Category Archives: Motivational

Embrace the Suck!

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No one wants to work hard for anything anymore.  It’s true.  Take a look around at our modern culture.  Instant satisfaction is everywhere from fast food to movies on demand.  We literally have to wait for nothing.  And, while the convenience is great and quite useful for the most part, it has also has had a deleterious effect on our lives that is sometimes overlooked or unseen.  It has eroded our patience and destroyed our work ethic – at least when it comes to the really hard stuff like physical development and skill acquisition.  Why?  Because these things are not and cannot be had instantaneously.  They require consistent practice and drive.  I mean, c’mon they now have pills to take that burn fat while you sleep?  Are you kidding me?  How lazy can we be?  By the way though, if you get your diet correct and even skip a meal once in a while, you will burn fat while you sleep without the damn pills, but that’s another blog post….

As you may have noticed, martial arts training and conditioning to develop the proper levels of fitness, mechanics, technique, attributes, and that  all elusive sense of flow can be difficult, repetitious, and sometimes downright boring, to be honest.  So how do we keep going in our daily training?  How do we push ourselves through the plateaus and dry spots with enough intensity and consistency to break through to our own personal greatness? (See what some of the historical martial greats had to say about it in this article here.)  My advice is to embrace the suck – yeah, the suck.  Learn to love it.  Crave it.  Become friends with it.  So when it hits, you not only can push through it, but actually embrace it.

Dostoyevsky said to “love your suffering.”

The Chinese martial artists call it, “eating bitter.”

We here at Warrior Fitness call it “embracing the suck!”

Does this make you weird?  Well, yes, but only in some circles.  But for the most part it earns you respect.  Why?  Because most people can’t do it.  Being able to embrace the suck and keep going  distinguishes you.  It differentiates you from the pack.  It makes you a leader.  If you want to be a leader, there’s only one way to do it – lead from the front.  That’s the only way to inspire people – by your own example.  What example do you set for your students, your family, your friends, your kids?

Learning to embrace the suck allows you to, as the great method acting coach Stanislavsky once wrote, “make the difficult habitual: what is habitual will become easy, and what is easy will become agreeable.”  So even embracing the suck is a process which allows us to continue to train with greater intensity and focus, and thus push through even greater levels of suck.

However, the best part about embracing the suck is when the suck ends and you come out on the other side.  You’ve fought the good fight, pushed through the barrier, and overcome the adversity once again.  You’re a stronger person for it.  You know it.  I know it.  So go out and live it!

The Warrior’s Key to Greatness – The Way Lies in Training!

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Throughout history a few exceptional martial artists have stood out from the rest of the budo landscape.

Millions of people from every country and culture on the planet have trained in innumerable styles and arts across the centuries, yet we only know a small number of them by name.

These men distinguished themselves and rose to the very uppermost levels of physical, mental, and spiritual skill in their respective arts and in some cases even took their talent to such heights as to create an entirely new martial art.

Looking back at them today, we are awed and inspired by the levels they achieved through their single minded determination in reaching a goal, dogged pursuit of excellence in their craft, and amazing amount of self-sacrifice.

Why are They Different?

What made these men different?

What pushed them to greatness?

What did they do differently or more productively that propelled them to prominence?

Why were their names and storied passed down through the years, sometimes centuries?

What one factor do all great martial artists have in common regardless of style, country, or culture?

And, more importantly, how can we learn from them and apply it to our own training?  Remember, we stand on the shoulders of giants, not to imitate them, but to be able to look farther.

 Quotes from the Greats

Instead of listening to my opinion today, why don’t we go directly to the sources themselves?  Here are some cool quotes I’ve complied by some of the greats talking about their own training.

Morihei Ueshiba – Aikido 

“The instructor can only impart a small portion of the teaching; only through ceaseless training can you obtain the necessary experience allowing you to bring these mysteries alive.  Hence, do not chase after many techniques; one by one, make each technique your own.”

“Always imagine yourself on the battlefield under the fiercest attack; never forget this crucial element of training.”

“This old man must still train and train” – said shortly before his death.

Gozo Shioda – Aikido 

“Kokyu power is produced when we push ourselves to the limit, making the most efficient use of the capabilities that lie within our own bodies.”

“Even though the body has its limits, until your death, the strength of your spirit is limitless.  This is precisely why, in the martial arts, there is no such thing as deteriorating as you age.”

Yukiyoshi Sagawa – Daito Ryu 

“Intermittent training, no matter how intensive, is utterly useless.  You must practice every day for your entire life.  That, and only that, is true training, or shugyo.”

“People who think they can ignore training their bodies and only work on techniques are amateurs.  They don’t know anything.  Actually, if you can’t prepare your body properly, you have no hope of ever perfecting your technique.”

“No matter what level of mastery you attain, you will never achieve perfection.  You should therefore never, ever assume that what you have achieved is good enough.”

“If people knew what my training regimen was like, they would be astonished.”

Masaaki Hatsumi – Bujinkan Budo Taijutsu 

“Modern budo students often forget to practice by themselves.  I used to practice by myself.  When there was no teacher, I found the secret teachings by my own desire.”

“Studying for oneself and making one’s own discoveries is much more important than group learning, and this applies equally well to martial arts.  As I often say, ‘Life is all about solitary training.’  This is because I want serious practitioners to discover the tricks of the trade for themselves.”

Miyamoto Musashi – Niten Ichi Ryu 

“From the time I was young I have set my mind on the Way of Martial Arts, practiced the one subject of swordsmanship with my entire being, and experienced various and different understandings.”

“See to it that you temper yourself with one thousand days of practice, and refine yourself with ten thousand days of training.”

“Never depart from the way of martial arts.”

Yamaoka Tesshu – Muto Ryu 

“Study hard and all things can be accomplished; give up and you will amount to nothing.”

“If you want to obtain the secrets of such wonderful techniques, drill yourself, harden yourself, undergo severe training, abandon body and mind; follow this course for years and you will naturally reach the profoundest levels.”

Inspired yet? 

Ready to train and push yourself to the next level? 

Check out the new solo training sensation – The Integrated Strength Program – and get started today!

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Prepare Yourself Every Day

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Ever have one of those days when nothing goes right?

The alarm clock is blaring yet you hit the snooze again for the 5th time dreading the prospect of getting up and facing the day.  When you finally drag yourself out of from under the covers and realize just how late it is, your heart jumps into overdrive as you rush through your morning routine desperately trying to get out of the house to make it in to work on time.  If you have small children to get ready for school, daycare, or other activities as well, that simply throws more chaos into the mix.

In your rush, you forgot to eat breakfast and left your steaming mug of coffee sitting on the kitchen counter while you ran out of the house.  Traffic sucks, of course, because you’re late, and when you finally get in to work there are 6 messages from your boss wondering why you missed the morning project meeting…  and your day goes downhill from there.

Some days it just seems like the universe is conspiring against you and this time it’s personal!

What do you do?

How do you respond to the myriad changes and vicissitudes life throws at you?

Do you find yourself tossed about like a small boat on a rough sea constantly overreacting and over-correcting with each wave?

Or, do you have a quiet calm reserve of energy and strength that allows you to maintain a state of fudoshin – “immovable spirit”?

Fudoshin is a state of mind that remains undisturbed and not easily upset by either internal thoughts or external factors.  It is the even keel that keeps your craft steady and on course during rough seas of life.

How do you develop fudoshin though?  How do you cultivate that quiet reserve of strength and energy?

Prepare Yourself Daily

Daily preparation is the key.  A reserve of strength must be built up gradually and nurtured daily, even when you don’t need it, especially when you don’t need it, so it’s there when you do.  Like a savings account you invest a little bit each day so that when the unexpected happens the funds are there for you to draw upon.  So let’s get to the nuts and bolts.

How do you prepare yourself daily?  Here’s what I do…

  1. Get up earlier each morning.  Yes, earlier.  Allow 30 to 45 minutes BEFORE you actually need to be up to get ready for the day.
  2. Grab a cup of coffee.  I love my coffee; there’s nothing like that first sip in the morning.  Feel free to skip this step if you don’t drink coffee. 🙂
  3. Head outside for a breath of fresh morning air (feel free to bring your coffee).  According to Chinese Medicine, early morning is the springtime of the day and thus best for planting seeds to cultivate good health.
  4. Stand tall, feet shoulder width apart, knees slightly bent, spine straight.  Raise the arms laterally up over head breathing in slowly and deeply with the movement.  As you inhale imagine the oxygen and energy carried by the breath is filling up your entire body.  Hold the full breath for a moment or two, then slowly exhale completely bringing the arms back down.  On the exhale, imagine the body is expelling tiredness.  Repeat 3 to 5 times.  Feel free to add other imagery to this exercise as well.  For example, on the inhale imagine drawing in the positive qualities of strength, health, and confidence, and on the exhale imagine the breath drawing out and expelling negative qualities of weakness, sickness, and fear.
  5. Perform a full, head to toe joint mobility routine to further wake up and enliven the body.  For a complete discussion on joint mobility work and much, much more, see my book, Warrior Fitness: Conditioning for Martial Arts.
  6. Depending on how much extra time you have, relax a few more minutes enjoying the strength and energy you have cultivated – and finish that cup of coffee before heading in to start your day!

 

 

 Life is Stressful – Prepare Yourself!

 

Battling Demons

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To get good at any discipline, you must practice every day.  To become great, you must practice all the time.  The problem is, with so many pressures, responsibilities, and draws on our time in daily life, how does one manage to train every day?

For me, it’s a daily battle with my demons.  These are the insidious little creatures that lurk in the dark recesses of my mind.  Their sole purpose being to distract me from becoming the person I want to be.  They rationalize and cajole to pull me off the path of self improvement.  The path of training.  For others, the path may be their daily struggle to make good food choices and lose weight, or it may be the daily battle to study at night while working a full-time job in order to earn that MBA.  The path is personal.  The demons are universal.

Currently I train for a few minutes every morning which provides the dual function of waking me up and setting me on the right path for the day.  It primes my muscles, movements, and nervous system for the more involved training I will perform later that night.  Additionally, I will train during the day at odd intervals when I have a few minutes of down time.  These little periods provide the consistency I need to help me keep going.  But, as I stated above, the bulk of my training is done at night after putting the kids to bed.  Usually around 9 pm or so I head down the basement to my home gym.  This is my dedicated training spot.  For me, it helps to focus my efforts since the only thing I do there is train.  It’s minimalist with very few distractions.  Perfect for doing the work.  For the most part, I beat the demons by just getting downstairs and setting foot in the gym.  Getting there is the most difficult part, but once there, the demons are beat and the daily training progresses.

Sometimes, like last night, the battle isn’t won by just getting to the gym.  Last night was different.  I was tired.  I was comfortable sitting on the couch watching TV with my wife.  The kids were asleep.  The house was quiet.  Peaceful.  I thought that the demons hadn’t even shown up to fight because getting down there was so easy.  Once I was in the gym though, they attacked.  It was a sudden, violent onslaught that took me by surprise!  “You’re tired,” they told me. 

“You don’t need to train anymore today…”,

“You did enough over the weekend.  Relax.  Take it easy.”, 

“Why don’t you just go to bed early for a change?  You need your rest!”

On and on it went, not just verbal but real feelings of being sleepy.  Feeling like I should go upstairs and go to sleep.  I almost gave in.  Almost succumbed.  Almost quit.

But mental fortitude kicked in.  Training kicked in.  The battle was on!  I heard myself talking to one of my training buddies saying – “you have to train every day.  You have to want it bad enough.  How do I do it?  Well, it’s like brushing your teeth, Dude.  You just do it every day (usually twice!) no matter what.”  This began the rally.  But it was far from won.  What won the battle once and for all (at least for last night) was the fact that I just started doing my solo conditioning exercises.  I was in the right place.  My mindset was returning.  But the way to win the battle is to simply begin doing the work.  Understand that your training is a necessary part of becoming who you want to be.  Understand that daily training is a necessary part of that process.  And get it done.

Do You Know the Enemy?

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Do you know the enemy?

I do.  It inhibits peak performance.  It makes you lazy and keeps you unmotivated.  It cajoles you into seeking comfort.

It distracts you from your goals and dulls your mind. The enemy sells you on an “easy” lifestyle and lulls you into a false sense of security.

It conspires to sabotage every move toward a healthier diet or consistent workout program.  It will aim to destroy any action or activity that moves you towards bettering yourself, be it education, a new job venture, a move towards a more spiritual life, or writing the great American novel.

Ultimately, it weakens your spirit.

What is The Enemy?

The enemy comes in many forms and assumes many guises.  It may tell you that it’s alright to sit down on the sofa and watch Lifetime Television with your wife after dinner; you can get to that workout later.  It may convince you that just one brownie bite is okay, after all, they’re just “bites”.  You may feel tired from a busy day at the office, and rightly so – the enemy will whisper in your ear that you can begin your fitness regimen tomorrow and that will be good enough.  What exactly is this enemy who kills our motivation and procrastinates our calling (sometimes indefinitely)?  Steven Pressfield identifies the enemy as “Resistance” in his excellent book, The War of Art.

“Resistance will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work.  It will perjure, fabricate, falsify; seduce, bully, cajole… If you take Resistance at its word, you deserve everything you get.  Resistance is always lying and always full of shit.”

Sometimes the most insidious form the enemy can take is the form of knowledge.  We fall into the trap of, I know what I need to do, I just need to do it.  Knowledge comforts us.  It allows us to rationalize that since we are in possession of it, we can carry out the action at any time.  We don’t need to do it now.  Tomorrow is fine.  Next week is OK to start.  So, why worry?  One of my favorite quotes (just ask my daughter, she’s heard it often enough!) on this subject is:

“Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.”
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

How Do I Defeat The Enemy?

In his book, Awakening Spirits, famed wilderness survival guru, Tom Brown Jr., gives the enemy a different name, calling it the “Demon of Distraction”.  No matter what you call it, if you call it anything at all, it’s the very same impersonal, unrelenting force pushing us away from our calling, deferring our goals to a “better time”, or for when “conditions are just right”.

Here’s a hint – conditions are never perfect.

There is no better time than right now.

How do you defeat this omnipresent enemy?  By doing your work.  By starting right now.  Don’t delay.  Don’t defer.  Begin.  Do the work(out).  Trade  the 3 o’clock junk food snack for an apple.  Skip McDonald’s on the way home from work and prepare a healthy meal.  Don’t allow yourself the luxury of excuses.  Be firm.  Be strong.  Get it done.  Be resolute and committed to your health and fitness goals.

 

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Motivation

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Everything sounds like a great idea when you are thinking about it and planning it out. The problem, as they say, is in the execution. Sunday afternoon you are superbly confident of your plan to get up at 5 AM Monday morning and do your prescribed workout. However, when that alarm goes off, suddenly your mind finds every excuse in the book to hit the snooze button and sleep “just 10 more minutes….” How do you remedy this? What do you do in the early hours of the morning to drive the demons of laziness out of your head and get up to get that workout done? Well, there really is just one way. Force yourself. Drag yourself. Make yourself get up and do it. I know, that’s not what you wanted to hear. You expected something magical, something logical, something practical, something that wouldn’t require you to exert any effort to make it happen. Me too. I used to think the same way. Why isn’t there some sort of crazy mental trick I can use to motivate myself? Why does it have to be so hard to force myself to get up and get the workout done? There actually is a trick, in a way. It’s called the law of accommodation. Whatever you keep doing over and over again becomes easier. If I’m lazy and unmotivated, then as I repeat that action of hitting the snooze alarm, it becomes easier for me. If I drag my lazy ass out of bed and make it to my basement gym just one day, it becomes slightly easier the next. As I keep pushing, prodding, coaxing, cajoling myself to get up at 5 AM and workout, it becomes habitual. It becomes easy. My body and brain naturally “accommodate” me. Don’t just do it. Get it Done.

How do you get and stay motivated?  Discuss!

The “I Don’t Have What I Need to Start” Myth

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So many people want to begin a diet or start an exercise program, but labor under the false pretense that they can’t start because they don’t have what they need yet and therefore have to wait.  For example…

“I want to start my diet, but I didn’t get to the grocery store, therefore I have to wait.”

“I want to start working out, but I don’t have a gym membership, so I have to wait.”

“I want to start working out, but I don’t have the right equipment yet, so I have to wait.”

Or, one of my favorite ones, “I want to start an exercise program, but I don’t have time right now so I have to wait.”

None of these things are true!

They seem like such insurmountable hurdles only because the people who subscribe to them are looking for excuses. They somehow believe that if the excuse is good enough, then they are, well, excused. That they are off the hook. They tried. Better luck next time. Maybe things will be different – NOT!

The problem is that things will never be different unless you actively do something to make them different. You want to lose weight? Start now. You want to be in better shape? Start now. You want to improve your athletic performance or martial art skill? Start now. Don’t wait. Don’t let those excuses become so entrenched in your psyche that you actually start believing them. Start right HERE right now.

Goals for 2010

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Happy New Year!

Welcome to Warrior Fitness in 2010. This year, like every year, is full of potential. It’s a new beginning, another opportunity to change, to reinvent yourself for the better. To make improvements by forging your body physically, challenging yourself mentally, and growing spiritually. There is a sense of excitement at all the possibilities that lay before us.

How will you change yourself this year? What goals have you set? What do you want to accomplish in your training and in your life? Whether the goal is to improve your fitness levels for martial arts training, to enhance your performance in those martial arts, to lose weight, to gain muscle, to improve mobility and increase flexibility, or just to be a healthier, more fit you, Warrior Fitness can help you achieve all these goals and more.

January is the busiest time of the year for gyms and health clubs, but guess what? In February, those places are ghost towns. How do all those well meaning goals become unsustainable for so many, so quickly? How can you assure yourself that your motivation won’t quit, that your will won’t weaken? One way to do this is to have someone else hold you accountable for your goal setting, progress, and accomplishment. Motivation is a funny thing. When we think no one is watching, it becomes much easier to slack off or make an excuse to ourselves as to why we can’t workout today, or why those cookies are better for us than that salad. When you must hold yourself accountable to a third party, it’s much harder to stray from the goals you have set.

Warrior Fitness offers personal training services, both in person and online, to help you hold yourself accountable. Together, we will set goals, create a step-by-step plan to meet them, and work toward achieving them. If you would like more information, or want to get started now, please email me here. and reinvent yourself this year!