As a young teenager I always loved watching the greats train.
Muhammad Ali, Roy Jones Jr., Arturo Gatti.
The sweat, the speed, the intensity.
Professional boxers. These were real men I thought. Warriors. Champions.
One thing that always looked so cool to me was watching them hit a speed bag. One of those small, teardrop shaped bags that have a circular board over them and hang at about face height.
Incredible timing. Intensity. Power. In a word – manliness.
As I watched all I could think is:
“I gotta get me one of those”
Lucky for me, Christmas was only eleven months away.
The anticipation nearly killed me.
But I made it.
Dad hung it for me that very morning in our furnace room.
I went to work.
At first I was pretty poor at it. It was tough to hit it more than a few times in a row successfully.
I kept at it and built up some rhythm.
Then I was fairly decent at it.
Then I was bored.
And we were barely into the New Year.
Even when my friends came over they weren’t that impressed and didn’t seem to think it was that cool.
So much for my manliness.
But maybe not all was lost.
In that same furnace room was a custom pull up bar that my dad made me out of some old scrap pipe and cheap brackets from the local hardware store.
Man did I put in a lot of reps on that thing over the years.
I never got bored.
Every day was a good day to head down to the furnace room and hammer out some reps.
The burn.
The challenge.
The potential back jacked-ness.
I couldn’t get enough of them.
I spent hours in that dark furnace room.
Just me and the pull up bar.
Oh right, and that speed bag.
Sometimes I used it more out of guilt that mom and dad spent their hard earned money on it. But that’s about it.
Unfortunately (for mom and dad – thus the opening apology) the speed bag had to have cost at least a few hundred dollars.
The chin up bar dad was able to throw together by spending some loose change in his pockets.
I may not be using that exact pull up bar any longer but pull ups are definitely still on the menu for me every week and they have been for almost thirty years now.
All the way since those days in the furnace room.
So what was the difference?
Why did the expensive, fancy, hardcore, manly thing not sustain my interest but the cheap pipe bolted into the floor joists did?
It comes down to three major things.
With them present in any of your undertakings progress is highly probable and nearly guaranteed.
Without them progress grinds to a halt, never to be seen again unless they are found.
With them any dream you can dream up for yourself is possible.
Without them dreams simply die.
Dream Killer #1
No continuous challenge.
The Speed Bag – Once I could do it for a few minutes straight without losing the rhythm it didn’t feel that challenging anymore. It felt pretty straightforward and easy. I wasn’t really sure how to get better.
The Pull Up Bar – I learned all that time ago that pull ups will never be easy. They will always challenge you. They will always offer a clear path to improvement. Do them slower. Do more reps. Add weight to your body. Change your grip. That fifty cent pull up bar offered me limitless challenge.
Dream Killer #2
No larger goal in mind. Not enough reasons.
The Speed Bag – The fighters that so inspired me and that I loved to watch train were preparing for battle with another human being that literally planned to rip their head off.
They had all the reasons they needed to be a little bit quicker. A little bit fitter. To slightly improve their technique.
For them milliseconds could be the difference between having the belt wrapped around their waists and waking up unable to recall where they are or what their name is. They had all the reasons they needed to train with all their might.
Never having any aspirations myself to ever enter the ring, I couldn’t link my efforts with the speed bag to achieving anything tangible or important to me. Being “ok” at it was good enough.
The Pull Up Bar – The journey was the goal. The reasons were clear. I loved the burn. I loved fighting for every last rep. I loved being able to do something that I was previously unable to. And as a bonus side effect of all this burn and pain I could see that my back was starting to fill out my t-shirts a bit. There was no finish line. Better was the goal and vision.
Dream Killer #3
Extrinsically motivated. No fuel from within.
Speed Bag – The fighters that so inspired me loved to fight. They’d been doing it their whole lives. The process of training and getting better was their main reason for getting up in the morning. They lived for it.
I, on the other hand, didn’t have all that internal juice and motivation. I thought it would be cool to be able to do. As a young teenager, I thought it would impress my friends.
Pull Up Bar – I didn’t care what my friends thought. I was only putting in the reps for me. No one else. No one was telling me that I should go down to the furnace room and put in the work. I had all the fuel I ever needed. That fuel is still operational in my life and just effective now as it was nearly thirty years ago. It never runs out.
It’s internal motivation. Fuel from within.
This is the only fuel that will ever produce lasting change and progress in your life.
Without it you will be destined for the dreaded yo-yo pattern with your progress to your goals, fitness related or otherwise.
This is because extrinsic motivation doesn’t last. It comes and goes and makes people wonder what is wrong with them and why they can’t just stay the course.
It’s due to being dependant on the wrong fuel source.
So to close it out here are the three key things you need to achieve any goal and make lasting progress:
- You want it to be continuously challenging. No challenge, no change. Lean into the challenge. Stop wishing or thinking it’s supposed to be easy. Nothing kills progress faster than ease.
- You want to have a larger goal in mind. Something so big that just being “ok” is not enough. Something that makes you strive for greatness. Connect to a higher purpose. Surpass mediocrity. Weak purpose equals weak results. Strong purpose equals strong results.
- You need to do it for you. Nobody else. Don’t worry about impressing anybody. Impress yourself. Don’t worry about being approved by anybody. Approve of yourself. Get enthusiastic about life and what you’re working on. Infuse it with some passion.
Challenge. Purpose. Passion. Embrace these ingredients and you’re on your way to becoming unstoppable.
