Does Your EGO Run Your Fitness Plan?

Does Your Ego Run Your Fitness Plan? Do you do EGO fitness training? What I mean by that is, do you do workouts that you are used to, what you are good at, what you are comfortable doing? Do you stay in your comfort zone?


Muscle heads, cardio queens and runners do this alot. They just keep on doing the same old thing in one form or another. They might switch it up from one form of exercise to another, but they are still operating in their comfort zone. Progress tends to be minimal even though they may get better at whatever they are doing.

So you have to ask yourself why are you doing what you are doing? You have to have a clear goal. If you want to change your physique, does training for 10Ks make sense. - The answer is no. If you love running and want to run 10Ks because you love it, then it makes sense. If you want a bodybuilder physique and all you do are arm curls - that won't fit into the make sense column. 

Some people use fitness training in groups to feel good about themselves. Lifting heavier weights than others, out running slower people or doing more reps of endurance based exercises than others in order to make yourself feel better, to impress others and to receive praise from others are not good fitness goals to have.

Back in the day, during my decades of running, there was always one guy who was really good at running and not much else. He would always take us on a death run for PT along his favorite route. We called this EGO PT (Physical Training).

It never did anything good for anyone, caused many injuries but it made that guy feel like a champ. - That's not leadership, that is ego and comfort zone. Don't be that guy.

When it was my turn to run company PT, many times, I would place a strength event at the end of a 5 mile run. The EGO PT people would call me out and ask why I couldn't keep up with them and generally talk shit the whole run - BOOM - until the end.

One time, I placed a weight bench with a 225lb barbell on it, at the end of the run route and said at the completion of the run, everyone had to do one set of max reps with 225lbs.  Of course, none of the runners could do even one rep. I could pull off 5-10 reps even after having a 5 mile run kick my ass. 

They would all say how stupid that was and walk away. That was the point. If you have no strength in general and all you do is run, how functional is your fitness plan, when you can't do something physically demanding at the end? Not very functional at all. I couldn't run as fast as they could but when I got where I was going, I could at least do something. 

The endstate is: if you are doing what comes easy to you, what you are good at and you never drift outside your comfort zone, then you will be limited in what you can accomplish. If your goals don't match your fitness training, you will be disappointed until you start using the right tools for the job. And if your goal is to impress people and get attention, you might want to take a look at that. Train to accomplish your goals and not to feed your ego.

Eric

Dempsey's Resolution Fitness