The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself

Rant and Tip for February 2, 2012

Quote: “The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself; to be conquered by yourself is of all things most shameful and vile.  ~Plato

Isn’t this everyone’s biggest challenge? We need to conquer our own minds to be successful in most any endeavor. For me to reach a 400 squat by August the first thing I need to do is get through my head that I can do it. I need to stop letting my own mind conquer me. When changing your way of eating for a healthier lifestyle the first thing you will find is that you need to conquer yourself. If you cannot do this then you will fail and as Plato has so eloquently stated this is shameful.

My work in the shirt last night was horrible. I was doing pretty well in it and found the grove but tweaked my shoulder/back on the lift. After that it hurt just to lift the bar off the rack. It is not anything serious. I have loose joints in my shoulder. I can make my shoulder blades stick out and sometimes the go the other way and go in. Now after doing some reading this last night and this morning I think I know what is going on. It all goes back to the imbalance between my back and chest. While I will always be able to force them to stick out because I believe that since I have been able to do this since high school the muscles are stretched out a bit. Also to add to the challenge my research has led me to believe I need to do more stretching in my chest muscles to get them more flexible. My scapula do not stick out on their own but when put under stress like when I bench in the bench shirt they tend to have a mind of their own. I can control them when benching raw and do not have this challenge. I do not at this point that it is due to the heavier loads I take on in the shirt because when I benched using the drop weight hooks I had 436 pounds on the bar with no challenge and no pain. In closing what this all means is I need to continue to strengthen the muscles in my back that hold the scapula in and stretch after my workout.

When conquering a new way of eating you will need to sit back and take an account of where you were successful in changing your lifestyle and where you were not. If you take a moment each evening and write down what you did right you will probably remember and do it again. The same goes for the areas that you may have failed. If you right down the cause of the failure and not so much what happened you can keep it from happening again. What I mean by this is, when you ate that donut at the office, you do not right down I ate a donut and leave it at that. You write down you ate the donut because you were hungry and didn’t plan well enough to have a healthier choice. Or if you have to write it just looked to dam good sitting there I had to eat it. You know not t go near the donut counter again. LOL You need to conquer you own mindset first. I often tell people come to me when you are truly ready. I guess what I really need to tell them. Come to me when you have conquered your own mind and your mind is ready.

Have a great workout!

Tip: Attack all exercise programs with the same intensity. Make sure you hit your back as hard as you are hitting your chest. Hmmm I wonder why this comes to mind? I always thought that I did do this. However the proof is in the pudding or scapula in this case. Time to take it up a notch on those smaller back muscles.