Everything is trainable. It’s not just a strong bench press or a fast mile split. This applies to everything in life: unique acts of skill, the accomplishment of crazy dreams, self-confidence, authenticity, courage, freedom, peace, creativity, wildness, acceptance, compassion, etc. Whatever it is we seek to cultivate or accomplish, it’s trainable. How do we get from where we are to where we want to be? We’ve probably all learned by now that it usually works to start small and gradually build our way up. But at what pace do we build up? What’s the "best" progression? What’s our weekly split look like? What do we actually do to train well?!?!? It feels very comforting to have a written syllabus for learning or a spreadsheet with all our training progressions to follow (especially when they are written by experts), and tools like these can truly provide us with some great structure to steer us through the chaos. However, these rigid structures simultaneously limit us and these two dimensional attempts to capture a process of learning and tuning in to the strength of ourselves and of nature are clunky illusions that reveal cracks when exposed to reality in all of its nuanced glory. The mastery of this paradox seems to separate mediocre and extraordinary training. This is a long never ending process but let’s take a few steps. The first step is taking some ownership over our own development and training. This is important because we are all unique. In every sports science study that I’ve examined (and I’ve examined hundreds of them), everyone responds differently to the manipulation of the variable that’s being tested. The truly scary thing is that often studies that lead to headlines in the training literature claiming that some training approach is X% more effective than another actually reveal a much more complicated reality: some subjects respond extremely well and other subjects actually do worse with it. The experiential wisdom of coaches points to the same thing: ultimately every athlete needs something a little different in order to optimize, and the best coaches are the ones who can see beyond a training dogma and tune into this. Hence, it’s critical to learn how to train ourselves. We can learn a lot from the wisdom and guidance of coaches to get us started and provide some helpful feedback over time but ultimately we will be our own best head coach if it is optimization that we seek. Our strongest expressions are completely unique. Even our highest performances within the narrow lanes that we are encouraged to operate within often follow as an outcome of mastery of our own energy. No one else is going to get us there. This will require some deep reprogramming and relearning, but it’s worth it. Some of our main barriers right now are random chaotic exercise and our culture of obedience and conformity. Great, let’s start there. Let’s rip them apart. Random and chaotic exercise is not completely wasted but it doesn’t really lead to our championship, whatever that may look like. Without progression, exercise is still generally healthy for us but it doesn’t really lead to higher stages of development and experience. Doing as we are told is a real problem for us as well. We’re not really going to break through as people by following generic workouts presented to us by a fitness media that seems to have lost touch with our true nature a long time ago. We often try to fight chaos and counter our lack of knowing ourselves by looking to “experts” to guide us and just tell us what to do. This is what many people want and this makes sense because we haven’t learned enough about our bodies. The fears are very legitimate: if we try to go off on our own without instruction we often train stupidly and break ourselves. Doing exactly what experts tell us to do is the way of our culture, but there are some downsides in outsourcing the guidance of our own personal development. Coaches, trainers, and guides have a very powerful role to play but mainly it’s to teach us, not tell us what to do. Both of these limitations are particularly well illustrated right now by the popularity of one-size-fits-all “Workout of the Day (WOD)” approaches like those provided by CrossFit and Orange Theory Fitness. The appeal and the benefits are understandable and they can indeed do a decent job of making us good at CrossFit or helping us lose a little bit of weight and gain a little muscle, but these approaches also have major drawbacks. Since our bodies are all so different such generic workouts work for some people much better than for others and they don’t work for some people at all. Since the WODs do not have any progression over time built into them, they have an inherently self-limiting effect. On a deeper level, the generic WODs limit our potential development because they ask us to do the same limited stuff everyone else is doing. This isn’t really a problem when we are a beginner learning some new exercises but it starts to really hold us back as we develop further. It seems to be no coincidence that Rich Froning Jr., the most dominant professional CrossFit athlete of all time, was completely doing his own thing. Am I saying that WODs are "wrong"? Not at all! For some people they have their place and given our overall state of fitness and athletic development in this country they make a lot of sense from a motivational perspective and teaching some exercises to groups of people efficiently. The suggestion that I am making is that we can approach such things from the perspective of learning what we need to with an eye towards moving on as we strive to become our own head coaches. Becoming our own head coaches will take some learning and readjustment, but it’s very doable. We appear to live in a bit of a tell-people-what-to-do-and-think world so that’s the starting place for many of us. From my perspective, that was the hallmark of our educational system (along with grading and ranking us against one standard). This seems to create a lot of suffering and limitation. When it really comes down to it, we are all faced with a choice: we can either work on deprogramming this mentality or not. I want to live in a world where people feel empowered and unlimited, so next week in Part 2 we’ll discuss the developmental patterns of nature because this is what we tune in to when we train.
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