Winners Vs Losers

This article was first published on StartingStrength.com

Let me tell you a tale of two lifters: Bob and Kelly. Bob is an accountant, he’s in his mid-thirties, he’s married to a stay-at-home mum, and he has two kids and a dog. Kelly is a project manager in a tech company, she’s also in her mid-thirties, she’s married to a soldier who’s often away for long stretches, and she has one child.

On the face of it these two people live quite similar lives. They’re both in high-paying jobs, they’re of a similar age, they’re both married with kids, and they both chose to pursue barbell strength training. Despite their similarities, and the fact that they were running the same programme (NLP), they achieved very different results. What was the crucial difference between these two athletes? Their attitude.

Kelly has a winning attitude that makes her a delight to coach. Come what may she shows up on time and ready to train. Pushing through in times of sickness, injury, grief, solo parenting and changing jobs. Sometimes showing up to sessions running on fumes she nevertheless always tries her best to hit the numbers prescribed for that session. It doesn’t matter if she’s tired, it doesn’t matter if the weight on the bar scares her, she grits her teeth and gets stuck in.

Bob, on the other hand, drags his feet through the door and very seldom shows up on time or with anything that could even be considered close to an enthusiastic attitude. He spends most of his session complaining about his job, or his kids, or some other part of his life, and only ever really puts forth 40-50% of his effort into any given session. On particularly “bad days” he’ll try to renegotiate the weight on the bar and is often unwilling to even try what’s been written. On more than one occasion he allowed himself to fail a set he could have completed because it “felt too hard”. Bob is a loser.

Both dealt with the same life stressors. Both would show up tired, hungry, and overworked from time to time. Kelly would take that in her stride, never allowing these things to stop her from trying. Bob would allow these things to defeat him before he even tried; “I’m too tired for that today”, “I haven’t eaten well this morning, I can’t do this today”. The difference is entirely one of attitude and outlook.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s okay to have bad days, weeks, or even months when life is bearing down on you. What’s not okay is to give up and roll over when you meet bumps in the road, not if you want results. Everyone who has a busy job, a spouse, and children needs more sleep. Everyone could be eating better than they are and every single one of us gets ill and gets hurt. You have two options when faced with this reality; shrug it off and try your best anyway, or give up and phone it in. The defeatist attitude will get you nowhere and it’s one of the most frustrating things to deal with as a coach.

To the extent that a coach can help cultivate the right attitude at all I think it is a balancing act between encouragement and whipping. Some circumstances deserve sympathy, others do not. Some people respond well to a soft touch, others do not. In general, I would say that it is the responsibility of the coach to make the lifter try the prescribed workout. Whether that’s done softly, by sympathising with the difficulties the lifter is experiencing and enticing them to try anyway, or by taking a hard line and telling them to man up, is down to the individual discretion of the coach.