mjmartin’s BodyBlog

So, in the past two days of cardio, I’ve learned to completely control my mind, like a great Jedi master! Okay, so not really, but I have found an invaluable distraction that helps me to get through my workouts without thinking. I’m watching football while I work out. I set my TiVo to record all of the Buffalo Bills games from this past season (My favorite team), and I transferred them all to DVD. For the past two days I’ve been watching them while I run on the elliptical, and the results have been unreal! I’ve done longer sessions, at a faster pace, and I’ve done so without feeling like I was wasting valuable time. (I don’t know how watching football is LESS of a waste of my valuable time, but it somehow works out that way in my mind…I don’t question it…)

The funny part is that I used to be tired after 30 mins of cardio, but now that I’m distracted I fee like I could go all day. It tells me that up until this point, I’ve been ‘babying’ myself, not going as hard as I could go.  I came to a similar conclusion several years ago, when I was lifting on a regular basis. I would do my thing in my gym, and write down my results, and my progress always seemed great…I was able to lift more, on a weekly and sometime daily basis. That is when I realized, I’m lifting more becuase I can, and I probably could have done this amount of weight from the beginning, I just wasn’t challenging myself. So from that point on I challenged myself, and though my ‘upward progression’ on the amount of weight I was using stalled rather quickly, my strength gains were much greater.

Moral of the story: I didn’t improve because I didn’t challenge myself. I didn’t challenge myself because I either had no idea what I was capable of, or because I wasn’t willing to do the work involved in finding out what I was capable of…either way, it doesn’t help to baby yourself. Hit it hard…as hard as you can and you will improve. It doesn’t matter if it’s work, school, sports or bodybuilding…if you make it easy on yourself, you’re going no where.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 6:28 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.