New Era or Blast From the Past?

An old pic of the guy I used to be!

There's the old saying, 'the more things change, the more things stay the same.' Sometimes I think it's true because we don't venture too far from our roots, and when we do, we come back when things go haywire. Maybe not even haywire, just when things get to be sightly off-center we revert to what is learned because there's comfort there and something proven. That familiarity allows us to settle down, regroup and still feel like progress is being made.

If you follow my post you know that I'm in a weird sort of limbo right now, and it looks like my career as a strongman is on hold for a wee bit. However, that doesn't mean I can just give up training, and in fact I need to get in even better shape to help me take care of the situation I have now. So I found myself thinking, 'what kind of training should I be doing?' The answer came to me quickly, and it was Jeet Kune Do.

Now to be fair, I don't have a JKD dojo around here and I'm not referring to JKD as a style of training, but more of a mindset. For those that don't know, Jeet Kune Do is the name Bruce Lee gave to his style of fighting and training. The literal translation is 'using no way as way,' meaning that JKD doesn't have a strict set of rules or positions that need to be mastered, but is more concerned with being in shape to defend one's self from virtually any threat and picking moves from other martial arts and perfecting them. While the dynamics are borrowed from other fighting styles, it's about mastering those movements and not marrying one's self to a particular style of fighting.

To me, this means that I need to get myself in better shape overall, and that can't be accomplished by training just for strongman or powerlifting, which is all I've done over the last two years. For my purposes, I'm entering into a phase where I will be doing some strongman movements, some powerlifting lifts and a lot of concepts from bodybuilding and elements of crossfit to make sure my body is in the best shape possible to either go through surgery or lose weight and rehabilitate myself. (Let's hope for the latter instead of the former!)

I sat down tonight and looked at my blank sheet of paper, truly with a heavy heart as I had to put together a program that wasn't centered around heavy deadlifting and squats, but rather incorporated bodyweight movements and high reps to burn more calories. Instead of charting out what I'd like to squatting in 12 weeks, I had to set a goal of how many pounds I should lose. I'm not depressed, I'm not sad, but I sure don't enjoy the prospect of miles on the elliptical machine instead of heavy tire flips and truck pulls!

Pardon me while I wipe the lone tear in my eye...

However, being a strongman isn't always about lifting the heavy iron, sometimes you have to lift the heavy weights of life. Whether that's depression, disappointment or plain old anger, sometimes it takes a lot more out of you to lift those burdens and set them aside than any weight you'll find in the gym. I've never met a challenge I wouldn't accept, but I can say that after all the miles I've put in over the last thirty three years...well, I don't turn down much but I'm sure a lot less quick to accept them!

That smile held back a lot of pain, and boy I don't miss it!

Things come so easy to some people, but everything I've ever accomplished or acquired has come from hard work and my own two hands. I think there's something to be said about that, but I also know the opposite side of that is a lot of tears and a lot of sleepless nights. So there will certainly be more tears, there will be at least a handful of sleepless nights down the road, but at the end I should be able to pull away in better position than I began, and hopefully with one or two less medical concerns holding me back. 2016 has been a real tough year personally, professionally and of course medically, but I've not suffered this year in vain. The lessons I managed to learn this year will no doubt pay dividends down the road, it's just a matter of continuing to drag my tired, broken ass down that road and keeping hope alive that things will pay off.

So while I fight back the tears as I hang up my Toro Bravo Custom 4XL lifting belt, and unfold the compression shorts I bought last week, I know I pay the price now to cash in the rewards later. If life was easy, everyone would be doing it.

So while I enter a new era, I look back to my past and find the things that worked for me before and put them back to work to build a new and improved future.