Training Truths, Part 2 - Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.

This post is inspired by some recent lessons that I've re-re-re-relearned about training, life, training life, life training, etc.

Truth #2 - Be patient. 

Honestly, all of this could be lumped under the general heading, "things that bear repeating." If you don't know that patience is a good thing, then you've likely been living under a rock and you've definitely never watched Star Wars. But our attitudes and beliefs don't always line up with our actions. Sometimes we need a swift kick in shins as a reminder that we should do what we know we're supposed to do. We can be stupid creatures sometimes.

Of course, "be patient" applies to life in general; but here I'll be focusing on patience as it applies to training (and transitively, as it applies to becoming a better human being). 

Half of the world is trying to sell you the quickest and easiest way to wealth and health, and they're making a pretty penny because people are falling for it. "6 Minute Six-pack," "Fat to Fit in Forty Minutes per Fortnight," "Butt Firming and Thigh Slimming Shoes"--this garbage is everywhere. We all want the quick-and-easy road to success so we can retire, rich and beautiful, at age 25. We want it so bad that we often delude ourselves into thinking that whatever is being sold to us, despite the painful gimmicky-ness and preposterous claims, might just work. Guess what. It won't. There is no quick and easy way. If there was, we would all look like Brad Pitt (before he tried the Castaway look) and Scarlett Johansson. Despite humanity's best efforts, hard work and patience remain the path to fitness. 

(By LokkoRobson (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)
The only kind of easy 6-pack.

So why patience? Well, to put it simply, the body adapts slowly. For the same reasons that you don't go from athletic to obese after one day of laziness and bad eating, you don't go from weak and fat to strong and beautiful after one day of working out and eating right. The body does not adapt in hours and days. It adapts in weeks, months, years. When you build muscle, your body is undergoing a complex adaptation to a stressor and preparing itself to handle that stressor more easily and efficiently the next time you may encounter it. This adaptation takes time. Your body must recognize and respond to the stress, receive the proper nutrients and release the right hormones, and recover and rebuild. It's a fact that your body can only repair itself so quickly. One may certainly expedite or hamper this adaptation, but there is a limit on how much one can do to change the nature of the adaptation process. 

I could leave it at that: you have to be patient because the body adapts slower than you want it to. But I think there's more to patience than just saying, "it is what it is." Patience is an attitude as well as a necessity. Jim Wendler, a powerlifter, strength coach, and creator of a great strength program, is a huge advocate of the idea that strength (and fitness in general) is a long-term thing. It's not an endeavor in which you race to the finish, but a long-haul commitment in which you progress consistently over the span of months and years. This patience and mentality of slow-and-steady progress over the long-term is one of the greatest training lessons I've learned. 

With a lack of patience comes a tendency to jump from one program to another, abandon goals, lose motivation, stagnate, and give up too easily. When you're losing patience, feeling like maybe you should try a different program, change your goals, take up knitting instead of lifting, whatever, you need to tell yourself to suck it up and stick with it. It doesn't matter as much what the "it" is, as long as there is an it and you are sticking with it. 

Sometimes the life-train picks up a bit too much steam and things get crazy and you forget to eat and sleep, and maybe your squat suffers for it. Sometimes you're just not mentally there and things don't go the way you'd like them to. Sometimes you just don't have time to get to the gym. Life happens. And if you remain patient, remind yourself that this isn't a matter of today and tomorrow, but a matter of this year and next year and next decade, you'll be able to handle the bad days. The great thing about having a crappy day in the gym is that, unless you blew out your ACL or ripped the butt-seam of your shorts in front of a crowd of on-lookers, you're probably going to be just fine. If you have the right approach and attitude, even the worst days in the gym can make you stronger, faster, fitter. And of course, there's always tomorrow, next week, next month, etc.

Swole is 4ever.