Just recently RKC Team leader Andrew Read from Dragondoor Australia put some great material up on www.breakingmuscle.com , some of which was about taking a step back in your training after you had an injury or other setback- spell break. The goal is to rebuild training momentum and to make progress from there.
I know that I have been feeling great, fired up and strong after I came back from the US and the RKC course. Especially since I had invested the last six months preparing for the RKC with quite ‘single minded’ training. There was nothing other than the six moves I got tested on. Then two weeks of rest and the momentum was gone.
So now I had some questions buzzing around in my head- Well, what am I going to train for now? Where could this next lot of training take me?
Once I made up my mind that I wanted to train for the Iron Maiden Challenge which involves pressing a 24kg kettlebell, doing a single leg squat (pistol) with the same weight and then doing a pull up with 24kg around your waist, things became a bit clearer. But as it often is in life, decisions get challenged to test your resolve.
Since I had the original Beast Tamer’s training program on ‘getting stronger’ available to me I thought I would modify it for my size. Two days into training in earnest my back decided to tighten up on me during a light practice. Perhaps I hadn’t spent enough maintenance time on me with stretching or the cold weather and the related freezing (shivering) tighten me up more than I thought? Or had I ignored something from the weeks of unfocussed training prior tho this time? Anyway the result was that I had to lay off training for almost a week. It left me feeling lazy, guilty and slack, even though I knew I needed to mend first before I could move forward. Great start to a new challenge.
As I am getting back into some get-ups and swings today I thought of the article that I mentioned before, and accordingly chose a 12kg bell for all my training.
My head played some funny games – ‘this is too light, I should be able to do more, will I get there with this little bit of practice’ kind of games – while I am training with a 12kg bell. I was used to doing get-ups with 16kg, 20kg and even the odd one with a 24kg; same went for the swings.
So this thing about humble pie popped into my head. I think that it sometimes is really important to recognise any limitations that pop up temporarily and start working on the different aspects that have been ignored or pushed to the side like ensuring that the body is in top working order: the spine is aligned, mobility is as good as it can be and have the head in the right space to execute the training/practice.
This is where the value of practicing with lighter or no weight and trusting that it is productive to train this way comes in. So many great people have walked this path before us and left us with an incredible amount of useful information and the results to show for, yet we still often disregard all or the most important bits of it.
I just find that I do need to take that slice of humble pie and just “shut up and listen’ because ‘coach said so’.