As a coach and an athlete we all have goals/missions we want to accomplish, whether it be get an athlete to the Olympics or to increase your bench by 20lbs in 6 months. Some of these goals will build onto bigger goals that will build onto lifetime goals. The thing is that you must have a clear and decisive vision and plan to achieve those goals.

In the Marines when we would go out on missions we drilled and dried and drilled until the task or tasks at hand where so ingrained in us that when shit hit the fan it was our basic instinct to go into those drills. Same thing goes when the leaders would draw up the missions, we had to know all the communication frequencies in order to radio each other, medical evacuation, or for a QRF to come and back us up. Along with that we needed to map out all the different scenarios that could occur and all the different routes that could possibly be taken to evade a situation or possible IED’s. These are all small details that needed to be ingrained in us every time we step out of the FAB and into danger. Yeah it would have been nice to just sleep in and relax before going out on the missions especially if its something we’ve already done, but complacency can get you killed and it was that discipline to get up study and do my job to the best of my ability that allowed me to come home safe.

So how does this relate to the real world and to lifting? Simple really to execute any goal no matter how big or small you have to be meticulous with everything and to have a laser focus on the days task at hand. Focusing on the goal is a key component that in this day an age gets lost. To many distractions like social media can halt focus at the gym. I don’t know how many times i’ve had people come up to me to show some stupid ass video or meme that they thought was hilarious all while I am trying to get ready for my next set. I see it when it comes to dieting as well people get consumed with what others are doing and think thats they way to do it, I saw this person post sour patch kids as an intra workout so I’m going to buy the biggest bag I can so I can be like them. 3 months later you are further away than you’ve ever been, you can’t focus on what others are doing, there goals, DNA, and philosophy can be completely different from what is best for you.

YOU is a huge concept to executing the mission. You have to take responsibility for your goals, your actions, and if they get accomplished or not. You can’t seek out validation from others to accomplish your goals and to chase after your dreams. In the Marines I am surrounded by a team with one vision and one goal and that was key to our success and will be the same for yours. Don’t do it for others but surround yourself with people who actually care about you and want to see you succeed and push you to succeed. Like I said these are your goals but to have others who share the same commonalities around you is a huge help. Once you have your goals, a solid likeminded team around you, the next step in executing the mission is to practice, practice, practice or in other words be consistent in your actions. That means consistency with the gym and the effort you put into it, consistent with sleep 8 hours or more plus naps when you can, and to be consistent with food and food prep. This is the day in and day out practice that we had to endure to make sure the mission was a success and so do you in order to achieve your physical goals this is a must. You can’t be 100% one week and 50% the next and expect to go places and do great things. it needs to be 95% or better each and every day with a focus that is unrelenting. 

You will have a lot of ups and downs along this path and thats why it has to come from within you to succeed because the days you don’t want to wake up are the days that will determine your success. You can sleep in even though you told yourself you were getting up at 5 or you can wake up and face the days challenges with enthusiasm and a drive to get better. It has to come from within no external reward will make you keep pushing, will make you face adversity and drive through it. Walls are put up in your life not so you can go around it or so you can turn back around, but rather it is an opportunity to see how bad you want it and to push through.

Injuries are inevitable when you are pushing the limits and trying to be great. Its a double edge sword we want to do more and always push, but you definetly need to listen to your body and know when to back down and rest. Injuries occur a lot of the times when there is an imbalance or just bad movement patterns, other things can cause injuries but most injuries occur from those two things. In these 2 videos I go over some of the basics to fix the issues and prevent inuries.





The Alphacast Episode 12

You might begin to see a theme in a lot of my articles, the key to success is to do things in a way that is sustainable and will create longevity. There are a ton of really strong guys that show up and in a year you never here from them or we all know the people who dieted super hard but couldn’t sustain it and ended up gaining all the weight back and few more for good measure. Now I respect these people because they go hard and go all out but there has to be a smarter way to approach things so you can maintain what you’ve built. We’ve all been there to some extent, starting something new is always exciting and we always want to start things off right so we go into the gym and blast a body part because we feel good and training makes us feel good, but we push to hard to the point where we can’t even move for a few days because of DOMS. A classic case of going in to strong and without the idea of progression and after this destruction we are left with a decision to miss the next couple days or to keep pushing harder and harder next time, until 3 weeks down the road we are burnt out and decide to pursue yoga instead. This is a bit of a stretch i know but you get my picture and for a few of you this may have happened. The same thing goes for dieting, start to low on calories and to high on cardio that you just can’t sustain for more than a few weeks and when you plateau you have to add more work or less food. You can clearly see the dilemma here.

The way to avoid this problem with training and diet is to come in with a plan that you can build on week to week to get better. Lets cover training first, how you approach training should be on a week to week basis so that you can build each week. You can do this by adding weight, reps, or sets each week so you start off with an easy week to get back into things, followed by a slightly harder week by making the small proper adjustments. For example I started my offseason plan with higher volume, after a meet the volume was low and weight was heavy, so I just did the opposite when I came back to training but not at a crazy pace. I started slow with DB movements and keeping everything somewhat light and easy. The next week I introduced barbell movements and started with a lighter weight that I know I can add to for the next 3-4 weeks. It’s a slow building process as I am not concerned with anything but building a solid foundation and staying healthy. The bigger the foundation the better the peak and if you can repeat that process over the course of 5-10 years you will be an extremely strong person as long as you stay smart and healthy. This is done with smart exercise choices and listening to your body. I’m not saying don’t push things but it doesn’t have to be every session all out failure and fatigue. You want to look for clean and smooth reps, not grinders or missed reps. A huge reason for doing things in a slow and methodical approach is it allows you the opportunity to develop proper motor patterns and technique, the best way to do this is not by maxing out it’s by sticking with reps and sets in the 65-80% of your 1 rep max. 

Key takeaways here

• Start off slow, lighter and easier workouts without pushing to failure
• Build each week by adding weight or sets or reps not all at once though
• Stick with building better movement patterns over lifting heavy weight

Nutrition is definitely the hardest of the two to be patient with, when you are at the gym easing into things you are still putting in work and training hard, with a slow and methodical start on nutrition, although it will yield huge dividends at the end, it is tremendously hard to wrap our heads around in the beginning because we want to lose weight and get lean now!! So the regular person starts with a ton of cardio and starts with an extreme diet like a no carb, paleo diet. This is a recipe for disaster because if you start out fast like this yes you will lose weight and fast but what happens when you stall? You have to do more extremes and more because you started at the high end already the only way to keep the train rolling is to do more and eat less. By a month into this approach you go binge crazy and quit everything all together. Taking things slow and get the most out of the least at the start, because once you hit a plateau you have to do more or eat less and if you already start with an extreme deficit you have to keep going and thats not sustainable nor is it healthy. Look into your current diet and if it is compete crap like you drink 6 sodas a day, cut them down to 3 week one, than 1 week 3 and finally eliminate them. Once you get that down you can go into a set diet with balanced macros, never eliminate any macro if you are a performance athlete, because you’ve already dropped the junk and the next step would be to get organized. For cardio same thing start with walking 10-20 minutes for 2-3x a week. Than week 2 you can add another day and so on and so forth. Its an easy thing to do it just takes a ton of patience which is hard to do because we want results and we want them now. Slow and steady progress will yield longer and more sustainable gains, in reality if you are losing weight at a rapid rate you are also losing muscle so look to shoot for a 1-2lbs a week depending on size of athlete.

Key takeaways here

• Don’t go into a strict diet right away if you are not use to it, slow cut the junk out week to week until gone
• Do the least amount at the beginning so you can make adjustments when a plateau hits
• Look to lose bet 1-2lbs a week depending on the size of the athlete
• Start slow with cardio a little will do a lot if you don’t do anything

The giant takeaway here is to slowly build into things and have a long term view of the process. Key word here is the process, not the end goal, you must learn to enjoy the process of building. You don’t want to get to down and you don’t want to get to high just know that throughout the journey there will be a lot of bumps in the road and a lot of victories. Take it day by day and week by week and try to get a tiny bit better every time. Keep in mind the guys and ladies you look up to have been training and eating right for decades so don’t expect their great results after a 3 month training/diet plan.