The Drug Addict and Intensity
The Importance of Intensity Inside the Gym: by Dustin Hawkins
Why would it be important to have an intensity within the gym? If your effort was casual in the SOAR Gym experience, would it be safe to say that your effort in life might be casual as well? Have you ever noticed that when you are participating in an intense workout that you can't really hear or think about anything? Is this a a healthy escape? What mindset comes forth after finishing?
The pain of a workout can cause our focus on the outside world to be lost. All the worries outside of the gym experience have now since dissipated, and we are now only in tune to the physical intensity. Our addictive mind can't even touch us during an experience such as this.
No more resentful, negative, or depressive thinking.
No more worry about money, or all of life's difficulties.
We are free from the world during such intense gym experiences.
We are, in a sense, experiencing an escape from our own selves.
Intensity To Get Strong
Weight training is where we work on perfecting technique and getting stronger. There is an intensity that one must have while participating in the barbell lifts if they want to linear progress and grow stronger. The back squat, for instance, is definitely a lift that we must be intense with, because if an individual gets strong at this lift, they will get stronger in all lifts, including the bench (I know, you can’t believe that right?) .
The Olympic lifts, however, are those lifts that one can only get stronger at if their technique is constantly improving. It's the same as in the squat, front squat, or anything involving the bar, but it’s especially true with the Olympic lifts.
It’s important for you to understand that all of these lifts that involve the bar feed one another. If we cannot squat we cannot do anything. If we cannot front squat then we cannot clean because the front squat is within the clean. If we cannot overhead squat then we cannot snatch because the overhead squat is within the snatch. And we cannot do any of these lifts if our posterior chain isn't strong enough to handle such intense loading. To get strong and good at these lifts it takes intense focus and practice.
Mobility & Intensity
We must work hard at perfecting the depth of all of the squats.
We must work on flexibility in our wrists in order to keep our elbows high so that we can maintain that front squat rack position when doing the clean and front squat.
We must work on developing the necessary shoulder flexibility so that we can have active shoulders when doing the overhead squat and the snatch.
If we cannot hold the weight overhead or in the front rack position when going into the squat, then we will more than likely dump the weight and will not be able to complete the lift.
We will never be able to capture intensity / linear progression if we aren’t mobile.
Taking Your Intensity To New Heights
What happens when an individual pushes themselves to a limit that they thought was never possible? When they push past being completely uncomfortable; where they now embrace it? The mind tells them to quit, but they press forward, almost going to a limit they have never known. Now when they go home after performing in a workout with such high intensity levels they seem to carry themselves in a different way; they have now developed an understanding of their own pain threshold, which then creates confidence and a new WANT (CRAVING) to revisit that uncomfortable moment (escape).
Life is uncomfortable right? It is through these workouts that we can learn to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. The toughness that it takes to do these workouts rolls over into the toughness it takes to compete for a position in the game of life.
We take on stress; we adapt to the stress; and then we take on more stress. How does this relationship to stress compare to stress in everyday life? What does intensity in the gym teach us about dealing with stress out in life? Life is uncomfortable right? The gym is uncomfortable right?