The Value of a Miss

Alright, I am now forcing myself to sit down for 30-60 minutes a day to keep current with this blog and post up some wildly mediocre humor and entertainment/knowledge bombs for you studs. I figure it’s the least I can do for you fitness fanatics who come and train at my temple. I’ll start off by saying it is only Wednesday and I’m already impressed with the numbers people are putting up for this weeks testing, we had like 4 guys go 300+ on the back squats and 3-4 more go 200+ on the push presses. A big congrats out to everyone as well for smashin some serious PR’s out so far, or even just finding out how much you can lift! It’s always nice to know. Keep up the good work everyone, the front squat 1RM is waiting to be crushed today so let’s get it! Today I have decided to talk about missed lifts in the sport of weightlifting and why they can be a good thing. I’ll preface this post with something Donny Shankle wrote in his blog about the same topic.

There is no white without black, there is no up without down, and there is no glory without failure. Isn’t it interesting how great people in history are the ones who did not let failure defeat them. These are the people who fought demons in order to dine with angels. After every attempt at a personal record Uncle Abadjiev would get up and shake your hand even if you just pulled it, because he knew a seed had been planted. Eventually, with the right amount of care this seed would grow into something amazing. Treat your misses the same way, and in time, you too will grow into something that will stupify even your own imagination.

We watch all these training videos from Team MDUSA and Attitude Nation and for the most part all we see is the successful lifts. This can be sometimes hard and frustrating to watch because you know well enough in the real world misses do happen. What they don’t show in that video is the countless efforts at a certain weight before they actually are successful with the lift. Jon North usually shows some misses in his videos which I find quite refreshing after watching Team MDUSA absolutely crush weights the entire video. But Donny speaks to a good point, if you aren’t missing some weights then you are not testing yourself to the fullest. You need to get rid of that fear of dropping the bar, missing the lift or just failure in general. How will you ever know if you don’t try? We come to the gym day in and day out to get better at what we do and live a happy life, I know things may not seem so happy when you’re having a bad day and missing the weights you want to hit but it will pay off. I think one of the biggest things I learned from training with Jon North while in South Carolina was that no matter how the day went, you still came out and trained. It may have been a bad day or the best day of the year, but as long as you come out and put the work in you are improving. You are taking that initial step to improving by wanting to be there and testing your body for all its worth. Now, I am not saying that missing every single lift during training is okay. We need some consistency to make progress but the point here is that you can’t get down on yourself, take it as a leap of faith when you try to hit some heavier weights and a chance to lift that bar above your head and feel like the king of this rainy town. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of hitting a new PR. So let’s get out there and give it our all, I don’t care if you use this philosophy towards weightlifting or life in general. Use it life everyday, push yourself and find new limits that you didn’t think were possible and then push a little bit more. You might be surprised where you end up. See you on the platform.