Mentality for a Tough Day

  Here’s a mental approach for any challenging task in your life. It works for diet, it works for back squats, it works for long runs too. It doesn’t involve willpower, and even if it did you wouldn’t notice it. So here it is: JUST ONE MORE!

One more rep, one more mile, one more step, one more minute, one more hour, one more day, one more year. Just one more good decision can lead to an entire day of good decisions and likewise so can a bad decision. Basically it is an approach that doesn’t let you give up on yourself unless you want to experience the shame and guilt of failure. I say it doesn’t involve willpower, and here’s an example: you really want to eat a cookie, but you know you shouldn’t so you tell yourself “Oh, just one more hour until I can have the cookie.” But by the time an hour is up you’ve already forgotten about the cookie, so you won’t have to exercise that muscle they call “willpower.”

I have found that this mentality extremely effective so far in many aspects of my life. I dare you to try it and see what happens!

My Last Chance

Eight months ago I competed at the USA Weightlifting Junior National Championships. This was about a week after hearing a pop when I was coming out a max effort squat clean. A month later I was in a cast with the diagnosis of a slight stress fracture, a partially torn scapholunate ligament, as well as a ganglion cyst in my wrist. Six weeks later, in a splint, I was given a list of physical therapy exercises and a time frame of 6 weeks until I would be cleared to start lifting again. Fear kept me from putting too much weight on the barbell, but even though I was careful and did my exercises things weren't healing right. A couple MRI scans and X-ray's later they decided that an orthoscopy would determine the next step. This is basically where they take a tiny little camera and insert it near the sight of the injury, then they take a bunch of pictures to determine what exactly the surgeon needs to fix.

In my orthoscopy they found a couple of inflamed areas near the ligaments. After my surgeon took care of all that needed to be done, he put me in a splint. He warned me that if this doesn't work, healing my wrist may require a much larger operation (ligament reconstruction), but after that I would most likely never regain the wrist flexibility needed to perform the Olympic lifts at a high level; so basically this is my last chance to heal it right. I can look forward to a cast in the future and hopefully that will be it. Then maybe I can start picking up heavy stuff again.

In the meantime I am on a solid swim and squat program. The goal is to maintain strength and body weight without the use of my wrists at all. I am excited for what the future holds and I know that whatever happens, everything works out in the end.

-Liz :)