500 Words a Week - At what expense?
The beauty about S&C and why I feel so many people are attracted to this field is that we can always get better and improve our practice. The curse of S&C is that we can always get better and improve our practice. The euphoric feeling of learning something new, can quickly turn into feelings of guilt after a certain amount of time passes and we haven’t learnt something or haven’t kept on top of our reading.
A recent twitter thread discussed how as well as applying the high – low model to our athletes, we should apply it to ourselves also. We encourage our athletes to recover, rest, and disassociate for a period of time from their sport, be that during a rest day in the week, or during a break in the season. How often do we heed the advice of our own words?
I’ve found this situation particularly challenging over the course of this year due to COVID, in terms of trying to create a healthy work life balance. As I’m sure many people have also felt. During the past year, as there hasn’t been much to do after work, I feel I have to spend adequate time reading or watching lectures. If I don’t, I get an intense feeling of guilt that I’m falling behind. Which overflows into other aspects of my life, hence the title “at what expense”. It’s wonderful that as a field we are pushing each other to get better and to keep developing our practice, but if this comes at the expense of our life outside work I believe we don’t have our priorities aligned.
Pretty hard hitting stuff from a twitter parody account. Let’s stop praising and admiring the person who works like a dog, and has no time, energy or enthusiasm for life outside of work. Admire the person who has balance. As with the very basic principle of what S&C is based on, you stress the body, and allow it to recover to reach a higher level of performance. So why do you keep pummeling yourself into the ground?
Prioritize your time, and be present during how you spend it. I am a nightmare for replaying situations over and over again in my head, “maybe I should have said this”, “I shouldn’t have let that happen”, “I should have done something different”. I’m also a nightmare for constantly thinking about the next thing or what’s happening tomorrow. How I’m trying to combat this is by focusing on being present in whatever I’m doing. If my mind wonders and feelings of worry/ guilt come up, I don’t try to stop them, I just acknowledge and accept them, which quite often leads them to dissipating.
As with all my blog posts, please don’t believe I have this figured out. I write this with the intention that I will heed the advice as much as it will resonate with others.
