Matt Rose sent me this-

“You’ve got to drive the body to the last inch of energy then go on! You gain nothing by just going up to where your body says you’re tired. The body will build and grow only to fit the demands the mind makes upon the lazy body. If all you do is exercise until the body is tired, the body will get lazy and stop a bit shorter every time. You must go to the point of exhaustion, then go on. That way the body figures out, “We’ve got to build up more strength if that crazy mind is going to drive this hard!” If you always quit when you are merely tired, you will never gain. Once you let the body tell the mind when to quit, you are whipped for sure. You can not gain by listening to the body. We can become much stronger if we drive the body. We use about one-tenth of the available strength of our bodies and less than that of our minds.”

-General George Patton

Some people just don’t get why we are so damn competitive. It’s not that we want to beat someone else’s brain out - it’s that we want to beat out our own.

When you played high school whatever - if you even played at all - you had a coach yelling at you every day & you actually cared about your sport. Then you went to college & you were either lucky enough to continue your career or you maybe played intramural something (or maybe you just mastered drinking games). After that you graduated & sport became much less important as real life took over. Jobs, houses, kids, cars, girls, guys, dinner parties, bars... Whatever you became consumed with, is what you concentrated on. Meanwhile, your waistline expanded & you became increasingly less happy with looking like your chubby parents (no offense).

That’s where the phrase “Suck Less” comes in. We all have a desire to be better in some way. Even the fittest of us knows that we have something we could work on. You may think you need to lose a few pounds, do more pullups, get a sub 3 minute Fran (I think that’s just my obsession), run faster, jump higher, so on & so on - we all suck at something. We all can improve.

The competitive nature that we are trying to breed is not exclusively for the sake of sport, or “beating people”. It is a great feeling to win a really tough workout, but it is even better to do a workout “as prescribed” for the first time. You are competing against yourself. Every time you perform a workout & set a new benchmark that means you got better. If it’s Fran & you took 2 minutes off of your time, that means you are now 2 minutes fitter & closer to “Sucking Less”. If it’s Cindy & you can do 4 more rounds than you did the last time, that means you added 20 pullups, 40 pushups & 60 body weight squats in the same amount of time - not bad.

EVERYTHING we do is competitive, because it has to be.

How else will you be able to quantify how much you “Suck Less”?

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WOD 022108

20 Burpee Box Jumps

20 Inverted Rows

20 KB Front Squats

5 rounds for time.