I get a little Grinchy when I read these fitness posts about how not to blow my diet over Thanksgiving turkey and Christmas ham. Hands off my bloat, thank you very much.
But real talk: it’s pretty tough to keep to a training schedule during the holidays if you’re traveling, have family obligations, or live in some godforsaken area subject to sudden blizzards (and subsequent gym closings). Finding time to train is one thing -- that just requires discipline. Get up a couple of hours early or skip a football game, no big deal. I once walked a mile and half to the gym in the middle of a blizzard so I could train arms (I swear -- it was in D.C. in 2010 and the year after I moved to California so I’d never have to do that again).
Getting in productive sessions is a different story. If you’re prepping for a meet, like the L.A. Fit Expo, you probably have demanding numbers that you need to hit each and every workout, and holiday plans can derail training plans. Here are a few suggestions to help get you through to the New Year no matter what your goals involve:
Get your training in, no matter what.
I covered this above, but no matter what, make sure you get your ass to the gym. Unless you’re sick or hurt or are at risk of overreaching, any training is better than no training.
Reframe holiday training as a chance to try something new.
Many lifters have this idea that they need things a certain way to have a good training session: the right kind of bar, or competition plates, or maybe a certain training partner. Look, there’s nothing wrong with having a routine. In fact, I’m a big supporter of anything that helps you have a better training session. But there are benefits to changing things up, too: for example, a new environment might be the perfect catalyst you need to hit a huge PR headed into your meet. Powerlifting is not nearly as niche as it once was, so no matter where you’re headed, you can probably find a good gym, maybe with a piece of equipment you’ve never tried before, or a good group who really gets fired up for heavy lifting. If you’re staying put but need to change your regular training times or days, maybe you can use social media to find another serious lifter in the same situation and get in a good workout together. These types of changes can be a little unsettling, but in many cases, they’re just unsettling enough to get us a little more excited -- and, as a result, train a little harder.
From an academic perspective, the routines we often rely on are mental cues that help us attain flow. Flow is a state of high performance characterized by complete focus on the activity at hand (basically, it’s being in the zone). When something is a little off in our routine (maybe we’ve only got bumpers instead of comp plates), our minds tend to obsess over that one imperfection, and it becomes much harder to achieve flow. But when everything is different, and there’s no single distraction to obsess over, then we can again slip into that state of complete focus and perform at our best. This is very similar to the concept of “Beginner’s Mind,” a concept usually associated with Buddhism.
Focus on the present.
It’s the thought that counts in gift-giving, and it’s the thought that counts in training, too. The secret is learning to focus entirely on your current training session, and let go of the idea that you have to be at your best in training in order to be your best at some point in the future. In truth, you can have the best training cycle of your life and still bomb out at a meet. And your training could be shit now, but in a few weeks, you might be at your strongest ever.
Focusing on the present is easier said than done, of course. It can be pretty damn hard to believe you can hit a 600-pound squat in a meet if you just had a terrible training session and missed 550 for what should’ve been an easy triple. Your best bet here is practice -- and, just like when you’re dealing with injuries, you need to practice even when things are going great. It’s too hard to practice when you’re already feeling stressed. Try this instead:
- Try to notice when you start thinking about the future. It doesn’t matter if the thoughts are pleasant (like daydreaming of hitting a huge PR) or unpleasant (worrying that the holidays are going to mess with your training).
- When you notice you’re thinking about the future, take a few moments to focus on your breathing. Take three or five deep breaths, breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth.
- Think back to a time when you were at your absolute best, and try to remember how that felt. You’re not recallin on memories of specific events or people or anything like that -- just the physical sensation of being at your best. Focus on that feeling for another three to five deep breaths.
Over time, it will become easier to replace thoughts of the future with a feeling of success -- and that feeling of success can help you manage to perform at your best even in the most difficult of circumstances.
I’ll wrap up this article with a story from a meet I did earlier this year. Two weeks out, I had to travel to Los Angeles to speak at an academic conference, and I worried that the travel would hurt my performance at the meet. I had the chance to visit Juggernaut Training and Chad Wesley Smith while I was in LA, and I told him exactly that. Chad’s answer was simple: “It will only hurt your performance if you think it will.” Your mind is incredibly powerful -- use it to get strong(er), not hold yourself back.