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This may not be the definitive edition of leadership positions, but it is the guide I use. I guarantee that at any point in your life, you will be exposed to people who could be bosses, role models, coaches, or mentors. It is important to your personal success to be able to assess these individuals as managers and as leaders. Did you choose them or not?
In my experience, there are a disproportionate amount of bad leaders. This will never change unless the quality of junior leadership is acknowledged, as leadership habits are learned very early on and are developed, for better or worse, over the course of an entire career or working life. By the time someone reaches a management or executive level position, many of their habits are too ingrained to change, if they ever make it there in the first place.
It’s the time of year where we wrap up our articles, and look back on the year - wins, losses, lessons learnt and changes made. I guess if I was to summarise the year of 2020; what the fuck?
Everyone who has ever attempted a training program based around the Squat, Bench and Deadlift will have an opinion regarding each of them. Some of the most accomplished powerlifters and powerlifting coaches in the world could spend hours explaining to the average lifter why their favourite lift is the best, the hardest, or the lift worthy of the most attention. Despite this, the deadlift seems to consistently rise to the top of training circles as the King of the Lifts. Why?
In this article, I want to provide some insight into how someone struggling may be feeling - beyond just sad, angry, anxious, stressed, and so on. I will be drawing from my own personal experience, so take everything with the understanding that I’m a single person with experiences and perspectives limited to just that - one human being.
Every time I look back on the first time I set foot in a gym, I can’t help but cringe a little. Like any beginner, I had the best of intentions. As human beings, the squat is a natural movement. Babies do it all the time, and they do it exceptionally well. I had been doing a bodyweight variation of the squat my entire life, and somehow - just like every beginner who wants to lift more weight with little regard for technique, it didn’t take long for me to screw everything up.
“What do you bench, bro?” - Some asshole, circa every time a powerlifter or bodybuilder enters a commercial gym.
I want to start by saying that the bench press is, and has always been, the lift I have struggled with the most. I have been bench pressing since I first stepped foot in a gym - which is a long time to build up bad habits, poor technique, and unhelpful motor patterns that all work together to slow my progress in a lift that is, at face value, fairly simple.
GAS breaks down these primal reactions into three phases - alarm, resistance, and exhaustion. These phases begin at initial exposure to a perceived threat, and span over an extended period of stress - detailing the bodies coping strategies for longer term exposure.
I’ve never been described as the most encouraging person. When I was an infantry soldier in the military, encouragement was actively discouraged - it was your own responsibility to push yourself hard enough to keep up, and a 10/10 commitment level was expected regardless of the activity performed. The team was the priority, with the individual being expected to push themselves harder and further for the sake of the team - motivation to do so came from not wanting to let the team down, or be seen as the one holding everyone back.
