The complaint given to me and many other coaches out there is:

“I’m not seeing the pounds off the scale/boundless levels of energy/ flexibility/strength gains/ general growth of athletic prowess of my peers. Help me fix that.”

The problem isn’t the question, or even the answer. Athletes tend to be aware of what they might be doing wrong, and they’re always open to hearing what we say they might do about it. The problem is that many athletes don’t take any action on what I or any other coach says to them.

Now. The answers to this question they ask – sleep, nutrition, and mobility – are likely the most well-covered topics here on Breaking Muscle, and I’m not exactly writing the seminal article of the century by briefly addressing them here. Yet they are still the three things that hold 99.9% of all athletes back.

So if you’re an athlete with this question, humour me for a brief moment. Before you continue your quest for The Answer to your training problem, take a look below and see if there’s a very common training truth or two that you know, but aren’t actually doing.

1. Get Enough Sleep

If you are crushing five CrossFit classes a week and sleeping four hours a night there is no intervention that will work for you, nutritional or otherwise. It’s that simple.

Sleep is the most important part of recovery. If you’re not making it a priority, you won’t lose weight, get strong, or generally get much healthier. And when studies estimate you need 7-8 hours of sleep a night, they don’t have the athletic population in mind. Those doing hard training will need 9 hours of sleep a night at a minimum, including on weekends.

2. Eat Well – Consistently

This one is like a broken record for a lot of coaches. The athlete spends £100 or more a month on supplements, is frequently on an extreme but short-lived elimination diet, and spends weekends getting shitfaced and eating takeaways. After a month of rinse and repeat, they then wonder why this formula is not resulting in a 200kg squat.

There are any number of real food fundamentals around that can give you guidance on eating wholesome food to fuel yourself properly. Fad diets and movements aside, decent nutrition is general, simple, and repeatable. That’s not the issue.

The issue is that a lot of athletes don’t eat well consistently enough to see results. You need to be eating whole foods within an appropriate macronutrient ratio at least 90% of the time to effectively support your training, and if you’re trying to lose weight, that margin for error decreases significantly. So grub up.

3. Do Mobility Work

You have no business – none – trying to snatch, clean, or squat heavy weight if you can’t perform those lifts to an appropriate range of motion with an empty bar. And I will stress this until I’m blue in the face: you will never get more mobile, stable, or supple without doing some general maintenance on your body to compliment your training and increase your movement capacity.

It’s pretty easy these days, so there’s not much excuse. The frantic “can’t squat now what” search on YouTube isn’t necessary anymore. Pull out your credit card, pay a few quid to a site like ROMWOD or MobilityWOD, and do a led class online for 20 minutes a day. It’s like falling off a log.

Hard Work Isn’t Exciting Or Easy

Listen: I’m not a demi-goddess of fitness living in a gilded ivory tower myself. This stuff is what I do most of the time and what I’m educated in, but it doesn’t exactly blow my skirt up either. These rules and habits aren’t exciting or easy. But the reason you keep on being told them is because they’re the simplest, cheapest, and most effective ways to your training goals. And before you try anything else, you need to give these three simple truths a good run first.

Teaser photo courtesy of Rx’d Photography.

The post 3 Training Truths You Know But Aren’t Doing appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

“They [the Marines] break you down in order to build you back up,” the father said. It got me thinking about what I do for a living and what the best coaches and trainers do so well – create that balance between push and pull, get the very most our of people, and find someone’s breaking point only to bring them back up.

I experienced this first hand as a kung fu student myself many years back. My first venture into the martial arts came at the tutelage of a man without much education or fancy credentials. What my Sifu did have was the ability to know people through and through. I have never met a man with a finer sense of keen intuition in knowing how far to push people and when they’ve had enough. Push someone too far and they go right over the cliff, never to come back. If you don’t push hard enough, you aren’t getting people to realize their potential and they are ultimately less likely to come back because of the marginal results.

What the Marines understand is the same thing the greatest teachers and coaches understand – success happens through failure. You must first learn humility to learn confidence. You must first feel powerless to truly feel powerful. You must first have intrinsic self-knowledge to obtain lasting extrinsic success. In other words, getting ‘there’ is a sacrifice.

This sacrifice takes a combination of both the right teacher/coach/trainer and a willing student. Both can be hard to find. One of the paradoxes of the human experience is that we rebel at times and yet we also crave discipline. It is here we find the crux of what it takes to succeed as a coach or a student – discipline.

The Marines wrote the book on discipline. Their motto, “Semper Fi,” means “Always faithful.” Always. Not most of the time or Monday through Friday. Always. We don’t have to be Marines to achieve the same discipline. We also can hold ourselves to the same motto. Always faithful. Always faithful to ourselves.

What it takes to achieve such discipline is the willingness to fail. We have to get out of our comfort zones and find the willingness to travel down the rabbit hole of facing why we dislike getting uncomfortable. Perhaps we don’t like sweating profusely or perhaps we dislike making the healthy choices because they seemingly aren’t as comfortable. I have some choice drill instructor-like words to say to that sentiment: Tough. Tough luck.

It’s difficult as adults to accept such proposition. The proverbial ‘one step backwards to take two forward’ doesn’t appeal to many. We don’t want to get uncomfortable if we don’t have to and as adults we have the choice not to, so we choose comfort. The drill instructor approach doesn’t resonate with a lot of adults and that’s why the Marine Corps attracts eighteen year olds. Thirty year olds are certainly as capable physically and have the benefit of life experience and critical thought, but once we’re through college, we pretty much march to our own drummer. We aren’t necessarily going to do something just because a guy in a funny hat is yelling at us.

Starting young has a lot of benefits. Learning to fail is easier for youth because as a kid you pretty much fail every day in some capacity. But somewhere along the way, we find a degree of success in our known lives and we forget it came about through failure. With success comes greater confidence, but also greater comfort and therefore a tendency to get complacent.

We all have things we benefited from by starting and learning at a young age. Still, we will be confronted with things in life that will be uncomfortable and must learn or re-learn as and adult. I remember when my dad thought he would re-learn to ski after a twenty-year hiatus. He lasted one day on the mountain. Not to throw my own dad under the bus, but he just didn’t like falling down, so he hung up the skis.

Indeed we must fall down if we’re going to learn. We must get hit if we’re going to learn to defend ourselves, literally and figuratively. Today, make that choice to try something uncomfortable. Tomorrow, try it again, and you will see with every step that it is the willingness to get uncomfortable that creates true comfort. The doorway to growth, change, peace, and success is failure. You have to get broken down to build back up.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post What the Marines Know About Discipline That Will Make You a Better Athlete appeared first on Breaking Muscle.