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Competition in jiujitsu is fun.  I mean, I don’t care for it particularly. It makes me nervous and anxious and I never perform my best. However, the need to test our skills regularly whether in day to day training or competition is an essential part of the sport.  I encourage people to compete at least to see if they like it and enjoy it.  For some people the thrill of competition is everything.  And finding that as an adult can be a great vehicle to improve their lives.  That being said, I have to put something into perspective. 

The real competitions start at Black Belt.  I’m not trying to be dismissive or condescending.  It is great that there are competitions open to students of all levels.  And the only way to improve at competition is to compete regularly.  I get super excited over my friends and students competing as anybody would. I cheer them on and I coach them and I watch their matches with great enthusiasm.  However, once someone is dominating the field and bringing home gold medals from multiple competitions, it just signals to me that they are ready to be promoted.  That is another good thing about competition.  It can signal when someone is ready to advance.  

I think it is important to remember this if you are competing and losing.  Yes, that gives you stuff to work on.  Learn from your losses! It also means you are where you should be regarding your belt.  And, third, you are probably going against people that are due for a promotion.  This is why I often say rather sarcastically that nobody cares if you are the world’s greatest white belt. In my mind the white belt world champion (I can’t believe that’s even a title) is just a blue belt that hasn’t gotten promoted yet.  And so on as you go up in ranks.   That’s not a bad thing (although I often say it with disgust). It’s just how it is.  

If you want to compete, then you have to be willing slog it out in the same division for a couple of years until you start making progress.  If you’re competing then it pays to be the world’s best white belt.  However that to me just translates to the world’s newest blue belt.  Then the process starts all over again as you move your way through the blue belt division for a few years.  

Enjoy the process.  One day you might be the world’s best white belt and the next day hopefully you’ll be the worst blue belt.  That’s the journey.  

“At the foundation of all training is the ability to make a better decision. Period.” My friend, Brian Mackenzie said this and it really resonated with me.  Making a better decision is all we have.  It’s all we can do to grow.  Each day we have hundreds, if not thousands, of decisions to make that will direct the course of our lives.  They say, “Hard training. Easy life.” To train hard is a decision in and of itself that will steer your life in a better direction.  Beyond that, how we train and what we do in the gym are decisions that also will have great repercussions.  The devil is in the details.

At its best, training is mental and emotional as well as physical.  If in the midst of hard training, I can maintain my emotional composure as well as my physical composure, I will have trained more than merely the muscles. Imagine an intense workout where I am asked to work hard for a given period of time.  After a few minutes the physical demand will start to show as I fatigue and need to slow down and take breaks.  However, the other struggle is emotional and mental.  I will start having feelings about how much my legs are burning. I will need to self-talk.  That monologue can be positive or negative. Furthermore, my emotional state might start manifesting as poor mechanics.  For example, when people fatigue, they often start looking down and hanging their heads, their expression turns sour, they rest their hands on their hips or thighs, they start sacrificing their form.  These are physical manifestations of emotional and mental fatigue.  Also how an athlete acts in the last seconds of the workout are indicative of how they act near the end of a contest. 

If we believe that “how we do anything is how we do everything,” then we should envision the athlete at the end of the match when they are fatigued and potentially behind on points.  We cannot expect them to rise to the occasion, instead we must understand that they will fall to the level of their training.  We look for the physical cues of their emotional content, the sour face and downcast eyes, the hands on their hips or thighs.  We listen for the self talk.  We see if they push through to the end or if they shut down before the clock winds down.  Those are not the types of athletes or people we want to develop.  We need to take the training room seriously.  We need to ask our athletes to make better choices about who they want to be when everything is stacked against them.  

Coach your athletes to make better choices not just physically but also emotionally.  Have them stop and listen to themselves.  Reframe their self-talk.  Make better decisions about their posture and their demeanor.  Train your athletes to push through to the end and not to give up prematurely.  Mental toughness is a trained skill as is emotional stability as is physical fitness.  Use that precious time in the gym to make better decisions about how you will be outside the gym.  

Sometimes the hardest thing is figuring out what is important and what is unimportant.  Once you figure that out, you can spend your time focusing on the important things and ignoring the unimportant things.  Too often we get caught up in shit that doesn’t matter.  The sooner we catch ourselves doing that, the sooner we can stop and get back on track.  Stephen Covey, author of The Seven Habits of HIghly Effective People says, “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”

I hate feeling helpless.  I assume I am not the only one.  I think most people hate that feeling.  Of course, we all make this problem worse by outsourcing so many of our daily needs.  I think ultimately giving our power away to other people can contribute to feelings of helplessness if we let that outsourcing go unchecked.  Some of this outsourcing is justified by the “convenience.”   Most people don’t cook because it’s easier to order in.   Sure it can be much easier and often more fun to order in and easy to justify the increased cost because of the time saved: time being a more precious commodity than money.  However, the real costs are often hidden.  We rarely get the healthiest foods when we outsource to third-parties so we pay for that food (partially) with our health.

Along with the poor health comes the feeling of being helpless to stop the problem.  Many people complain that “it’s too hard to eat healthy.”  It’s not too hard, unless you don’t know your way around the kitchen.

Another common problem is that people rely on experts to take care of all basic needs.  I know as a person that grew up in New York City, that when I take my car into the mechanic, I am totally at their mercy because I don’t know anything about cars.  My car maintenance skill set includes: filling it up with gas, checking the oil, changing a flat tire, replacing wiper blades and fluid, and changing lightbulbs.  Beyond that I am helpless and at the mercy of the mechanic.

When it comes to human body maintenance, most people have an extremely limited skill set: they can fuel it, clean it and drive it really fast and hard.  When it comes to the human body, I consider myself an expert driving instructor as well as an expert mechanic.  I refuse to feel helpless when it comes to the place I spend all my time.  Not only do I want to teach people how to drive their bodies better, I want to teach them how to perform the basic maintenance on their bodies so they don’t have to rely on experts.

Coach Greg Glassman is fond of saying,  “I’ve got an analogy for you. Physicians are lifeguards. Trainers are swim coaches. When you need a lifeguard, you need a lifeguard, not a swim coach. But, if you need a lifeguard, you probably needed a swim coach and didn’t get one.”  My goal is to be that swim coach for people.

My friend Melissa Hartwig said a really great thing. “The mind likes a plan.” When you have all this stuff bouncing around the inside of your head and it’s keeping you up, just get up and write it down. Don’t stress over all the emails and calls and bills, just write a plan and go to sleep. Wake up and execute. Sounds simple, but sometimes we forget and get caught in the drama of worrying. I know I do. This was a great reminder.

Some people advocate doing this every night before bed. Write down on an index card your to do list for the next day and wake up with a plan and execute. It’s a brilliant way to be effective.

Take a look around and notice how much stuff you acquired.  How much of it do you really need?  I know I have acquired a lot more stuff than I need.  I still look for more, but I know more stuff will not fill the void.  The void is only filled by doing things, not getting things.  It’s like Tyler Durden said in Fight Club, “The things you own end up owning you.”

I was listening to a great podcast and they talked about sandbag training.  I have trained with sandbags before and they are unforgiving and potent.  I started looking around the internet for sandbags.  Then I thought to myself, will this fill the void in my life?  Will this make my training better?  Perhaps.  However, what I really need to do is stick with the program I am on now and not get distracted and diverted by a new toy.  Sure the sandbag is one of the most cost effective training tools pound for pound and I could do a lot of stuff with it that I cannot do with a barbell.  However, I will wait to get one until I have a more compelling reason.

“It is preoccupations with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.” — Bertrand Russell

I am currently doing a gymnastic program that requires 3 to 5 days a week of serious commitment. I have always had a hard time following a strict program. Which is why I gravitate towards CrossFit’s varied programming.  It’s always something new and different and I never get bored.  However, I have more specific goals with respect to gymnastics now and therefore need a specific progressive program to reach those goals.  Distractions are constantly rearing their head to try to get me to fall off the program.  That is what happens whenever you have a goal or a project: your fear and resistance will come up with excuses for you not to live up to your potential.  The more important something is the more fear you have around it.  The more fear you have, the more your mind will want to wander off target and create very compelling reasons for you to give up.

Learn to spot these distractions and do not let yourself get pulled off target.  You have big things to do and great things to achieve.  Stay the course.