Hey Friends!

Thursday!  Favourite day!  Should be an interesting evening, finding out what the next Open WOD is – Mr. Castro always knows how to make us excited to work out.  Keep in mind, the Open is just another series of workouts.  It’s a good opportunity to “test” yourself, but ultimately, they’re “just another WOD”.  One of my favourite Strength Coaches, Dan John, has a concept I’ve read a bunch of times (because I like it a lot and like trying to repeat it to people):

There are two kinds of benches.  Bus benches and Park benches.  Both are used for sitting, but the context is completely different.  On a Bus bench, you have expectations.  You showed up at a particular time, for a particular reason, so that you could go to a particular place.  When the bus shows up late, you are upset as now you’re late for things, you’re anxious to know WHY the bus was late and how could they do this to you???  Now, on the other hand, there are Park benches.  When you sit on a park bench, it’s often to admire the view, to take a little rest, to chat with a friend, or any of 100 other possibilities.  You don’t have any real expectations about what your experience should be like.  Those are two very different experiences, and yet both involved sitting on a bench.

SO, this applies to your training BECAUSE most of your training should be “park bench” training.  When you feel good, you push hard.  When you feel like crap, you dial it back a bit.  AND, depending on who you are, you will benefit greatly from a couple bus bench situations.  Training where you lift this much, this often, and you expect to PR or get a certain result after all that training, and you are genuinely annoyed when you don’t.  BUT, you can’t approach all your training that way or you will burn yourself out.

You can totally tell which type of training I prefer by the way I write about it (I think), but ultimately, so long as you’re cognizant of why you’re training, and that we’re all in it for the long haul.  We want to live a great life.  I know I don’t speak for everyone on this, but personally I don’t mind not PRing my Clean and Jerk if it means I’m still living a great life, and still capable of accomplishing everything I want to accomplish.  I also know that I’ll just get it next time.  Anyway, what I’m saying is that we want to help you guys live a great life, and we want to support you through mobility work, training to get you more fit, speaking with you about goals outside the gym and helping you achieve them, etc. etc.

Sorry about the long-winded blog today, but I had time to write this time so you can deal with it 😉

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