Today is my 27th birthday. Looking back, 26 was pretty awesome. I got engaged. I got a job at one of the greatest training facilities on the planet. I won my first Best Lifter award. And of course, I met a lot of awesome people and learned a lot of valuable lessons.
As I continue to move forward on the wrong side of 25, it’s staggering to look back and see how quickly time goes. It sounds cliched, but getting old(er) gives you perspective as far as just how important health is to your quality (and quantity) of life. I hope that, in some way, this blog has helped you improve your quality of life through fitness. Thanks for reading!
Here are 27 lessons I learned this past year:
- Perfect timing doesn’t exist, so stop waiting around for it. It wasn’t the perfect time for me to intern at CSP or the perfect time for me to get engaged, but I’m sure glad I did them both. Adopt the “ready, fire, aim” approach and get moving.
- You don’t realize how much you need a mentor (or mentors) until you get one.
- Doing cardio will not kill your gains, so no more excuses.
- For the love of God, if you’re a powerlifter, stop looking down during your deadlifts. This simple trick has helped resurrect my deadlift and fix a slew of issues.
- Speaking of issues, at some point, you can’t keep outrunning your technique flaws, so fix them now.
- Breathing drills are not for wimps.
- Neither is crawling, if you do it right.
- Really long warmups are kind of for wimps. Figure out what you really need and lock it up.
- On that note, corrective exercises should, you know, actually correct something. If you have no way of measuring how well your corrective exercises are “correcting” your problems, you need to rethink your approach.
- Bragging about how little you sleep sounds less like “Look how busy I am!” and more like “Look how inefficient I am!” (If you have kids, you get a pass on this. In case either of my bosses are reading.)
- That said, if you don’t have streaks of sleep deprivation from time to time, you’re probably not doing many important things.
- Join the heels-up club for bench gains.
- It’s really really hard to be a great coach if you don’t love to train.
- Discipline starts the second you wake up, so make your bed.
- On that note, call the Success Hotline every morning. It’s free, it only takes 3 minutes and you get some of the best motivation/mindset coaching on earth.
- Listen to audio books. You know how important reading is and you know you don’t have time to read much. So if you’ve got a 15-minute commute, you can make it through a 5-hour audio book in just 10 days. That’s 36 books a year if you spend half an hour in the car every day.
- “Elbows up” is a useless cue for front squats unless you do this first:
- Silence is better than bullshit.
- If you don’t ask, the answer will always be no.
- As we find ourselves saying more and more at CSP, have some feel.
- It’s entirely possible to make boring chicken breast taste awesome with less than 5 minutes of prep work.
- If you like your steak anything but medium rare, we probably can’t be friends.
- Ice sucks for recovery. It’s hard (i.e. impossible) to argue with the evidence.
- Trust the process.
- Cutting weight for a powerlifting meet is 100 percent not worth it unless you have a legitimate shot at winning money, qualifying for a big-time meet or setting a world record.
- Your assistance exercises need to take away leverages, not make the lift easier. This means that board presses, rack pulls and reverse bands are going to have very little carryover to your main lifts, so use them wisely.
- It’s entirely possible to be a dog person and a cat person.
Thanks for reading! Time for steak and cake.
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