Breaking Down

Training gets hard. Should you listen to your body? No. What I mean by that is not to ignore pain, but just don’t let the pain stop you. I say don’t listen to your body in the way that when you feel terrible and everything is hard and you want to take a couple weeks off, you shouldn’t. There is always something in the gym to work on and if you really want to be the best you need to realize that every minute you aren’t in the gym one of your opponents is.

The body breaks down during hard training and that is when a lot of people quit.There is a point where everything just sucks and it hurts to walk and you’re most likely not making any progress for a really long time, then you see these people that you compete with hitting PRs on Instagram and you just really feel like crap. It’s hard because you know that you have to listen to your coach and believe in his programming even when nothing feels good anymore. Those massages that were once relaxing now feel like you’re being poked with needles and you can’t even tell the temperature difference in those contrast showers you take. People at school and work start to question why you always walk around like you’re constipated.

   But that is the part where you really become a better athlete both mentally and physically. You are breaking your muscles and your nervous system down to build them up stronger later on. Sometimes when you put so much stress on your body you can do some pretty amazing things, because your body goes into a certain response mode where in order to do anything strenuous it has to recruit literally all of your muscle fibers because that is just how broken down you are. As Jillian Michaels puts it "Your legs aren't giving out, your head is giving up!" You must continue to push through the tough training and you must believe that you can or you will fail. Don't you dare tell yourself that you can't do it.

Then after that terrible break down period if you were eating enough and sleeping enough you should come back and make some really great progress. After you start to taper for a competition or max out week you should feel 10x stronger and worth a million bucks. The weights should shoot up and you should be able to walk up the stairs without cringing in pain. This is the fun part of training. It doesn’t come without cost though, you must work for it. Breakdown periods can last for weeks or even months, and it may take more than a week for your body to fully recover from them so you can start to hit big weights again. Thats just all part of the game of weightlifting. Whatever you do when training starts to suck, don’t quit.