In many ways I am still pretty slack but if turning up for lifting was an App, I am on a serious Streak (and I am aware that pride comes before a fall so I am almost scared to say that).  I have almost never cancelled a session unless I am unwell (apart from that hangover) and that’s a record that keeps me going now. Memories of how difficult the start of my journey felt also sustains me, I don’t want to go back to the beginning again, knowing that I gave up.

Apparently willpower is very brittle, which is why we all start trying to be ‘good’ with best intentions and then find it very hard to keep it up unless we find other tricks to make ourselves stay the course. That has nothing to do with weakness, it’s just very difficult to make oneself do something over the long term and for our long term benefit unless there are more immediate pay offs, or other levers that we can pull in our efforts to manage ourselves.

Learning to live in the moment with the Lockdown Lifters

Several of these levers came to the fore in early 2021 when a few of us were trying to keep up with our strength training. I would regularly pass by my friend Dale as we swapped over and said our hellos in the outdoor skateboard park in Bristol where we were having our outdoor one-on-one socially-distanced sessions with our pt, Luke. He gamely drove down from Malvern to stand in the freezing cold with a barbell, bench and weights in the back of his car, ruining its suspension in the process.  Dale states to this day that he absolutely hated these sessions and couldn’t wait to get back into the gym proper, but still he turned up and did it.

It was cold, it was next to a main road, surrounded by skate-boarders and with drivers continuously honking at us, there was a load of rubbish around, there weren’t any ‘facilities’ and I had to make sure I went to the loo before I left home otherwise it was wild wee time behind the bushes. 

Despite all of this, for Dale’s husband Jonny and I it was a different experience overall, because we quite enjoyed it. Loved it even. In fact for me, I suddenly found the ability to concentrate on what I was doing like never before. Stood outside in the freezing cold, concrete-encased wasteground, surrounded by skateboarders I think it was here in the depths of the bitter 2021 Lockdown Winter that I really discovered the mental benefits of lifting, and the time-tunnel aspects of being absolutely present in the moment, or in a flow state. I felt amazing afterwards and so of course doing what was ‘good’ for me quickly became something that involved no willpower to maintain.

And we built solidarity, we were the self-named Lockdown Lifters. I was aware that this lifting experience was a privilege not open to most people, unless you happened to own a gym, thanks to the efforts Luke made to keep seeing us in person. I had also done Zoom sessions with my friends Sharon and Rhian but in-person strength training became the ultimate luxury.

So without realising it we were using a lot of the well-known tactics that can help anyone to stay the course:

• We had a team
• We had someone to whom we were accountable to turn up, and who we would have been letting down if we didn’t
• Also then I started also to enjoy the feeling of living in the moment and not thinking about other things
• I learned to flex around the situation and be thankful for being able to train heavy, knowing that it could potentially be stopped at any moment with new rules
• I progressed. Only pbs for reps because we didn’t have enough weights but I took great gratification from sets of 10x100kg deadlifts.

Now that those days are over I want to channel that feeling of focus and flow still in the gym, though I don’t always succeed. I am easily distracted but when going into a heavy lifting session, either with coach Chris or alone, luckily I still feel nervous enough to focus my mind. I still get nervous before squat days and deadlift days. On warm up sets it’s hard to believe that it will happen, but you remember all the times you did it before. This is the jeopardy I need to create enough arousal to force me to concentrate on what I am doing (usually aided by caffeine of some sort). Being in the present moment eventually kicks in for me when it gets heavy (scary).

It’s this mindful activity which uses every available brain cell that cuts out the chatter from everyday life and produces that cathartic effect. This feeling, which I am sure produces some amazing brain chemicals, is one of those levers that ensures we carry on, utterly spent sometimes, but a slightly renewed person every time.

Now all I need to do is consistently translate this focus onto the competition platform without excessive nerves getting in the way, but that is another story for another post and is my ongoing BIG CHALLENGE that I want to crack.…