Today’s guest post is by Mark Marotta, long-time reader, Strong College Kid, Competitive Powerlifter, and a Canadian, to boot, eh? I edited out all the funny vowels.  – Jacob

The first thing to consider, when talking about motivation, is “WHY?” You have to figure out WHY you want to do this – what fuels you to do five or even eight sets of squats in a row? What could possibly make you want to take a barbell on the ground and throw it straight over your head 10 or 20 times a day if you’re a weightlifter? What justifies walking away from a heavy deadlift seeing stars with a face full of burst capillaries? If you’ve been training for more than a year or two, and reading this site on the regular, this probably won’t be the same reason you first picked up a dumbbell/barbell/cable machine handle, but it’s important to know WHY.

Personally, I started lifting dumbbells as a dweeby little 9th grader figuring “If I get all jacked, all the pretty girls at school are gonna wanna smooch me.” Yep. That was my motivation. I’d go to the gym 5 mornings every week, in a tight tank top and black, fingerless workout gloves, and that was why. Inevitably, between realizing things aren’t that simple, and ‘driving my dick in the ground,’ as Justin would say, with a Typical5DayBodyBuildingSplit.xlsx program, I changed my tune. Eventually I stumbled onto Starting Strength, and my motivation became being stronger than all my peers. This not being much more mature than my past goal, I moved on from it as well. Now one portion of my motivation is becoming better. Not becoming better than someone else; simply becoming better than I was. It’s the physical equivalent of picking up a physics textbook and reading it. Not because you’ll get a better job from knowing physics, or do better in school, but because you want to know physics. I want to become stronger, to find a current limit I have, and take a step past it, then next week, go a step further. Another part is that if, as an adult human being, you don’t have something to work towards, short or long term, inside or outside of training, something that’s more than a hobby, you’re most likely gonna be pretty miserable. For me, and I’m sure quite a few of you, training is that something. Finally, out there somewhere for each of us there are some asymptotic values for our squats, presses, pulls, snatches, whatever, that are a finite limit. What motivates me most is chasing that limit.

Now, I figure there’s probably a fair sized group of readers on this site who lift just because it’s something to do, and that’s fine if you only see lifting as a hobby, but by taking that attitude you put yourself in a cage if you ever want it to be anything more. If you intend to put up serious numbers, you need a serious reason to push yourself to do it. You need to figure out what in your life, hell, in the universe makes you want to get as strong as you feel you should be. For some of you it might be competition in weightlifting, powerlifting, or another sport. It could be that you think training will improve the general quality of your life (it more than likely will). Whatever your reason is, you need to identify it, and furthermore understand it and think about it every time you step into the gym.

Which brings me to the dedication side of things. You need to apply yourself to the reason(s) that you lift. You need to understand that if you don’t put everything you have into it, you can never get everything back out of it. Since I started training properly, I have never ‘skipped’ a workout: sick, inconvenient, tired, doesn’t matter. I have done PR sets of 5 squats where I coughed/sneezed between each and every one of my reps. I know that if I skip out on lifting, I’m saying my goals aren’t that important to me. Well, they are. Of course there are scheduled weeks off, deload weeks, etc. I’m not talking about that – I’m talking about taking the attitude of “My program is to do ‘X’ today; I’m doing ‘X’ today.”

You cannot take the attitude that it’s an option. If you give yourself a choice to opt-out, then at least once, and probably more, you’re going to take it. You need to use the reasons that you lift to alter your view of training into something that you need to do. You need to make it a part of your life. Those words weigh more heavily on me every time I think about them. You need to dedicate yourself to the level that if you don’t train on a day you’re supposed to train, or skip out on a few sets and leave early, you’re fucking up. Once you can take that attitude for training, that it’s either succeed or fail, you can know, definitively, that you’re putting everything you’ve got into your training.

So in summary, what I want you all to do this week is reminisce about why you started lifting, and after that, let your mind wander about why you lift now, and how you can turn that into motivation to keep pushing forward. Once you motivate yourself, dedicate yourself to lifting for your reasons (whatever they may be) and adopt the attitude that this shit is not an option. “This is why I lift, this is why I can’t fuck this up.” Until you understand why you’re training, and dedicate yourself to it 100%, you can never take things to their full potential.

If by some chance you can’t think of a reason yourself…

Feel free to discuss the reason(s) that you train in the comments.