What is Training to You?

Are you working out or are you training? If you don’t know, you’re NOT training. People in my line of work make millions of dollars trying to categorize the things that people are insecure about. They’ll sell you fat loss workouts, toning workouts, butt lift workouts and any other type of “isolation” exercise. It makes me insane because you need to do only one thing and one thing only – TRAIN. By train, I mean, train your ass off. Don’t stop when it gets hard, push further. If you don’t feel like you’re struggling, you’re not training hard enough. Want to get lean? Train your ass off. Want to get a tight ass? Train your ass off. You don’t need to do these ridiculous butt lift and muscle elongating moves. You need to get yourself off your couch, grab some free weight, grab some ropes, grab some medicine balls, grab anything that you DON’T want to grab. Lift it, run with it, throw it… do SOMETHING with it. You don’t need pretty machinery and club music. You don’t need a juice bar and mirrors. You need to have the peace of mind that you showed up and worked as hard as you could and that you’re going to show up tomorrow and do the same. Each workout should leave you feeling as though you just did something that you didn’t think you’d be able to do one week ago. You don’t need to have some cheat sheet with the workout that you pulled out of Men’s Health. You need to go in and do the things you don’t want to do for the body parts you don’t want to train. Because, guess what? You can’t isolate your body parts, not like they make you think you can. Your body moves as a whole and that’s how you should train it. The big thing that crossfit sells is “functional movements’. EVERYTHING is a functional movement if your body is moving through space. Are doing curls on a medicine ball better than doing them standing flat on your feet? Not if your balance sucks! If you want to do it that way, do it that way. If not, don’t. But train, train any way you can think of. The worst investment you can make in fitness? Getting a gym membership and a trainer. The people I train know more than most trainers I’ve met. How is my situation different? Because I give people a guideline to follow. How they do it is up to them. Think it’s unsafe? I’ve never had anyone get hurt. Results? Those that needed to lose weight did, but not because we were trying to lose weight. Because they took an ass kicking, time and time again. When you train that way, your body will settle in to where it needs to be in order to continue moving the way you’re demanding it to. You know what else happens? You become an athlete. Not set to play a single sport or complete a specific event, but in good enough physical and mental preparedness to participate and complete any event. Your goal then, in the end, should be to show up, every day. Nothing else matters. Show up, get your ass kicked and let everything else take care of itself. If you push yourself the way you should, and you show up when you’re supposed to, they will.