Passion, discipline, motivation
Published: 2024-12-15
If you train seriously for a significant period of time you will eventually not progress as fast, or not progress at all. This is often followed by a fairly rough battle with yourself for the simple reason that putting in a lot of work with zero to little return is simply not fun. That's probably one of the reasons why the training community have more motivational slogans than just about any other community. It's common to hear that you need "discipline", "passion", or to "stay motivated". Obviously I'm not above any of what I just described so let me give you my personal take on it.
Table of Contents
On passion
When you first start training you (hopefully) see fast results. If you're anything like me, you'll also get deeply invested into it. I hesitate to use the term "addicted" because It's so damn overused ("I'm ADDICTED to these shirts!" - way to devalue a word) but for many there's actually at the very least a tendency towards it. Slowly it might even take over a big part of your life. You think about what you eat, you skip hanging out with friends as much as you used to, you change your work- or school schedule, all because they in some way affect your training. That's all fine, power to you.
For me it was the excitement of feeling better, getting stronger, more endurant, all the stuff people train for basically. Well, unless you're one of those people who train simply for looks I guess. I had no intention of ever competing in anything. I was just happy my knee wasn't constantly bothering me as it had with long distance running, and that I actually felt somewhat athletic, which I never did running. Weighted dips, pullups, and pistol squats served me well, as did the significantly harder bodyweight exercises and the kettlebell swings.
On discipline
Somewhere along the road something changes. I would venture a guess that's where most simply give up. All that passion was real, I mean, it really was real! You were really living for your training! But something happened. Perhaps you had a setback, like an injury, or you couldn't accept that gains don't come as fast after three years as they did when you were a beginner. Perhaps you got married and had kids. Or you took the other road, like me, and went all-in.
After a while I had a brief flirt with powerlifting before jumping to Olympic weightlifting. During this time passion was not the driving factor - discipline was. If you think training up to 13 times per week, taking maximal attempts on many of those sessions, and doing all this regardless if I felt good, bad, or was straight up broken... If you think that's driven by passion, you'd be wrong - it's driven by discipline. The discipline to keep working up to the maximal despite squatting just the bar hurts in more places than you can count.
Example: At this point I referred to squatting as brushing your teeth, it's something you just do. What I thought about it didn't matter.
It's not passion that makes you do the same 5-10 lifts day in, day out, for years. And it certainly didn't relate to the positives from my earlier explorations when my training was in fact driven by passion because I didn't feel better or more athletic. Was I stronger? Sure (I could snatch heavier barbells at least). Was I more athletic? Sure (after a long enough warmup I could probaly jump significantly higher). Did I feel like that in everyday life? No! I felt beat up, tired, and was aching in new places every day. And honestly, I never liked competitions and didn't care to compete anyway.
On motivation
For those who travel the road of competition - and it is a worthy cause despite what I just wrote - there comes a time when it's not worth it anymore. Maybe you're too old, maybe you're too broken, maybe you simply don't feel like it anymore. I've known many of those people, from not very competitive people to those who have been to the Olympics. Most of them will continue to go to the gym. Their priorities have obviously changed and they're likely not thinking about lifting over 250 kg's anymore. Perhaps they're training simply because it's fun (oddly enough it seems to bring out the closet bodybuilder in a lot of people) or at least half-heartedly trying to battle growing old. Interestingly, several of the former top Bulgarian weightlifters I know simply quit training. I guess because it used to literally be their day job and now they're retired.
After head surgeries, lockdown, a bad case of Covid and age catching up, I realized I had no more interest in building myself up from scratch for a third time when it came to Olympic weightlifting. I certainly didn't have a passion for it and I didn't feel the discipline I had to muster up was worth it. It was time to circle back, at least partially, to feel strong and endurant again. To feel that I could move well in everyday life and not just after a 30 minute warmup.
Finding this motivation did not happen over night. I'd estimate I spent at least a year of fucking around in both the gym and in my own mind until it wasn't just something I said I should do but something I was motivated to do. Lo and behold, after that year of doing not much of anything aside from "checking in" at the gym I actually started feeling stronger and better.
Funny how that works. On all three stages the mind was a driving factor. Without passion, why care? Without discipline, why continue? Without motivation, why do anything at all?
Get help
Online training. Lacking the discipline to motivate your passion for training? I help regular folks who want to be strong, as well as athletes - from rank beginners to international level lifters.
Workshops. I occasionally do workshops and seminars for athletes as well as the average Joe and Jane.