Average Training is Good.

What does it all mean?

Average training is good, but average training does not mean average effort.  It means that with repeated bouts of high effort inside and outside of the gym you learn to appreciate that every session will not be this killer PR session.  You have made your average high relative to the norm.  Average is good, but average effort is not acceptable.

Elevate Your Average

Don’t be okay with mediocrity.  If you are here, it’s because you are inspired to become a better version of yourself.  Well then, put forth an inspirational effort.  No one has ever been motivated by the person just checking the boxes from day to day.  Or the person that skips their accessory work.  Rocky is an inspirational story because he fails repeatedly, but he keeps coming back harder. 

Every time you are not putting the highest level of effort you are lowering the ceiling on what your average could be.  Every time you skip accessory work, or skip training, you are setting yourself up to do that again in the future.  Every time you miss your protein target, or cheat on your nutrition plan, you are setting yourself up to do so again in the future.  Every time you stay up later than planned, falling down the YouTube wormhole or stuck in a Netflix vortex, missing your sleep target, you are telling yourself this is acceptable behaviour. You are telling yourself that hitting your sleep goal, and therefore performing at your highest level possible in the days and weeks to come, is less important. 

What is Average Anymore?

In the days of YouTube and Instagram our sense of what average means has become very skewed.  It can be tough not to compare ourselves to the elite lifters or young up and comers floating around the internet.  If you train at a gym with a very high-level performer, your perception will be even more skewed because after leaving the gym having witnessed this performer you will then scroll Instagram you will see more and more of these people.   Your perception will become that every gym has one of these people, or that these people are everywhere.  Having trained, worked, and lived in gyms for over 20 years I can assure you that these people are not everywhere.  They are not even in every powerlifting gym.  

I have a client who recently decided to get a membership to his local Globo gym, on top of his powerlifting club membership, so that he could take advantage of the equipment variety once or twice a week.  He had just competed, and we had discussed that it might give him a mental break from the pressure he places on himself when training at his club.  This individual battles with their lifting anxiety on a regular basis.  Whether it is surrounding performance, how certain lifts feel, fears, expectations, or just trying to focus after having dealt with every day work shit all day, we are regularly working on his mental game to help him help himself keep the ship heading in the right direction.  It took him looking around a Globo gym for one session to notice another person’s squat form and load to think to himself, later messaging me, “Hey, I guess I am pretty good at lifting weights.” To which I chuckled and responded “Yeah Man, most people don’t squat 500lbs, let alone 540.  Not even everyone at your gym squats that much.”  His perception is greatly skewed by the fact that an individual who he has trained with for years, who also happens to own the gym, has hit a 2100+lbs total in wraps.  When you see one or two of those individuals regularly in training, and then you see them all over the internet, you think they exist everywhere. 

Insert Yourself into Environments where the average is high.

If you are the biggest fish in your pond, you are in the wrong pond.  If you aspire to elite levels of training and performance, and you are the strongest in your gym, perhaps it is time for you to find a new gym where your accolades are considered average again, or even below average.  Franco Colombo became one of the best in the world because Arnold was his training partner.  He thought he sucked and was small compared to Arnold.   

This will flip a switch in your mind and warp your expectations in a positive way.  I am sure most of you have heard of the “Bannister Effect.”  Before the 6th of May in 1954 no one had ever run a mile in less that 4 minutes.  The barrier was thought to be unbreakable at the time, but after Bannister broke the 4-minute barrier, it only took 46 days for someone else to break the barrier.  After that more and more people kept achieving the milestone.  Within 11 years a high school student had broken the barrier.  The “Bannister Effect” refers to the mental shift that occurs when a significant barrier is broken, demonstrating to other that what was once thought to be unachievable is, in fact, possible.  In Strongman and powerlifting these barriers have also been broken time and time again.  Eddie Hall’s 500kgs Deadlift come to mind. 

It also seems like everywhere you look someone deadlifts 800lbs these days.  While the understanding, techniques, training methods, and programming that go into powerlifting have improved over time, yielding bigger and stronger lifters, the number of people in the sport has also grown drastically.  There are more people in the sport, so there are more talented and genetically gifted people in the sport, so our perception is that it is very common to deadlift 800 lbs.  Meanwhile, because the sport is so much more popular now, that means there are just as many more people that are not as talented or gifted genetically.  And that is only including the people that are competing. 

Side note, if you have yet to compete because you do not think you are strong enough or ready enough, you are wrong.  You will never be strong enough or ready enough for your first meet, so you better just do it.   You will learn more from one 16-week prep for a competition, and the completion of a competition, then you will from a year in the gym without competing.  There is also something magical that happens when a bunch of individuals come together for a ritual 1RM tribute to the powerlifting Gods.  If you really love lifting heavy weights, you will love competing in a powerlifting meet even more. 

                  If you really want to know where you stack up against the rest of the world, strengthcheck.me is a great resource that will help you feel better knowing how many people you are stronger than. 

                  So, what do we do with all this info?  No one wants to be average at anything.  The point here is that as you get stronger and stronger your average continues to elevate.  At some point it simply becomes difficult enough just to maintain your average. We get in our heads when we are not hitting PRs or progressing like we once were, or how we perceive people on the internet are progressing.  Just remember, the Instagram is not a real place.  The goal of this ramble is to convince you to check your ego and allow yourself to put the right weight on the bar, for the right number of reps, at the right RPE.  Practice being content chipping away slowly, or even lowering weights, when your practice requires it.  Your body probably doesn’t know the difference between 210kgs and 200kgs.  Putting forth a high effort also means knowing then to take your foot off the load progression gas and just get some quality training in.  While this may seem like it takes less physical effort, it takes a higher degree of mental effort to execute these decisions while being able to see the longer-term outcomes of your short-term actions.  Choosing to love your training even when the weights are not where you want them to be is also an example of putting forth a high effort.  The more you practice this attitude for months and years, not days and weeks, the more you will be rewarded with stronger and stronger training that is completely average, for you.  Yielding better and better performances on meet day, when it is time to push the pedal to the floor.    Average Training is Good.