That daily ritual of packing your gear, getting to the gym, grind, and head home becomes a part of your life. You'll be telling yourself, Yeah, I can do this forever, I can juggle it with my work/studies/life commitments. The following week, you start your job/internship at a prestigious company, your baby steps towards the top of the corporate level.
Weeks go past and you start to realize, you haven't been to the gym in weeks or months. You try to kickstart that fiery momentum of a beast you've had while preparing for your fight. Then you'll realize, you start to give yourself an excuse to just save the training for another day. This is the one way ticket to exiting the sport and failing to achieve your goal, quitting the sport for good. Here's a blogpost on what you can do to prevent falling into the slippery slope of failure.
1.) Set realistic training schedules
As you grow older or have more and more commitments, it's not easy to juggle work/success/sports. To do this, you have to start managing your expectations, you either have to be super disciplined to train everyday after work (We all know that's tough given Singapore's hectic work culture), or start to taper down your training sessions, instead of planning to come 5 times a week like you used to while you were a single, hormone-raging teenager, a 5 day training schedule is probably going to intimidate you and you're probably going to start skipping sessions. Instead, Plan a more realistic schedule just like how a responsible contributing good citizen of our motherland would. 1-2 days a week. Make the training count, make it matter, train as hard as you can. It's not the number of days, it's the quality of training that matters.
2.) Have supportive friends
Personally, I feel that this is an important aspect. One of the motivating factors for me during school days was because I had a clique of kick-ass 'Avengers' like friends who would be hyped up before trainings. We fed off each others' positive energy. As time passes. Some of your friends might have found other interest, some might be like you, having internal struggles of their own. Don't rely and hope that your friend suddenly finds the fire again and motivate you to start again. Instead, be the positive influence. Take the initiative, drop him a text: " Hey F**ker, we've been away from the gym for too long! It's time to go back for some kick-ass glory days!" Don't wait for the change, be the change. Be that spark that kick starts everything again.
3.) Go overseas and experience training there
If you haven't been to Thailand to train, you should. It's definitely an eye-opener and a potential resuscitator to your dead martial arts career. After witnessing how committed and intense these thais are with their training. Hopefully it will wake you up and motivated you after you witnessed being a good martial artist looks like. Giving you a concrete visible and tangible goal to work towards might be that secret recipe.
4.) Look or try to recall your past experiences
This takes a little mental work and nostalgia right here. Recall the time when you first learnt how to throw the perfect kick, remember the feeling when you won your last fight. All this positive thoughts and memories will make you feel good mentally and physically. As you start to feel good, your body craves for that sensation again. How do you get that feeling again? That's right, TRAIN.
With all that being said, there are much more ways to get it starting again. As I'm writing this post, the fire is slowly starting to build up, and hell, i have time to make it for the 3PM class. Time to get my ass moving again, Signing off.
No comments: