I’m a big fan of Podcast’s. I listen to them whenever I’m driving a long enough distance to warrant the plugging in of my headphones, and even when I’m cooking, cleaning, or just staring at a wall.
They’re kinda like the modern-day radio containing thoughts, opinions, knowledge, advice, comedy, and all things in-between.
Anyway, I listened to an interview with the man, Arnold Schwarzenegger, a few weeks ago, and something he said really hit me and I’ve been retelling and paraphrasing it to some of my clients that I believe it would resonate with.
So, I thought I’d share it here. Since, you never know, this might hit home with some people reading this, too.
ARNOLD’S 200
In this interview that was conducted by human guinea pig Tim Ferriss, Arnold talked briefly about what I’ve been spinning and calling ‘Arnold’s 200 Rep Theory’.
During his days as a bodybuilder, his mental preparation leading up to competitions really helped him get in the zone. See, if he knew he had to do 200 reps of a certain exercise in his workout, he would put his mind forward to the future when he would be actually standing up on the stage.
He would focus this far ahead. This mental focus provided him with an absolute fool-proof attack and approach during every single workout.
If he slipped up, got over it, got tired, got bored, got fed up with putting effort in, his future-self would suffer.
Every single rep counted in the lead up to his competitions, and he made sure to never cave.
YOUR 200
The way I have been spinning this with a number of people I coach seems to have hit a lot of them right where it needed to.
And of course, whilst not all of my clients are training to get up on stage, they’re all training to be the best they can be, right?
In all areas of life, too – not just the gym.
EVERYONE’S 200
Imagine if we all had the 200 rep focus and desire for every single thing we did in life. Imagine if we put the amount of energy into everything we did to achieve something that we wished.
We could all kill it. If we applied Arnold’s 200 rep focus on things like our jobs, our families, our friendships, our body, our health, our interests, our passions, we would all get to the end of our roads a-helluva-lot happier.
I mean, what’s the point of dong this whole ‘life’ thing, if we don’t even actually put in proper effort? What future-self can you envision being? What future-self would you want to be?
Anyway, that’s just my little spin on such a perfect mental desire to get shit done.