Saturday 24 January 2009

One of my first weightlifting epiphanies

One of the first life principles that weightlifting forced me to confront was patience. When I first met up with Harry and he began our lifting odyssey together, he preached the virtues of patience and gradual improvement. Of course, being the eager buck, I showed complete disdain for his advice and proceeded to put on extra kilos here and there and add sessions every week that my joints could not handle because of inefficient lifting technique and a lack of adaptation to the deep knee bending that weightlifting requires.

As you will have guessed, I got knee problems and it stalled me for a month. I could train around it, but it was frustrating all the same. What this injury taught me was great for the following reasons because I learned:
1. I had to stop trying to force my body and skill level into doing things that neither was ready for.
2. I had to learn better technique in order to spare my body and have more efficient lifting. This is the intended order of priorities.
3. I had to improve my hip flexibility so that I could achieve better positioning.
4. I had to learn to realise my mind/ego was lying to me and that Harry wasn't. I learned to trust my coach more.

These lessons are ones that I am still trying to learn, but as the sub-title of the blog says, this is a journey we are on and it won't be ending anytime soon. I still struggle to be patient now as my expectations and beliefs in what I can do sometimes outstrip my capabilities. It is not an ego problem, it is an issue with patience and reality checks. This is one of the many reasons that I need to listen to Harry: he has the objective voice--or as objective as possible-- while my eagerness and at times, blind faith in my capabilities, have me expecting things that are not plausible except in my head.

Because we are increasing our volume in sessions and adding an extra day's training, this means I need to be realistic about how heavy I can go and what I can do for the next month, rather than go all out for a week and collapse in the following weeks. Patience is the key here, and of course, trusting my coach. Why is being patient so damn hard?

Here is an interesting post on gradual improvement from a fascinating blog:
http://zenhabits.net/2009/01/the-power-of-gradual/#more-1966

3 comments:

Laura Nolan said...

Ha, yes I also have trouble with the patience and trusting aspects of things. Of course, if anyone else asked me I would tell them to be patient and trust Harry, but somehow my brain thinks I'm special. Stupid egos.

Nice snatching out of you today btw.

Barry said...

Cheers Laura. See you on Monday

Franklin said...

Its as if you were describing me to a tee. For my first three months of training I was injured every third week from over-doing it. Fortunately I've started to come around and started listening to my coaches and my body.

Great blog .. keep it up!

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