new 18 month PR and inched closer to my all-time best on the bench press hoisting 295.  I tried 345 yet again on the squat and failed, but I cranked out two very good subsequent sets that were progressively heavier than my last squat workout.

Squats 135/10 225/10 345/fail 285/5 245/10

Bench Press 225/9 295/1 225/9(+1f) 210/9(+1f)

Donkey Calf raises 200/10 280/9 340/8 260/7

Standing Calf raises 250/6 300/5 260/6

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 10:52 am and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.