Some of the best progress I’ve ever made came during long, uninterrupted stretches of training.
Not necessarily the hardest training. Not the craziest programs. Just consistent training where I found the threshold of what I could adapt to, recover from, and continue doing.
Looking back, most of my highest achievements had one thing in common: momentum.
That has changed the way I think about competition.
I recently did a strongman contest, and one of the events involved a movement that has historically been a problem for me: the deadlift.
I’ve started thinking about exercises as green, yellow, and red lights. There are movements I can push hard without much consequence. Green light. There are movements where I need to pay attention. Yellow light.
And then there are movements where the potential reward starts becoming pretty small compared to the cost.
Red light.
The mistake is believing that because something is in the competition, I have to push it.
I don’t.
My coach has a phrase I keep coming back to:
Is the juice worth the squeeze?
Could I squeeze a little more performance out of my deadlift?
Probably.
But what does it cost me?
If pushing one event leaves me unable to train normally for the next week or two, I have to ask whether that one performance was actually progress.
My goal is changing.
I don’t just want to be able to do a contest.
I want to be able to do a contest and keep training.
That might mean intentionally doing one rep when I could possibly do three. It might mean accepting zero points somewhere. It might mean watching somebody else outperform me and being completely okay with it.
That is harder than it sounds.
Most of us enter competitions because we want to see what we can do. We want to max out. We want to beat what we did last time. We want some objective measurement telling us where we stand.
But one of my clients said something during this conversation that caught my attention.
He notices what other people in the gym are lifting, but then he realizes how meaningless that comparison can be.
He doesn’t know whether that weight is their max. He doesn’t know whether they're in week one or week six of a training cycle. He doesn't know what they're training for.
He only sees the weight.
And somebody watching him has the same problem.
They don't know his story either.
The longer I coach and train, the more I care about different things.
Was the lift composed?
Was the technique good?
Did you execute what you intended to execute?
Can you come back and train again?
Sometimes the strongest decision you can make is not squeezing everything possible out of today.
It is leaving enough in the tank to protect tomorrow.
Because one great performance feels good.
But momentum is what actually changes you.