Friday, September 24, 2010

Origin & Purpose

Take a moment to spot a few items around you. In my room I see hangers, a shoe box, a fully made bed, dresser, and other stuff I have yet to clean up.

Pick one of the things you've selected. I'm going to guess you know what it does and what purpose it serves. The hangers allow me to put clothes in my closest and keep them wrinkle-free. Now, think about this. Do you know the history of the hanger? If not that, at least why it was created?

I don't expect anyone to have that knowledge. But we take things for granted. For example, look at a door. There's the door itself, the doorknob, and possibly a lock. However, what about the hinges the door rests on? The door wouldn't move if they didn't exist. How many people even consider them?

My goal isn't to try and get you to Wikipedia everything. Rather, it's to make you think about your own training. A few questions to ask are,
  • Why is this incorporated into my training program?
  • What purpose does it serve?
  • Is it conducive to my goals?
  • Am I optimizing my efforts?
  • Is there a more efficient way to go about this?
  • Has doing this helped me or is everything still the same?
  • Is it time to progress and choose a harder variation?
  • Is is best to choose a regression/easier variation to better help myself?
There are a lot of questions you can ask. The objective is to refine your own tasks and really keep what is helpful to you. Figure out why it's worth your effort to even bother with it.

Lately, I've noticed a sort of dichotomy in some sports. The warm-ups are either completely unrelated to the actual sport or it isn't maximizing on preparing the body for movement.

Make sure there's a consistency in your own life. Warm-ups, recovery, training sessions, diet, lifestyle habits/behaviors, you name it.

If it's not helping, why bother?

Have a good weekend everyone.

2 comments:

Creative Commons License
Niel Patel's Blog by Niel K. Patel is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.