Secrets.

Are there secret techniques? This is one of the biggest points of marketing something to people that will sell products quick. Make them think you have something they don't, and they can't get it without you. 

Let me let you in on a secret. "Secret Techniques" are never what gets you somewhere. They can be accessories to success, if the knowledge is even worth while, but never can you build a whole foundation on it.

I've been chasing secret techniques for a long time. So long, that i forget sometimes the key isn't necessary what you're doing, but going ahead and doing it, committing to it, and putting hard work in. The basis for any success is always hard work. You can't escape that fact. There is a reason why we admire top athletes and sports stars. It's because they have shown they have worked hard enough at a single task and attained a mastery, when most of us fall short to ever do the same. 

We as a society respect hard work, theres no doubt about it, mostly because so few of us truly know it.

Most of us never get the big picture of what it is. The sports heroes we follow may only be good at one thing in their life, and thats what carries them. One thing. It's all you need, just work hard enough at that one thing, and dedicate yourself completely.

Thats why we frown on steroid use. Not because it hurts the athletes health, but because it means they took the easy way out. It means they are just like the rest of us. Their hard work is artificial.

I've had victories on the mat that meant next to nothing to me, because it wasn't hard work. I didn't train hard enough, or i felt like i got a lucky win. Those are not victories. You only remain victorious if that effort comes through struggle. Those are the things that make us. Sometimes the struggle isn't even in the arena of competition. Sometimes the struggle is just getting there. The training, the financial burden, the relationship strains, it all comes to fruition when you win. Its a validation of yes, you put in hard work, allow yourself the pleasure of recognizing it.

Struggle gives purpose. Reject the notion that anything in life should come easy, because if it does, it carries no meaning.  

Sometimes it doesn't matter if you win or lose.  It's how you struggle.

Athletics are an avenue to know yourself. Theres a million different ways to do it, but all of them involve encountering adversity.  The man who skips out on adversity has never known the true reason of doing anything; Testing yourself.

We feel who we are in our everyday life doesn't accurately represent us.  We encounter the mundane, the unremarkable, and the flat out boring things that fill most of our workdays. Unless we are lucky enough to find and work enough in a field we are truly passionate about, our potential to represent who we think we really are is not capable in everyday life.

Theres nothing great about the drive to work. Theres nothing great about your tuna sandwitch for lunch. Theres nothing great about your boss yelling at you.

The people who possess such a trait to find these things great are either a enlightened buddha, or  suffer from complacency induced insanity. Some people relish this things. These are people that forgot their dreams along the way. Maybe they convinced themselves that they really are doing what they want, and changed their highest aspirations to fit whatever life they made themselves.  It's hard to come back from that point. 

To really appreciate the little things, you have to see life from the highest peak. Thats why you don't see  people dragging along in the day to day muck teaching seminars on how to achieve happiness on the weekend. Its the same reason that enlightened monks can be truly happy just by watching the leaves fall. They have had the struggle, the doubts, the fears, until it all accumulated into seeing things as they are.

"A ship is safe in harbor, but thats not what ships are built for," would accurately describe how i few.

Most of are safe in the harbor, because if we take the middle road we don't have to fall short of whatever expectations we think we know.

I've been there. I like to think i'm past that, but it's not a permeant place you can escape. You have to keep making forward progress. Sometimes you rise to the occasion, and sometimes you fall short, but if you know you had the hard work, you had the struggle, you did everything you could until the point you would rather die than give up the fight and the moment comes and you still fall short, you are left with no regrets.

Failure is usually the easy way out, which is why we feel bad when it happens. However if you put as much struggle, as much aversion to failure as it took the person who won, you've not lost. 

To be able to struggle, fight, and learn something about yourself is the true victory. 

You have no true opponents. When you decided to compete, the person in front of you might have complete domination of you on his mind. He may even hate you.  Make sure to thank him. Without the man standing across from you ready to challenge you, you can never know yourself or your abilities. You need someone to push you and pressure you to make the victory worth it, or the defeat beautiful. There's no dishonor in defeat. Theres dishonor in quitting. Few will ever see the difference, because few will ever want it that bad. 

Three weeks ago i took second place in a tournament. This was not my first loss, nor will it be the last, and i was upset about it. The fact i lost was very secondary to the fact i didn't truly push myself. I didn't push the attack. I had the gas left. I wasn't ready to push to the point of complete bodily shutdown to avoid a loss. If i had done this, i could of brushed defeat off and learned. Instead, i left the match learning nothing about myself, and with very few points to improve on because i never really opened up. 

If someone wants to beat me they sure as hell better earn it. It's my responsibility as an opponent to push the other person to their struggle zone. If they don't rise to the occasion, and will themselves to put as much into it as i do, they lose, and vice versa.

I'll be the first say simply wanting something more isn't enough to win, but it goes a long, long way. I know as a blue belt in BJJ, if i really try, i can surprise myself with my ability. I've had the benefit to test myself in Brazil against the best in the world. I know where i stand in regards to the top. So i know i have the potential to take on and submit anyone, deep down inside.  Others might not have that benefit and might have to rely solely on fate. To really believe in yourself is important. How do you develop the fate? By taking yourself places you've never been before. By risking it all in training. To be on the verge of quitting and recover from it. You must do this consistently. Fate is a trainable skill, and the harder i know i work, the more of it i have coming from the knowledge of myself. You can lose it if you don't work it enough. I've been guilty of that too.  So work hark, and everything else will come easy. Theres no secrets. There's no shortcuts. Embrace the struggle.

 

Recovery

"If exercise is King, recovery is Queen."- Scott Sonnon

Sometimes the problem isn't people putting too little work in, but in the case of some athletes, putting far too much. Over-training is a elusive state that some will argue is pure myth, and others will cite as a major factor in diminishing returns over time. What is agreed upon, is without proper recovery, you will feel sluggish, sore, be more prone to injury, among a myriad of other similar symptoms. Whether you think you are simply being soft, or feel these symptoms are hindering what you want to do, the answer is proper recovery.

I'm a firm believer that there is no such thing as overtraining, but only under-recovery. These sound the same, but the distinguishing factor is, you can put in just as much overall total work, but if you have the tools available to you, how you feel, will greatly vary. There are all sorts of factors that go into recovery including, age, sex, genetics, diet, compensations, type of weight lifted, frequency of workouts, proper nutrients, ability for body to assimilate nutrients, total systemic stress, and experience with the activity. The last one is my favorite one. Recovery can be grow just like a muscle can. You wouldn't try to instantly deadlift 500 pounds, nor should you expect your recovery to come up to be able handle that work in a reasonable amount of time without training it too. 

Lots of goal oriented people run into the "too much, too soon" type of overtraining.  For example, if i'm an 30 year old with no significant exercise experience, i decide i want to start running to try and lose weight. I start off alternating between running and walking, after a few days to a week, i decide i want to step it up to running 15-20 minutes with out stopping. I'm a little bit sore and achey, but i'm making good progress. I can see the time i can run going up and up with each training session i'm doing. I see i'm losing a pound or two a week, but i decide that progress is too slow for me. I think like most american adults and fall into the "more is better" mindset. My theory is if i run 2-3x's as much, i'll drop the weight 2-3x as fast. Over the course of the next 2-3 months this  turns to running twice a day, 6-7 days a week. I love the high running gives me. No matter how i feel, i just have to get my run in. Ran or shine. Until after 2-3 weeks of this twice a day training, i start feeling winded. My shin splints have almost got unbearable, and every step i take turns to agony. It takes more and more for me to get going every morning. I measure my resting heart rate and see it creep up a few beats per minute with every consecutive run i take. I no longer feel good afterwards. I don't know whats happening, things were going so great. I'm eating 2000 calories a day, i know i've measured. If i want to cheat, i can still get the Big Mac as long as my total is under 2000, because a calorie is a calorie. I've also not been getting great  sleep, as i'm constantly stressed out from work. I don't have time to do specific warm-ups or cool-downs before and after my run. The more i try and continue, the worse it gets. The great results i was seeing now stop completely. That's overtraining. 

The "more is better" mindset is a cultural norm for us. Its not enough to have a smart phone that sees to my every will, i need the IPhone 5. Would i like to make it large for a dollar more? You beat your french frying ass i do. Buy one get one free?! Why get one when i can have two of something.

The best example i've heard is this, If i have a headache, and can take two aspirin, and the headache will go away, or i can take 10 aspirin, have my headache go away, but get the runs, a upset stomach, and stress on my liver, which is the better option? Well thats a common sense answer, you take the two. Why are you going to do more when two is the right dose for you? So why do we train the opposite? We see benefits stacking up very early on, so we decide if thats working so well, i could do much more and get that much more benefit. Athletes would benefit to think in this "minimal effective dose" mindset. Don't do more than you need at any one time. Do something that challenges you, and forces you to adapt. Force too much and that time for adaptation goes up too. If i'm doing a heavy dead lift workout where i hit a 1RM, i should know to take a couple days recovery because of the excessive demand on my body.

This can especially turn into a detriment if you are putting so much more into working out, at the expense of sport skill practice. Athletes will seem to gravitate to the concrete, and quantifiable progress of strength and conditioning. It offers an allure that you get to see your progress, rather than simply feel your progress, like if you are in a sport that is skill based.

I've been on both sides of that issue. I've done too much, and too little, and i've payed for it. It's not simply enough to train harder, but to train smarter. What you choose to do should be a compliment to your main priority rather than hold it back. It takes a lot of sensitivity and time to get an accurate feel for this, and to know your recovery. So when we are novice athletes, and we try to start something if we don't have the intuitive gauge to differentiate whats good, and whats bad, we run right back into the "too much, too soon" mindset.

Our bodies are not designed for exponential growth, we are designed for slow, steady progress.  I have to ease into anything i do, because i'm not sure the effect it will have on me.

So while the body's over-all ability to recover from exponential stress is slow, there are things we have control that effect recovery. With the knowledge of time being the biggest factor in our ability to recover, we have to utilize all the tools we have at our exposal  to ensure that we do what we can to recover.

Here's your toolbox:

Journal- Keep a detailed training log. Include mood, energy level, aches, pains, and soreness. Try to quantify how what you're doing is effecting you. This is your most important tool. Make any connections you see, and highlight any patterns that come out. Play around with what your doing to see if your suspected effect is truly being caused by what you think. With proper journaling, all the other tools presented will be self-evident.

Sleep- Sleep is not expendable. 8-9 hours a night is mandatory if you want to keep doing what your doing. Hormone regulation, muscle growth and repair, among a mountain of other benefits means you cannot sacrifice this. Don't believe me? Journal and find out.

Diet- A whole article itself can be written on this, and perhaps it will be. Diet has a big effect on inflamation. Inflammation= slow recovery. Everything I eat should be real. If it comes from a factory, it most likely won't help you. The processing of food leads to an excess of Omega-6 fatty acids in our diet, leaving the ratio compared to Omega-3 far off. Take a fish or krill oil supplement, and avoid all foods with processing and ingredients you can't pronounce. Also, water is the number one anabolic supplement you can take. Half your body weight in ounces of water a day should be consumed. Think about taking an antioxidant supplement as well, or just drinking your fair share of green tea. Use your common sense on this one. It also might be beneficial for you to experiment with cutting grains out all together, to see if you have a gluten intolerance, which can lead to more inflammation. Get a good consumption of your green vegetables, and limited consumption of fruit. No processed sugars.

Stress- When we exercise, we stress our body. A hormone by the name of cortisol is released. When we worry, the same hormone is released. Cortisol is essential for recovery and to be alive, but too much of it, and the negative side effects stack up.  It's essential to manage emotional stress, because this has a side effect on total systemic stress, in turn effecting, and even limiting our recovery. Emotional stress manifests itself in physical stress. Simple meditation, and breathing techniques can go a long way in management of stress. So can avoiding assholes.

Mobility/ active recovery- We recover faster when we move. Nutrition is only sent to the joints through movement. Increased blood flow is also able to remove toxins and waste products from muscular break down.  Search for "Intu-flow" on youtube, and follow the program religiously.

Myofacsial release- Some of you might be friends with the good old foam roller. For those of you who are not, they are available for purchase here. Proper usage of the foam roller includes hitting every major muscle group, and once you find a spot of tension, hold pressure for about 10 seconds. This is best done before a workout. Massage is essentially the same thing. If you feel like your being overtrained, massage is a great thing to splurge on to help you recover.

Other techniques are better suited for individuals. Do a little experimentation.  Different workouts require different recovery. For example a heavy strength workout requires a few days of recovery. If i'm going to muscular failure in workouts, that also takes extended recovery. Only you know how much work you put in when doing sport skill practice, so tailor any conditioning program you have around that. Conditioning cannot live separate from skill practice, one will always affect the other. Use the minimum effect dose, and work up from where you're comfortable.