miked512’s BodyBlog

I’m being a copycat, but my content is completely original.

2008 was a year of discovery.  I learned a lot and actually made quite a few accomplishments despite the fact that sometimes I think I’ve gone backwards in some respects.  I also harnessed the use of "intuitive guidance" a bit more than usual and its gotten me out of some sticky spots.  Here are a few of the great aspects of 2008.

1)  2008 was the year I learned to "Shut the door and hear whats on the other side".  Thats an oblique strategy used to help give you a perspective that you never considered.  This also goes into the idea that things aren’t always as they seem.  This has helped me with various friendship, relationship, housing arrangements, supplement choice, supplement purchasing and various other issues I found myself encountering over the past year.

2)  The human body really SUCKS at multi-tasking.  I thought I learned this in college, but to be honest, 2008 seems to be the year I became really in tune with my body.  No matter what number of activities you think you can juggle and focus on wholeheartedly, you can’t.  With multiple outside of work projects going on and trying to put my all into lifting, doing all of that really messed up and spilled over into other things.  In college, I would have just done it all and trim corners around sleep and recovery.  This time, I just dropped it all off on a plate and said I’d get to it when I could.  Ha ha, if you work a 9-to-5 and consider lifting one of the important things in your life that you have to do 6 days a week, then don’t vow to keep all of your gigs going strong.

3)  "Pushing past a plateau" is a misnomer.  That term implies doing a bunch of work to get over a hump.  So you either change your exercises, moving from 5 sets of 5 to german volume training to P/RR/S or something similar, or taking a break.  The better term would be "Finding a workaround to get you past the plateau.  It seems drastically reducing my frequency of training and doing something silly like full body workouts in a half hour 2-3 times a week.  You don’t have to beat yourself up to past a plateau.  You really just need to find a ride on an animal going across it.  I think I’m going to keep this up until well, I get more crap off of my plate.

4)  I read a crapload of books and am all the better for it.  Speaking of books, I finished my first book of the year right before I wrote this posting.  Man, now what am I going to do?  Read another one and make sure to keep track of everything.

5)   Always remember to keep the beginner’s mind.  Knowing everything sucks because eventually all of that stuff becomes old and needs to be changed and updated.  Somtimes there are just better ways of doing things than you already know how.  My how bodybuilding parallels life.  Of course, you learn this as you grow older but sometimes you need a refresher.

6)  Online friendships are just as valuable as in-face ones, even if you’ve never seen the person on the other end in real life.  There are real flesh and blood people out there on the other end and they can motivate and/or demotivate you just like the neighbor next door can.  However, the thing about online is its persistent.  You can’t just forget it, its real, honest, and saved somewhere.  Ha ha, the only difference about the online versus in-face is the demotivators that are online generally tend to disappear from your area of interest.  They aren’t interested in it, so why waste their time on the internet bothering those that are.  This leaves you with nothing but people contributing positively to you accomplishing your goals.  Those in-face people, well, they’re there spreading their evil or goodness, intentionally or otherwise, with support and what not directly around you.  Ha ha, thank you bodyspace people (you may or may not know who you are) for waking me up to that.

So 2008 was a great your of intuitive guidance and introspective discovery.  I could say I’m even closer to enlightenment than I was.  Ha ha, but at any rate, enjoy your new year.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 1st, 2009 at 3:39 pm 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.