Can I Train Myself?
By Master Trainer Kamal Ramgoolam
Are you in control of yourself, or is it the habit of
getting told what to do is so ingrained into you that you cant do anything by
yourself. If you fall into this category, bodybuilding is not for you, you cant
be a champion in any filed, you must realise by now that you are a loser, is
it?
The purpose of the article is to answer a simple
question...'Why i cant train my own body to the best by myself?'
In a world of competitiveness, where everyone wants to be
better than the other, where most are carried away by the ego of 'self', its
not so hard to break the shackles of the system and be a master of your own
destiny. Many has done it before and achieve great success and you can be one
of them too.
I thought it would be
worth addressing: how can you be your own trainer, coach or teacher? I want to point out that a good trainer can
offer a lot more than I’m going to discuss in this article. In fact a good
trainer is a 'father' like character, he imbues you with all his experience and
knowledge to make you a better man or athlete than he was.( congatulations for
those who got a father like that, someone in the sky is been generous to you)
The most basic
technical guidance, is teaching yourself to do the movement
correctly. A disturbing trend over the
years is that a number of people in gyms doing exercises wrong and guess what, even teaching others
the wrong things. Nobody knows what
proper technique is, much less how to teach it, and it saddens me a bit that
the handful of people using good form on weight training movements stand out
and keep to themselves. I know its not their business, but hey, if you see
somebody doing the wrong things with a probability to hurt themselves, it just
takes a few words to make the person comprehend what is wrong and right. Like
they say, doing good things-'its good for the soul'.
It goes without a shadow of doubt, that for more technical
activities or sports, a trainer may move from a good idea to absolutely
required because there’s simply no way to learn the movement on your own (the
Olympic lifts spring to mind as a weight room example of this). But I’ll make the perhaps poor assumption
here that those reading this already have good technique.
Something else a trainer often provides is motivation.
Interestingly, how much motivation a trainer needs to offer depends on the
crowd, he is dealing with. With
athletes, usually they are too driven and want to work too hard too often; a
coach spends more time keeping their exuberance in check. With the general public, it’s often the
opposite, getting them to work out of their comfort zone is the hard part. I’ll also assume (perhaps incorrectly) that
your motivation is good, you don’t need someone pushing you to work harder.(a
very sad incident was an overweight woman with puffy watery eyes coming crying
to me to seek advice how she can lose weight fast coz her boyfriend left her
for a model...not to forget she had suicidal tendencies and driving all the
women in the gym to tears. That scene was an ultimate challenge for me to take
out all i've got to motivate a whole bunch of estrogen ballonned people to get
training...)
So far, so good, right? Like everyone on the Internet, your
technique is brilliant and you work harder than 10 normal trainees put
together. What can I possibly have to
tell you about being your own trainer?
There’s an old saying to the effect that “A man who
represents himself in court has a fool for a client.” We might extend this to say “A man who tries
to be his own coach has a fool for a athlete.”
And there’s be much truth to that.
In a related vein, there’s a reason that doctors are often unhealthy
(and can’t treat their family members) and mental health professionals are
complete nutcases,lol.
Simply put, it’s staggeringly easy to be objective about
what someone else should do. People do
it all the time, give other people stunningly excellent advice that they fail
completely to follow themselves.
Why?
Because it’s easy to be objective about other people, and
damn near impossible to be objective about yourself (or people that you have a
close emotional investment with). You’re
too close, you can’t look at yourself, chaps emotionally close to you and carry
that same level of objectivity. A doctor
can’t treat his own family members because he can’t be cold, clinical and
objective; his emotions will come into play.
And the same holds true for training.
Most people can’t be objective about themselves and their
own situation. You’re too close. So…you rationalize. That you’re different, that you’re situation
is special and unique and all of that crap. (sorry am cracking up with laughter
& driving your testosterone down, but never mind, you will see more sense
by viewing the greater picture). But here’s the thing, you’re not different. You just think you are.
But you’ve lost objectivity and are too busy rationalizing
why that excellent advice (that seems to apply to everyone but you) somehow
doesn’t apply in your situation.
.
How Does This Apply to Training?
I’ve talked to many trainers, trainess and athletes in the strength and conditioning field about
this and they all basically report the same thing to the effect of “I can’t
train myself. Because the things that I
would never let an athlete do, I’ll find myself doing.”oops!
One example comes to mind, a trainer who generally follows a
low-volume, high-quality approach to training his athletes and clients. Yet when he’s in the weight room, he starts
adding stuff. A set here, an exercise there until he’s doing double what he’d
ever have an athlete do. There are
plenty of other examples.
But that’s what happens.
If you were a trainer watching someone lift and you saw that their
technique was falling apart on a movement, or they clearly looked exhausted, or
their bar speed was dropping or what have you, you’d stop them and either send
them home or move onto something else.
But if you were training yourself, you’d be far more likely to keep
training on..
Years ago, I was my own worst enemy in this regards because
I did the above constantly especially with training. As a martial artist, i would combine
traditional martial art exercises with modern strength conditioning and end up
sore, moody.
It was part of the
overall learning process. I learned a
lot about what didn’t work. The irony is that’s often how you learn....
In that context, until I figured out the solution I’m going
to present next, the absolutely best and most productive experience I had was
one where I basically side-stepped my own stupidity. I set up a basic plan like I’d give to
anybody else and then had a bunch of friends email me once per week to ask
simply “Are you sticking with the plan?”
By giving myself the accountability (that a trainer might provide) and
not wanting to tell them “No, I messed with the plan.” I kept myself from
screwing it all up by changing a bunch of stuff and doing things I knew better
than to do.
I’d note before moving on that that is certainly one
approach to train yourself, just make yourself responsible to an outside force
(that is hopefully objective and won’t just tell you what you want to hear) so
that you don’t mess with the plan and start rationalizing a bunch of mistakes.
But beyond that, I’m going to give you two simple strategies
to hopefully keep you from becoming your own worst enemy.
.
Solution 1: What Would I Tell Someone to Do?
The first solution is one I learned from another
trainer. If I’m in the gym, boxing, or
whatever the specifics of the workout is and I have any doubts about what I’m
to do next, I’ll simply ask myself the following question:
If I were training someone else in this situation, what
would I tell them to do?
Yes, that’s it.
That’s the exciting solution. But
by putting it in those terms, I force myself to step outside of myself and be
objective, or at least more objective.
Because if the answer to that question would be different for them than
it would be for my own training, then there’s a problem. And if I can’t come up with a real reason
(and I don’t mean “But I want do the next set.”), then the answer to the
question is made: I do whatever I’d tell them to do.
If I’d tell someone I was training to stop for the day, spin
down, move onto another exercise, that’s what I do in my own training. It’s no longer an issue of what I want to do
or what I think I should do. Rather, I make it an issue of “What would I tell
someone else in this situation?” This
forces me to find objectivity even if the answer doesn’t make me happy.
.
Solution 2: Asking the Question Provides the Answer
My own coach takes a slightly different but equally useful
approach to the issue. He figures that
if you’re in training, in the gym, and
you ever ask the question “Should I do the next set or repetition, the next
evercise?”, the answer is always no.
The approach is this: if you have any doubts whatsoever
about the intelligence of doing something in training, you should listen to
your brain and not do it. Because
invariably it’s that last start, that last set, that last interval that you get
hurt on anyhow and you wouldn’t be asking the question if you didn’t doubt
doing it in the first place. And the
simple presence of doubt is a good enough reason to stop.
I’d note that the above is more an athlete application than
anything useful for the general public.
Athletes are almost always too motivated (if they are anything) and
always want to do more than they should (another one of his suggestions is
that, when athlete draw up their own training programs, they should take what
they wrote, cut it in half and that’s probably a good workload). Athletes tend to fall into the trap of
thinking they need more and more and more work when what they usually need is
more rest.
For the general public, the above doesn’t really work that
well since, in my experience, most of them don’t want to really train (or train
hard) in the first place. If you let
them ’stop whenever they doubt working out’, they won’t ever show up in the
first place. Just like i anticipated for the abs challenge, it was no surprise
for me that only a fraction still stick to the training protocol
But as I noted in the introduction to this article, I’m
going from the assumption that you’re a little more driven than most. In which case, this approach applies: if
you’re training and have any doubts about doing the next set, the next repeat,
the next drill, the next exercise it’s your brain telling you something that you
should listen to. If you have to ask the
question, you already have the answer and that answer is “No, don’t do it.”
.
Summing Up
And this is it! A quick and dirty way to save you from
yourself in your own training, to avoid the dangers of loss of objectivity and
rationalization. It’s hard enough being
your own coach but it’s even harder when you become your own worst enemy by
doing things that you’d never let anyone else do. Hopefully the above two strategies will save
you from yourself and drives you towards your goal of a better YOU!
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