In his excellent meet writeup for XPC Worlds, Elitefts coach Brandon Smitley explained that his meet prep had been pretty subpar – mostly for reasons unrelated to training, but also, in part, because
“I'm really good at hearing what my body is telling me, but I'm TERRIBLE at listening to it.”
Brandon is one of my all-time favorite authors in the strength and conditioning world, because he’s one of the few guys who not only has the formal knowledge, but also the self-awareness that’s necessary to apply that knowledge in what are actually really fucking complicated situations (like a meet prep during an engagement, while trying to move, and working four jobs). And this insight is maybe the single best example of that I’ve ever seen.
Because understanding the difference between hearing what your body is saying and actually listening to it is absolutely crucial if you ever want to go from shit to suck – and certainly if you want to go from good to great.
Hearing What Your Body Is Telling You
This, honestly, is the easy part. For beginners it probably doesn’t seem that way, and if you are a beginner, don’t stress: that’s perfectly normal. You learn to hear what your body is telling you from experience. Unfortunately, because everyone’s body is so different, there’s no real way to verbalize the difference between an ache or pain that you can push through and an ache or pain that needs rest to avoid developing into a serious injury. Nor is there any good way to convey the difference between the fatigue that comes from a poor night’s sleep and the fatigue that comes from overreaching.
It’s up to you to learn to hear your body’s unique language, and that process is a lot like a kid learning to talk for the first time. At first, the kid hears sounds and can’t understand or even distinguish among them. Eventually, he hears the same types of sounds over and over, and is able to separate them into words. And then a little later, he can put those words into context and understand the meaning behind them. That’s the process you’re going through as a beginner.
After a few years of serious training, though, it becomes almost second nature – you feel a sensation you’ve felt many times before, and you understand (more or less) what caused it and what it means.
Listening To What Your Body Is Telling You
This part is so, so much harder – because oftentimes, when your body tells you anything at all, it’s telling you to back off. And if you’ve gotten to the level where you can hear what you’re body is saying in the first place, you probably got there because you love to train, and train hard. In fact, training hard, even when you felt tired or worn out, is probably what got you to the advanced level in the first place!
Furthermore, many lifters have an emotional connection to their own training. That might mean they use a hard session as a means of stress relief; that they derive a sense of self-worth from pushing past mental and physical boundaries; or even that if they make a plan, they’re going to stick to it, come hell or high water.
These are all perfect valid reasons for training in themselves. But one of the keys to listening to your body, and not just hearing it, involves prioritizing your motivations. Ask yourself: at the end of the day, are you lifting to be a strong as you can possibly be, or are you lifting to let out some stress in you life? You can probably answer the question very easily, but it’s actually the process of asking yourself that makes it much easier to accept the consequences.
Separating the Long and Short Terms
One of the many difficulties in learning to coach yourself (something I discuss extensively in my Unfuck Your Program YouTube Series and training course) involves the dual roles of the coach-athlete: as a coach, you need to analyze your performance objectively and impartially, but –as I explained above – as a lifter, you’re often very much emotionally attached to that same performance.
Part of the “coach” role in that dichotomy requires separating long-term and short-term goals. Let’s take a case where you’re in the offseason and you start to get a little shoulder pain – nothing major, but you’ve felt pain like that before, maybe even needed cortisone or PT for it in the past, and you know that if you push it too hard, it might develop into something nasty. Obviously, in that case, it’s time for a short break, even if you don’t want to take one. During that break, you probably want to reevaluate the past few weeks of training and see if you can identify an underlying cause of the shoulder pain.
Now let’s say you’ve got the same symptoms, but you’re a month out of a big meet. In that case, you probably do need to keep training – at least if you want to perform your best on meet day. Maybe you taper your bench training a little early, or get some extra bodywork – but however you go about it, you need to figure out how to work around the issue in the short term. For some people – particularly those who really struggle with the mental aspects of injury – that can be just as difficult as backing off.
Wrapping Up
As difficult as it may seem, learning to listen to your body and not just hear it is so crucial to being the best athlete you can be. You will not always get it right. Brandon’s one of the best strength athletes in the world and he got it wrong at this last meet (and I have 100% confidence he’ll correct that for the next time). I can tell you that I probably get it wrong more often than not. I just want to push myself so much that it’s very, very difficult to back off.
The point isn’t to be perfect. The point is to identify what to work on, and to strive to constantly get better. Just like when you reflect on your motivation, it’s the process that makes all the difference.