SILENCE: Reload, Balancing Your Nervous System, and Recovery Methods

“Silence is a source of great strength.” -Lao Tzu

If you want to get stronger, it’t important to go all out in your training. You shouldn’t be holding anything back when you are in the gym. You need to be intense. You need to be focused. You need to get angry. 

 That is why I always tell my athletes to give me just 1-2 hours of focus, to give me 100% of their energy for that small time. I want the stress they may be experiencing at school, at home, or in their relationship to disappear. 

But once you leave the gym, the real work begins. You see, all the work in the gym was breaking your body down, not building it. The building part…the recovery…comes after you step back into the real world. 

I always say; for every hour you spend in training, you should spend 15-30 minutes of recovery. 

 Unfortunately, most people don’t look at it that way. Oftentimes, the only time that we start to focus on our recovery is after we get injured. 

Before that, we’ve previously have been unconcerned with warming up or doing any type of recovery work for the muscles, ligaments, tendons and joints that served us so well. We punish our body with heavy lifting, conditioning, while ignoring its need for time and to rebuild. 

After all, We had goals to reach. 

 We have the warrior mindset. 

 This warrior mindset was asking to being in an army that was being led by a general who only obsessed over conquering new cities and defeating new armies; a general who was not concerned with the well being of his warriors; and a general who did not realize that he was eventually going to run out of new cities to conquer, run out of food to feed his men, and run out of luck on the battlefield. 

 Over time, even the most hardened warriors get broken down—whether that means physically, emotionally, or mentally. 

 Constantly being in attack mode can work for a time—and you may have some early victories—but Sun Tzu said, “He who knows when he can fight, and when he cannot, will be victorious.” You cannot always be on the attack. An army needs time to rest, eat, let wounds heal, and take respite from the horror of the battlefield. 

 Now, Im not bold enough to say that training is anything like going to war. It is not, of course, but you can draw parallels between the two. The philosophy behind the “Attack-then-rest” pertains as much to the gym as it does to the battlefield: it is imperative that you know when to work “out” and attack, and when to work “in” and recover. 

 Don’t only be focused on going hard in the gym and beating up your body. I know that it feels right in that moment, but the truly best way to get strong is to train hard and rest just as hard. We do that by starting with the concept of reloading. 

WE WILL BE POSTING ABOUT DELOADING NEXT WEEK