Education

Wait, what do you mean “we are four weeks out”?

If you just realized Nationals is only four weeks away, this is for you.

Here are four points of advice that will take you less than ten minutes to read and took me nine years of coaching to learn:

1. Building your confidence is the most important thing you can work on in the next four weeks. Your brain can make you lose or miss before you even step on a platform. If you don’t walk up to the bar telling yourself that you’re the baddest mf’er in the room, you’re doing yourself a disservice. One thing you can do for this is read 1-2 books this month in your downtime. “How Champions Think” by Dr. Bob Rotella is currently on my nightstand and a total game changer. Another great one is “The Perfect Day to Boss Up” by Rick Ross. You can’t just be confident on the platform – you have to find a way to be confident in your life.
2. Visualization paired with intentional and deliberate reps can be the difference between a breakthrough performance and “just another meet.” The best part – doing both of these things adds zero time to what you are already doing in the gym. As you are warming up from the empty bar, be intentional and deliberate on the things you need to focus on for the heavy lifts: pushing with your feet, setting your back, or whatever else. These things don’t become the focus at 90%; they become the focus at the empty bar. As the load increases, take 5-10 seconds before each lift to visualize it happening. Sit in your chair, feel your feet on the ground, close your eyes, and ACTUALLY feel your way through the lift and see it happen. Then, when you step up to the bar, just do what you just saw. Creating and engraining motor patterns is quite literally that easy.
3. Understand that your attitude and perspective will make and break you – not only as an athlete, but also as a human. Pay attention to the words that come out of your mouth. How do you speak about yourself? How do you speak about your lifting? Are you a pessimist or an optimist? I tell my athletes that every single day of your life can be the best or worst day of your life – it’s just your perspective. Take a second to realize that things maybe aren’t as bad as you think. Optimism goes a really long way in life and lifting. In Russ’s book, he says “Everything is unrealistic until it’s not. Follow your dream despite its contradiction with the known reality and the rational expectations and assumptions of other people. You must believe in what you are doing before anyone else can.”
4. Stop treating meets like they are such a big deal. We get ourselves all worked up about one day, one session, and six specific minutes. In the grand scheme of things, it’s just six lifts. The moment you start to treat this sport holistically with an understanding that the ultimate goal is to become a better version of ourselves, it gets a lot easier. A bar weighs the same in your garage as it does at AO Series, AO Nationals, or anywhere else. And, guess what? The same applies to plates. I tell my athletes the same thing I told my coach when she told me I didn’t celebrate lifts or wins enough: “It’s only a big deal if you make it a big deal.”

So TL;DR:

The things you do between your ears over the next four weeks can do a lot more for you than what you do with your muscles.

The muscle part is important too, but ya’ know, you get it.

Also if you haven’t signed up for a media package at Nationals yet hit up cr_ea_te for quite literally the best media in the game. (click his name to sign up)