Discipline – Mental Toughness Training

Everybody talks about discipline and everybody says you have gotta have discipline, and discipline is a must. How can you reach goals without discipline?

Everybody is right!

I think about this all the time: If I waited until I “felt” like doing something, I would never get anything done. I’d say that I get excited about training about half of the time. After 40 years of doing it and with no competition to train for on the horizon, there are days where I certainly don’t want to train, where I just want to sit on the couch and read and eat cheeseburger club sandwiches and nachos with beef and lots of sour cream and drink Broken Skull Beer. Just get tore the hell up and sit around. Walk outside a few times with the dog, maybe.

But as soon as I began doing that, as soon as I got lazy, I would start to feel this gnawing in my brain, this feeling of worthlessness. And that voice, THE VOICE would be talking to me, “Oh, are you tired? Your Tier One friends have seen their friends shot in front of them, have starved for days, and lived outside in the freezing temperatures with no food at all, but you can’t get your ass to the gym? Those POW in Vietnam, had it easy, right? Eating rice with weevils in it and being tortured daily? What a coward you really are.”

So I go to train. Those voices are too much to take after a while. And I have always had them, those damn things. Ever since I started lifting weights in 1979, I felt worthless if I even thought about not training. So I train. I always go by train. Whether it's a 10-minute workout or a 45-minute workout, I’m going to train. It is now not a want now for me, it is a need, seared in my subconscious to never slack on the training.

So maybe it has gotten to the point of being pathological about the whole thing. I don’t think so. I think that my inner voice, the inner ME is saying, “Hey get off of your ass. Get shit done. Train. Train because you want to be strong.”

You want to be strong in case you have to protect yourself. To be strong in case you have to protect your family. Shadowbox and hit the heavy bag because you may have to hit some crazy man right in the face on the street. Keep your heart healthy so you don’t keel over playing catch with your kids. Lift heavy as you can so you can rip open a car door if you have to when someone is stuck inside. Put that weight on your back and pick that weight off of the ground so your bones are strong and healthy. Those bones need pressure on them to be strong. Keep that low back strong so you never, ever have to ask for help picking anything up off of the ground. Neglect those muscles and you will deteriorate fast.

So you have to do it anyway. You have to train. You have to lift weights and you have to do cardio, and you should include something combat related in it. And you think that you have a choice, you really do. But what happens if you do not have discipline?

If you can’t get to work to better yourself, then you will be a victim and a needy victim at that. You will have to depend on others for the rest of your life; to pick something heavy up, to fight for yourself, to do anything that involves being alive and being alive means being independent and in order to be independent, you have to be strong.

So discipline comes in when that alarm rings in the early morning and you resist the urge to push the snooze button, or when you just want to hit the bar after work instead of getting under the bar in the gym. That’s when you just think about doing just one rep, then another, and then another until you have separated yourself from the masses, and you focus on how you will feel afterward, walking to the truck. You’ll feel accomplished, you will feel high, and you will have done what you HAD to do in order to really live.

To see more of Jim's content check out his site Basbarbell. You can check out his books there as well - Basbarbell Book of Programs and Steel Reflections. We are excited to have him as a contributor to Functional Strength. His training experience is extensive transforming many college athletes at the University of Pennsylvania for over 20 years.

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