Do what you want to be good at.
I'd like to bench press a heavier weight and bench presses or dips are the two movements that you can lift most weight on for the upper body in the pressing.
So I have a goal of a 95-kilo standing press which means I’m going to need to be able to press a lot more weight.
Pressing more weight on the dips and bench press are going to give me more foundation to be able to stand and press the weight that I want to press.
So I did 40 minutes of snatch practice in the morning and then scored it up to 110 and
then I went for a long walk in the afternoon with my children, we kind of got stuck and we ended up out for four hours and then I got home and I thought I might do something else, get a second session in but I really felt pretty average for that.
So I just started by pressing the bar a bunch of times and then I did 10 by 10 at 40 kilos as a way to kind of see if I was gonna do something else.
It wasn't challenging but it was like “okay well let's see how this feels” and if it feels good then I might do something else I think I then went on to 60 kilos and then 70 kilos.
So this might be the first at 70 and everything was feeling not that great.
It's day 14. I’ve been training twice a day most days and I didn't really feel amazing for a session after the day that I'd had but I thought “let's start, let's touch the bar and see how it goes”.
I’ve been listening quite a bit to John Bros, he talks about “if you can touch the bar then you win, if you can squat the bar then you're winning, you're in the game.
So that was the plan and that's what I did and as often happens, I did start to feel okay.
I didn't feel amazing like I was gonna break any more records or do anything spectacular but I felt okay and I ended up getting to 80 kilos and then 90 kilos and just did a bunch of practice and if you think about it, the only way you can be terrible at something is if you don't practice.
If you practice enough, you're going to be okay at it.
You're not going to be the best in the world. To be the best in the world you have to be smart and you have to have the genetic potential and you have to get your sleep right, and everything.
In any endeavor to be the best in the world is unlikely and it takes a specific special effort but to be very good really only takes the decision.
The decision to be really good is quite rare and therefore anyone who makes that decision is going to achieve quite a bit.
So I’m not living proof of that in the bench press at the moment but I’m endeavoring to become so and this session is an illustration of that, I practiced, I practiced and I practiced
and the way it felt heavy and then it felt okay.
So I started with just doing singles at 90 and then I did some triples and then I did some pause reps and then I did some mid-position pauses.
I didn't really do anything fast but make it feel as light as you can and I did think about “okay well maybe I should go up now” but the way I started the session convinced me “don't really need to go up, this is not meant to be a tough day”.
So put that mid-position pause in there and just really dominating the weight and I'd be surprised if that session doesn't result in lifting a bigger weight in the near future.
So I went back to 60 kilos and then I don't know what I was doing here.
I was trying to get comfortable. I’ve got like a scratch on my back and it was bothering me all through this session but I thought I could get around it on the lightweight and that's why I was wriggling and wandering around the bench but the bottom line is if you get that practice in, you're going to be very good.
It doesn't take science to be very good, it takes effort to be very good, it takes science and intelligence and a combination of everything to be the best of the best genetic potential but very good is about showing up, doing the work.
The sooner you do the work, the sooner you get to the result.
That's a perspective that a lot of people won't agree with but it's the perspective that John Bros was talking about, a Bulgarian kind of perspective of like “by the time you've done x you'll be able to do y”.
So the sooner you do x, the sooner you'll be able to do y and that was the Bulgarian system where they had kids at the age of 17 who were able to break world records because they'd done the work since they were 13, they started earlier in the Bulgarian system and I haven't forgotten about my freestanding handstand push-ups, all my one-arm chin-ups and so I still got some work in on these, working to a bit more depth, keeping it smooth.
Day 14.
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