Toolbox: Power of Mind

I’ve been keeping track of my weightlifting progress since I was 16 years old–and have over 22 log books to show for it! Today, I was doing an exercise called ‘smith-press for shoulders.’ I’m fairly strong on this particular lift but when you get up there in poundage it might takes weeks or months to break a plateau, in either reps or pounds.

Only doing this exercise once a week it gives me roughly 4 attempts to increase per month, or roughly 50 per year. At 59 years old, increasing the weight by five pounds is a great feat. Today, I did something I’ve only done probably five times in all my years of training–I started with the wrong weight.

With my style of training, I’m supposed to be completely in the moment. But I wasn’t. I was thinking about something else. This is a good way to get hurt. Fortunately, I didn’t, and a funny thing happened: I started ten pounds higher than I should have. I must have looked at the wrong number.

It was an eight-rep set and I did it ten pounds heavier than last week, which trust me, in my world is almost impossible. I only realized when I went to write the number in my book. This reminded me of something important.

With all that I went through dealing with agoraphobia, it would have been so easy to blame my mental disorder as an excuse for being an average businessman at best. Or maybe stuck in a job I hated, living in total fear. But, not knowing what ‘it’ was and fighting on anyway, I truly believe this gave me the strength to become successful. Once I learned that anxiety is a condition, and put in the years of work to manage it, I discovered that the drive and the fight were ingrained in me.

In the gym, I challenge myself physically to this day. And I’ve discovered that for that exercise, I have a new starting point. It was a mistake, but one that showed me I’m capable of more than I realized. Whether you’ve come to this blog deliberately or by accident, I hope it shows you the same thing.

Set a new starting point. You’ve got this!