When was the last time you felt embarrassed?
Mine was a couple of weeks ago during a staff race that brought the curtain down on my school's sports day.
What was ironic was another teacher spent the evening in A&E after bouncing his jaw off the athletics track...yet I felt more mortified with my performance.
Despite not being a naturally quick athlete in my youth, my extensive background in speed training put me in pole position to claim an inevitable victory in the staff race.
In 2016 I worked with the *GB Boxing team, and was lucky enough to see the likes of former heavyweight world champion, Anthony Joshua, sprint in the flesh.
In 2017 I graduated with a masters in strength and conditioning (the science of how to make elite athletes fitter, faster and stronger for their sport)
By 2019 I was an accredited strength and conditioning coach...part of which involves being able to demonstrate/coach an athlete into improving their speed on the spot.
Yet fast forward to 2023, and in the traditional staff race that wraps up my school's sports day...and I finished 4th.
That's right...4th
As a strength and conditioning coach turned P.E teacher...against the likes of maths, geography and R.E (no disrespect to those people or subjects)
In questioning my performance I thought when was the last time these teachers had sprinted? More importantly...when was the last time I had actually sprinted?
Despite my extensive knowledge of what it takes to sprint faster...I was doing little to apply it.
In my 'leveraging your unfair advantage' video I explained that if superior knowledge was all we needed for habit change then we wouldn't have divorced marriage counsellors, obese doctors or burned out life coaches.
Therein lies the first problem; knowing and not doing is the same as not knowing.
The second problem with lofty goals is exactly that...they're too difficult.
In my boxing days I would get up at 4 in the morning to cycle to a local track and climb over a locked entrance to get my morning speed work in.
That's a 10/10 for impracticality.
Yes I don’t want to be embarrassed in the 2024 staff sprint…but I don't need to get myself fighting fit for a boxing bout I'm not going to have.
Yet this is the mistake people make with their attempts to **regain athleticism of their youth or yesteryear.
They crank the impracticality and difficulty up to an 11 on the Richter scale, and wonder why they've quit within a matter of days.
To stop this I want you to think of the smallest step you can do to nudge yourself towards your athletic goal.
For me it is committing to a daily sprint of an unspecified distance.
For you, it might be something as simple as downloading my Average to Athletic Habit Tracker by signing up to a week’s free trial of my Patreon
When it comes to reclaiming your athleticism, start by asking yourself what is the smallest action you could take to make a significant step towards your goal.
And if you must set yourself lofty goals, then invest in a coach me to help take out the guess work.
Resources:
*Having spent a year with the GB Boxing strength and conditioning team heading into the Rio 2016 Olympics, Episode 1 of Platform to Perform Podcast is what I would’ve done differently if I had my time as an amateur boxer all over again.
**Re:gain is a 12 week program I designed to do exactly that; a sensible approach to reclaiming the strength, muscle mass, and athleticism you used to have
***Most people don’t read articles, they skim them. As a thank you if you have actually read this far, here’s a free 1 week trial of my Patreon.
