“I’ll buy you a drink…”

Most activities that are rewarding are difficult. If you involve yourself in things that are difficult, you will undoubtedly encounter some obstacles in order to obtain the reward. This is a frustrating yet necessary truth.

Barbell training is a low risk, high reward activity. You train, get stronger, enhance athletic ability, learn to be mentally and physically tough, and ultimately become more useful for things like moving furniture, tossing small children, and lifting attractive women (men?).

Yet, there will be obstacles in barbell training. When training correctly, bad things won’t happen often, but they will happen nonetheless. Set backs can come in the form of missed lifts, recovery problems, scheduling problems, and the most unfortunate…injuries.

Whenever there is a set back, the logical step is to identify what went wrong and fix that thing so that you don’t do it wrong in the future. If you are under-recovered from lack of food, sleep, or sandwiches, then you need to remedy your situation. Schedules can be worked around, but injuries are a big giant pain in the ass.

Injuries usually happen because of form faults. This is why having a coach in some regard is useful and necessary. If Rip hasn’t watched me squat in a few weeks, I will typically require some kind of feedback to validate what I am already doing, or to tweak a small problem. Last year I squatted in some capacity two or three times a week, every week. I have seen at (the very least) 20,000+ squats in the past year. This means that I typically know exactly what the hell I’m doing wrong right when I do it, but little cues from Rip help clean up the movement. In other words, everybody needs a coach, and the extent of how often they need one depends on their experience.

Injuries unfortunately will also occur…”just because”. When a person is lifting significant amounts of weight, the margin for error decreases because of the injury potential (another reason why having a coach is useful — they can prevent or correct that error). Last week Chris, who has chosen to train for powerlifting and strong man, tweaked his low back while power cleaning. Today I tweaked my back (which was already tired from traveling home yesterday) on my second set of squatting. These injuries are irritating for Chris and I. It is easy to get frustrated when injured, and it is easy to make the injury worse by doing too much too soon. Furthermore, when you put it in the context of progress goals and/or a meet schedule, it can be really fucking frustrating.

But, here’s the deal. Instead of getting all pissed off or upset by injuries, there is only one useful mindset: Figure out what went wrong, fix it in the mean time, and implement a strategy for doing it better in the future.

Read that again. This is one of those lessons that resonates out of the realm of barbell training. Such logic can and should be used outside of the gym. The harsh reality is that bad shit is going to happen to you all the time, including when under the bar. Realize that this is normal, and how you respond is going to define your success.

Tomorrow in Part 2 I’ll talk about some guidelines for working through or around a given injury.

Cinnamon roll french toast, eggs, bacon, and sausage in San Diego this past weekend