“Now if you are going to win any battle you have to do one thing. You have to make the mind run the body. Never let the body tell the mind what to do. The body will always give up. It is always tired in the morning, noon, and night. But the body is never tired if the mind is not tired.”

– George S. Patton, U.S. Army General, 1912 Olympian

As human beings, it’s our nature to seek pleasure. Or more accurately, we are hard wired to move away from pain.

We will always move away from distress quicker than we will move towards contentment.

And nowhere, are we more welcomed away from the impendence of pain than the sanctuary of our Comfort Zone.

Regardless of who you are, or what discipline you train in, no one is exempt from holding back in a workout every now and then. We can even start convincing ourselves that we have actually worked hard during these times.  We make up stories like needing to go easy, choosing to cut the sets and reps this time, so we can be fresh for the all-out monster session we will do tomorrow!

It’s all too easy to ride on our past endeavours and reputations and dismiss those half assed efforts in the gym, that are actually more common than we want to admit. Basically, it’s all too easy to start believing our own bullshit!

We hear time and time again that we are more capable than we think we are. However, this is an almost pointless cliché, because even though this may be true, the paradox is, because our genetic makeup dictates that we manoeuvre away from discomfort, any pleasure associated with achieving our supposed ‘full potential’, is usually blocked by the notion of pain, or alternatively the fear affiliated to acquiring it!  Most of us suffer from a fear of failure and coming face to face with our own limitations.

If we knew what laid ahead of many of our endeavours most of us would never start. However it’s interesting that once we commit to something, regardless of whether it goes as we planned, when we are in that situation, more often than not we manage to handle it. It’s amazing what you can achieve when you have to!

This is the opposite of what drives our fears and stops us – the belief that if it goes wrong we won’t be able to cope. This reflects our primal fears of rejection and not being enough.

At today’s training venue, namely The Commando Temple in Deptford, it was going to turn out to be one of those ‘primal’ experiences. Pt 2 to follow.