How Can You Challenge Yourself?

We gravitate to the sport of strongman for that challenge that it brings to us.

Maybe you're fortunate enough to be in an area that hasn't boarded itself right up with the pandemic but as for me, I've struggled since March when the plans for the Canadian Hercules qualifier I was organizing got cancelled due to COVID.

And then as if that weren't enough, adding insult to injury, the gym that I was training at went out of business. For good.

So there I was, back at the beginning of the good old days with my strongman log and the farmer handles that my brother and I made out of railway ties we procured almost a decade ago.

Now in this time, I have added some other strongman miscellany to the collection but I'm sure I wasn't the only one filled with the ennui of not having a competition to look forward to all year.

Once you get into the sport and get a taste for competition, it's hard to look back at training for the sake of training and not see it as lesser than the sense of purpose a competition can bring.

When you've got a set number of weeks to get ready for a competition and you either hit the lifts or you don't, that fuels an intensity for training that's hard to match.

So, how can you challenge yourself over the next 6-to-10 weeks?

It doesn't even have to be strongman specific. Anything that you do to push yourself towards progress will work better than being pulled along by just training without a goal in mind.

• Set a goal to hit a PR on one lift.

• Start a new training program with a coach or training buddy.

• Take up a new physical challenge that you're not used to.

There are a million different ways that you can challenge yourself and work towards a goal. What are you going to challenge yourself on?

P.S. While this blog has been inactive for the last half of the year, it’s not that the site is dead. I still send out content to the newsletter almost every week and there’s the blog over at the Flow Academy if you want more peak performance content regularly!