Identity Crisis

Let’s say you are in a sport. You sport with the best of the sports competitors. You identify with that sport and with the training of your sport.

You go on sporting for a while.

Lo and behold, disaster strikes you right the fuck down.

My favorite example of a D&D styled sneak attack.

Oh No!

Now, you can’t do the things you once loved because your knees/hips/shoulders/back are fucked right up.

Now you are in a stand still because you can’t sport and train for your sport the way you used to. And you’re depressed. I get it. I have been there. I get it. It sucks at first.

But it needn’t suck for that long.

Considerations

When you are physically active, there’s something you should ask yourself.

“Do I ever really plan on stopping my physical activities?” You plan on one day waking up and saying, “Fuck it, I am not gonna lift, train, sport, anymore,” right?

Wrong.

What would you do when you played out your sport injury free until your retirement from it? Did you have a contingency plan for that?

This is something to think about for any serious athlete.

Another consideration for you.

If, like Mel Siff said, sports are a limited set of movements (they are), and you injure yourself doing those movements, is it a good idea to jump right back into moving the exact same way, with just a lighter load?

Probably not, though there are exceptions to this.

To hammer this point, I am going to paraphrase a conversation my coach Adam and I had.

For context, his directive for me was to fix my issues. And in so doing, discover more motions instead of going back to the same shit I had done before. This resulted in his directive that I not barbell squat or deadlift for a good while:

Here’s what is gonna happen. You’re gonna feel pretty decent. You’ll be attending these figure competitions and what not and you’ll start talking to people and you’ll get inspired. You’ll get this urge to start doing shit well before you need to, and it isn’t going to end well for you. So fix your shit before you back to barbell deadlifts and squats.

So there’s that. What does this mean?

It means to look smaller to discover more motions.

One of the things that Adam and I learned from Frankie is to learn our skills from gross to fine.

In a variety of contexts, this can look like different things.

Babies walk like drunken zombies before they refine their gait patterns.

From a musical perspective, this could be starting with chord strumming on your guitar and moving onto single note melodies, and then potentially, shredding like Marty Friedman.

So if we are in our state of injury, we have to see smaller.

If deadlifting with a barbell hurts you, the appropriate question is, “should I deadlift? if I should, how should I deadlift?”

This is when your experimenting comes into play.

What doesn’t move? Should it move?

Only you can answer that.

Furthermore, think about your psyche.

If you are in the mind state that YOU are your sport, perhaps you have something not moving in your psyche. If so, you need to move it.

The good news is, the human body is of a large amount of finite combos of motions.

And I can help you discover them to help your situation and overcome your identity crisis.

Perhaps it’s time we had a chat.

Don’t let your identity crisis get the best of you.

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