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By Brian MacKenzie, Jason Donaldson and Rachael Colacino

The Bohr Effect was first described by Danish physiologist Christian Bohr in 1904. In very simple terms, it says that if one takes in enough carbon dioxide, oxygen can be used more effectively throughout the body. Bohr discovered that your blood, or more specifically your hemoglobin’s ability to bind oxygen, is inversely related to acidity and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the blood. So your blood releases oxygen when in the presence of carbon dioxide.

According to Bohr, the lower pH, caused by an increase in carbon dioxide, will cause your blood to deliver more oxygen to your muscles.

Experiments by the Art of Breath Team

Our breath work started with experiments using the training mask, which worked well to stimulate the diaphragm to become more connected to breathing. The Training Mask works by resistance, and trapping some of the air when exhaling, and carbon dioxide (CO2) is in part also trapped, signaling us to breathe more deeply and creating more of a need for air of poorly adapted. It also showed to have a great influence on motor control as well, teaching many athletes how to set up mechanically better than they were. This experience inevitably pushed us to explore many other things surrounding the pulmonary / respiratory systems.

History with several “methods” in Yoga, Tummo, Wim Hof, Buteyko all lead to very similar things. We started to find a pattern: higher levels of CO2 tolerance seem to be indicators of healthy physiology. Not just a great AErobic or ANerobic threshold, muscular power or endurance, mobility, or inactivity. Most of us seem to be fairly CO2 intolerant to a large degree, meaning we can’t handle a healthy (> 5% CO2 in the lungs) dose of CO2 that actually optimizes that O2 “infusion.” This also forces more of a hyperventilation to not only our work, but throughout the day. When we exercise, our oxygen levels fluctuate between 95 and 99 percent; those are the optimal levels to release oxygen into the system. If you’re performing super ventilation practices and using a pulse oximeter to measure your oxygen saturation, you may see your oxygen concentration measured at 100%. Unfortunately, that oxygen isn’t available to your cells. It hasn’t been released if it’s at 100%. Over-breathing & deep breathing can cause too much carbon dioxide to be removed from the blood, tissues, lungs and cells as the hemoglobin holds onto the oxygen. You may have a high oxygen saturation level, but it’s not where it’s needed most. Instead, optimal seems to be between 95%-99%, but that’s not the entire story. 

If we are CO2 intolerant, we may have a chronic “hyperventilation” issue that is blowing off excess carbon dioxide, all day. We may also be able to correlate carbon dioxide tolerance with eating habits, respiration, how our body breaks down, and disease; the lower your tolerance, the more susceptible we are. We can also see carbon dioxide intolerance in people who exercise, who huff and puff when they work out. They may not be absorbing oxygen well either.

Experiments in Nasal Breathing

We’ve been playing with the concept of nasal breathing a lot lately, and it’s been a tremendous catalyst in showing us how efficient and inefficient we are. When we train with nasal inhales and exhales only, switches start to flip. Our body becomes more efficient at working harder through nasal breathing, whether we’re walking or running or lifting. We’ve seen increased efficiency and faster recoveries, in part because respiration is now slowed, and due to the higher levels of CO2 in our systems which allow our bodies to recover more quickly.

There are side effects as well: less heavy breathing, calmer beings, better sleep. Overall we are becoming less sympathetic dominant creatures. The transition has been awe-inspiring in that we can see how if you overuse any of your body’s systems, you become inefficient and less likely to recover. We see how important sleep becomes, how important it is to not overreact, not to stress, to avoid anxiety. These are all amalgamations of a sympathetic-dominant existence. Which, although some of us are wired to be more sympathetic, it’s learning to down regulate (parasympathetic) more efficiently that becomes the more important piece of our autonomic nervous system.

We’re certainly not devoid of that sympathetic stressed state in athletics. If we’re constantly worried about mile splits or the weights we’re lifting, it has an effect on everything we do. It’s self-sabotage. Focusing on our breathing helps us understand that no matter how else we fuel our bodies, we need to use CO2 properly. The chicken or the egg concept plays out here too, but the fact is if we actually apply some of the principles (not to be confused with methods) we can hack the basic foundation of an ill adapted system just through breathing.

Experiment on Yourself 

How do you know whether your body is using carbon dioxide and oxygen efficiently? One way is the exhalation breath hold: hold your breath until you feel the first sensations of having to breathe again. How did you do?

• A score of below 10 secs is a problem. It means your ability to retain CO2 is very low.
• A score of 10-20 secs is pretty normal these days, but as we now know, that’s not a good thing.
• 20-30 is getting better and you’re above average.
• Efficient breathers have a score of over 40 secs. That’s the goal. Get your exhalation breath hold score above 40 secs.

In a previous blog we discussed using nasal breathing only as you begin your workout, to warm up your pulmonary system along with your cardiovascular and muscular systems. The next step would be attempted to use nasal breathing during your workout for as long as possible.

Try the CO2 Tolerance Exhale Test

Check out our CO2 Tolerance Exhale Test, where you take a 5-minute, at-home assessment that measures your CO2 Tolerance. Based on your results, you will receive a customized breathing plan to help improve your CO2 Tolerance!

“There is no path to happiness: happiness is the path.” — Gautama Buddha

Heart, grit and passion all are subtle shades of the same character, with tangled and intertwined intentions. We talk about training and competing, about using grit and willing yourself. Heart, its meaning and what it looks like all depends on who you ask. If we’re looking at athletes and examining the truth and clarity of their heart, we see grit, the ability to push through, and the aversion to quitting. As athletes and as humans, we fight for what we want and for what we believe, and those struggles are deep. They require heart.

Heart tugs on ego as well, because if your heart sings for something you’re passionate about, you’ll set aside ego to learn more about what you’re doing. Passion, with its mixture of love and hate, means you love something so much that it frustrates you while simultaneously driving you to learn more. And that’s what heart is – the passionate drive to understand what you love on a deeper level. While there are no clear downfalls to being a human with heart, there are downfalls of being an athlete with an ego, especially coupled with a lack of self-awareness. An athlete with an ego is a danger to him/herself if they cannot sense that danger. The danger stems from the sacrifices one will undertake to feed their passion.

Happiness is the Path

That heart-driven, single-mindedness is where we see ego poke through, and where there is the greatest chance for happiness. We all have ego, but those of us who can make the best of any situation and still be happy are even more fulfilled when we can do what our heart calls for – whether it’s an outside run, a turn through breaking waves or whatever else makes you soar.

Happiness is the path, but you can’t follow that path unless you’re true to your heart. You’re either happy with what you’re doing or you’re not. So many of us solve our happiness equation by the results of a workout or a race. If we expected to run outside and it’s snowing or -20 degrees, I might have to adjust. I might run outside anyway and get frostbite. Or I might find something to do inside. No matter the decision, the heart of the journey is just that – how you choose to move your body. Heart is not disappointment borne by false expectations. Surfers are another example; athletes in constant search of strong swells that will soon disappear. Most surfers drop everything to surf. Anyone who’s been married to a surfer knows that to be true. There’s sacrifice, whether it’s waves or golf or a run or a bike ride. That’s your happy place.

No Such Thing as Procrastination

There is no such things as procrastination. There is only “I’m interested” or “I’m not interested enough.” I heard this not long ago by a guy being interviewed and it stuck! When you’re interested in something enough that your heart becomes involved, there are many things you’ll set aside so that you can accomplish what you want. You will pass through obstacles and failures along the way, and continue forward.

So, how do you live with heart? Learn. Learn from your failures and be open to change. The journey is not a straight path. Take what’s useful and get rid of what doesn’t work for you. Get rid of what doesn’t make you happy. Yes, this may seem a little bit too good to be true, but the fact is the people in your life and the things you’re doing right now may need to change.  And that is where understanding heart vs ego begins. Good thing is none of us are perfect.

Your personal path to enlightenment can be running, food, cars, even a typewriter. But whatever it is, make sure it’s enlightening for you. Make sure it’s true to your heart.

By Rachael Colacino

A few years ago, I lost touch with my heart.

It happens to all of us. We get so drawn up with career and life and the business of just getting through the day that we can easily forget our passion. I had so much life and career projects underway that none gained momentum. I felt lost. It happened slowly, and came to a head when I least expected it. Losing touch with what centers you can cause some big questions that will cause big trouble if not answered. Lucky for me, people I love helped me to clarify what was engraved deep in the folds of my heart.

If you lose touch with your heart, if you start to question your path, spend time thinking about what — and who — is most important in your life. Find the chords that seem to be present in your life at the most important times. That is where your heart shows itself and can help right your ship. The same process can be used with training and with how we approach performance. How we prepare mentally and physically for races ties in neatly with how we approach the rest of our lives.

Some of the best marathon coaching advice I’ve been fortunate enough to receive are also approaches I use when I need, centering around what’s most important in life. One of the best goes like this:

“Run the first 10 miles with your brain. Run the second 10 miles with your legs.

And run the last 6.2 miles with your heart.”

Put another way, about the marathon and its mighty 26.2 miles: the first 10 miles is the warm-up. The second 10 miles is the workout. And the last 6.2 miles is the race.

The advice rung so true because at the start of any race, whether it’s a marathon or a 5k or even a figurative race in life, it’s so easy to go out too fast, to have too much confidence, to never imagine that we might slow. It’s easy to say that you’ll take the class, or work to change careers, that you’ll schedule the trip. That’s the first 10 miles, with all its promises of novelty and heroics and unending energy. Yes, start any race or experience with enthusiasm, but don’t forget to be thoughtful, to use your brain.

A weighty goal requires planning.

The second 10 miles, though, that’s where your workout begins. In a race, that’s where you may start to tire, where the miles may not feel as effortless. In life, that’s when you start to question your original motives. Why did I start this project? Why did I choose this path? Why am I stressing over this if it’s supposed to be fun? The second 10 miles requires you to use your legs, to put the strength of your training into use, and to make some real-time decisions about your path and your purpose. It requires stamina and fortitude, mentally and physically.

And then the last 6.2 miles of a marathon – that’s the part of the race requiring heart. That’s the true race of it. It’s your gut check, your heart check, a check of all your intentions and training. That’s the point in the race where you have no choice but to follow your heart because there’s no turning back. But how loudly your heart calls can also be how strongly you respond. It’s the true race, whether it’s the end of a marathon or whether is the home stretch in your goals. Your heart is what carries you across whatever finish line you’ve created. No matter the circumstances that delivered you, no matter what your journey looked like, there’s power in that final part of a race, when you’re tired and questioning. That’s where the truth in your heart speaks most clearly.

There’s a saying down under: “…a heart as big as Phar Lap’s.”

Phar Lap was a New Zealand-born racehorse trained in Australia during the Great Depression of the 1930s. His heart weighed 6.35kgs. By comparison, the average thoroughbred racehorse’s heart weighs 3-4kgs. Anatomically he had a massive heart! But it was his courage, strength and staying power that led to his massive popularity.

In the very tough years of Depression Australia, Phar Lap’s rise from humble beginnings spoke strongly to the hopes and dreams of ordinary Aussies. He didn’t have the looks, the obvious racing talent and he was leased very cheaply by an unknown horse trainer

He failed to even place in 8 of his first 9 starts. But he got off the canvas and won 36 of his next 41 races! He was so good that he often won by several lengths and at half pace! He was also heavily handicapped (had extra weight added to the saddle) in an attempt to even the field. Nothing could slow Phar Lap down. Debate still rages to this day that his death, in San Francisco in 1932, was the result of arsenic poisoning by jealous rival trainers. His heart is such a big part (literally) of Australian history that it’s actually on display at the National Museum of Australia!

To have a heart as big as Phar Lap’s is an indicator of great courage, generosity, guts and determination.

Guts and Determination (G ‘n D)

When I work with an athlete that has “Heart”, I see guts and determination. G n’ D for short.

To have G n’ D, to show heart, is to push forward in the face of adversity. When your back is against the ropes, you can either give up or come out swinging. G n’ D is coming out swinging and continuing to swing until the fight is over.

I believe you either have it or you don’t. Some are born with it. Some develop it by getting knocked down and finding they don’t like to stay down. It’s dirty down there and you get trodden on.

Those who don’t have heart are often the people for whom everything comes easy. Life, career, money, athletic achievement. They have natural ability, they may have been born with a silver spoon in their mouth, they may have fortunate connections. We all know someone like that.

In contrast, those with heart have had to scrap, fight, hustle and hurt to get where they are. They may very well have talent, but they don’t leave their success up to talent alone. They take their talent, add heart and make the very most of it.

To develop guts and determination is to get comfortable with the uncomfortable. To recognize that failure is ok, giving up is not. To push beyond your comfort zone. Not in a risky, dangerous way, but in a measured, strategic manner. If you’re on the mat, your arm is being cranked on, you can feel your elbow separating… for god’s sake, tap. To not do so is not showing heart. That’s stupidity.

BUT, if you’re just tired, feeling beaten down, spent… yet there is still some remote chance of submitting your opponent, regardless of how small that chance is, keep fighting! While there is still a little light at the end of the tunnel, fight your way towards it. Grow that heart as big as Phar Lap’s.

It’s all in the nose.

For all general purposes, we are intended to inhale and exhale through our noses. By design, our mighty noses, with hair, sinuses and mucus, are designed to filter the air we breathe.

As we breathe, the nose is constantly exposed to inhaled debris and microbes (viruses, bacteria, and fungus). When we breathe through the nose the cilia filter, moisten and warm or cool the air before it enters the lungs. Once the inhaled air leaves our nose, it passes through the mucus-lined windpipe. This is another avenue to trap unwanted particles before they enter the lungs. Next, air enters the lungs, where the oxygen is pumped into the bloodstream and circulated through the body. In exchange, the air leaving the body carries with it carbon dioxide from the cells, a waste material that is expelled through exhalation.

When we bypass the nose …

And breathe straight through our mouth, we bypass much of this process. Most of us are chronic over-breathers (hyperventilation) when stressed, breathing shallowly in and out of our mouths. That hyperventilation can cause and be caused by acute stress or anxiety. Just by simply switching to nasal breathing, you can mitigate those anxiety-provoking responses and help your body adapt to the stress. Just like anything, with practice, this can become a subconscious and productive reaction to stress.

For athletes, nasal breathing will help develop aerobic capacity and can also keep us in check with our technical or mechanical limitations. We can always get away with going faster or harder with breathing predominantly through our mouths. But, breathing through your nose forces you to focus on efficiency and inevitably forces you into a biomechanically optimal position to access your diaphragm and a full breath. Nasal breathing can also keep you in tune with your metabolic shifts. Nose in/nose out breathing is highly aerobic. Nose in/mouth out bumps you up to your lactate threshold. Mouth in/mouth out breathing is totally anaerobic.

To start experimenting with nasal breathing training, use the nose in/ nose out only in your warm up and stop when you have to breathe through your mouth. When you get the hang of that, progress to using nasal only breathing in a workout. Commit to two weeks, any training you do, and see what you learn.

Try the CO2 Tolerance Exhale Test

Check out our CO2 Tolerance Exhale Test, where you take a 5-minute, at-home assessment that measures your CO2 Tolerance. Based on your results, you will receive a customized breathing plan to help improve your CO2 Tolerance!

By Jeff Ford

When you attend any triathlon event, you can quickly tell the athletes who prioritize strength training in their personal plans and those who let it slip away. The slim and skinny often outnumber the lean and strong, without question.

Implementing strength training with limited time while factoring in soreness can be quite the science. You have to pick certain movements, understand timing and set up each strength training session so that you’re not taking away from your sport activities. Think about it, is there any chance of you having a successful tempo run the day after a session filled with four hundred squats?

Stop just guessing when you add strength into the schedule. Here’s how to NOT be a weak triathlete and still have pep in your legs and arms for each sport.

You Need to Understand Potent Movements

Judging the success of your workout by how sore you get is pretty short-sighted thinking. Soreness from a workout doesn’t necessarily equate to getting stronger, especially if you’re a triathlete who has to swim, bike and run in conjunction. You have to understand which movements (given their properties) will require the most recovery; strategy is involved.

Classically, most triathletes have very weak posteriors (in the back of their body – think back, hamstrings, glutes and lower legs) due to poor sport mechanics and overall lack of true muscular strength training in favor of high-volume endurance activities. This means that you’ll tend to get increasingly sore with exercises that target your weaknesses. Now this is no reason to avoid these exercises, but requires limiting the overall volume so that you don’t inhibit your swim, bike or run.

Potent movements also include those with high range of motion eccentric contractions; the downward or lowering phase of a strength training exercise. For example, in the Romanian deadlift, by lowering the weight and keeping your back flat with your hamstrings relatively straight, you’re inherently signaling an eccentric contraction. Additionally, the slower you go during this lowering phase increases the likelihood for delayed onset muscle soreness. That said, you won’t be able to run hard the next day if you overdo the deadlifts.

Balancing your strength sessions to meet your sport needs while decreasing the potency at a basic level can be set up as follows:

• Day 1 (let’s say Monday): Squat/Press 3–5 sets of 3–7 repetitions at medium to heavy load, or 70-80% of your maximum lift. Move the weights with good form, steady speed and rest 2:00-3:00 between sets.
• Day 2 (let’s say Thursday or at least 48 hours in between): choose a Deadlift/Lunge variation and perform 6–8 sets of 2–3 repetitions at light to medium load or 50-65% of your maximum lift. Move the weights with good form, quickly, and rest only 30 to 60 seconds between sets.

Your Focus Should Be Compound Movements

The second factor to becoming the right kind of strong for your sport has to do with a focus on compound or multi-joint movements. You can see by our example training sessions that you’re not programming heavy bicep curl lifts or fast side dumbbell raises; the idea is to pick movements that target many muscle groups and directly relate to your sport.

Don’t get it wrong, you’re not going to neglect supplementary exercises or weaknesses, there’s just a time and place for those in the plan. Compound movements like the squat for cycling and the overhead press for swimming just make the most sense, especially for the time-crunched triathlete.

Compound movements force your body to go through a much greater range of motion, exhibit the shapes of your sport, and rely on you to create midline stability. You don’t have to do a bazillion sit-ups to get six-pack abs.

When you get stronger pressing overhead, your streamline position in the pool becomes easier to hold because of the number of muscles you’ve taxed during the movement. If you’re an efficient runner, you pull with your hamstrings/glutes, therefore leveraging deadlifts and training a box squat will increase strength in the areas of need. Think best case scenario – your schedule allows time for two strength training sessions in a week, doesn’t it make sense to prioritize?

You CAN Combine Strength and Sport

Now, besides executing your two main lifts and focusing on compound movements in a training week, your best way to become a stronger triathlete relies on combining your strength work with your sports. Who said brick training can only be done with the bike and the run?

Design at least two sport-specific conditioning routines behind your main lifts. You don’t have to go over the top and make it crazy, but think instinctively; what exercises can you select to challenge your sport?

Part two of your day 1 and day 2 would be designed as follows:

• Day 1 (Monday after your lift): 5–6 rounds EACH for time of: 12 Wall Ball Squats 20/14, 200m Run, Rest 1:30. If your legs become fatigued, and then you force your body right into an all-out repeat, that should help to come off the bike, you think?
• Day 2 (Thursday after your lift): 3 rounds for reps of: 3:00 Bike Trainer, :30 Rest, :30 Box Jump (step down always to save your Achilles), :30 Rest, :30 Hollow Hold, :30 Rest. You’re now training a different energy pathway (given the bike is 3:00), challenging stability of the ankles and feet for the run and challenging ideal posture with the abdominal hollow hold exercise.

You Don’t Have to Be a Rocket Scientist

Whenever you add a new type of training into your plan, it can be a little bit intimidating. Have no fear, as hopefully you can tell it just takes a little rhyme and reason to piece together a strong plan. As you begin your quest in NOT being a weak triathlete, you’re going to get a little sore and understand which movements are particularly potent. By focusing on compound movements and combining sport with strength, you’ll quickly see great results.

A strong triathlete isn’t scared to try new things. You understand quickly how to overcome the suffering in your race and within your long training schedule. You just didn’t know that your sport was making you weak. Start today, pick a day, time and a place. One session is all it takes.

Heart. Beat. Heart. Beat. Ba bum. Ba bum. Lub dub. Lub dub.

From the moment we are born to our last moments on this planet, our hearts are our own personal drummers, quietly thump-thump-thumping in the background. As athletes, we take our heart’s cues and do our best to correlate heart rate to effort and training. We strap on heart rate monitors, try to keep in prescribed zones, and diligently track numbers over time.

Your heart is not a computer, though, and can be affected by several variables. For example, go back to your days of being single, and think about the first time you met your spouse or significant other. Can you remember your heart beating wildly? Consider other stressful situations – physical exertion aside – when your heart rate elevated and seemed to call more loudly and quickly. Caffeine intake and stress, for example, can also affect heart rate.

With wearable technology, be clear on what you’re measuring. We aren’t wired like a Homo sapiens version of a video game. Our goal is knowledge, not a high score. Use your monitor to maintain and not exceed intensity, especially if you’re training for an upcoming race.

Triangulate Your Data

Think about the last time you performed an interval workout at the end of a stressful day. With multiple stressors, heart rate monitor numbers will skew high. If you’re only looking at one data point – your monitor number – and ignoring the stress closing in, you may think you’re getting training value when you’re not. Your physiological demands are not as high as your heart rate tells you they are.

Or picture yourself in the middle of an open water swim, the gray cold water wide before you. If you’re swimming point A to point B, with no additional frame of reference, measuring the straightness of your path may be difficult. You’ll be weaving back and forth, wasting energy. However, if you maintain a third point of reference and can triangulate efforts as a reference to position, your path will be straighter. Same thing applies in research. Your endpoint will be difficult to find if that’s your only focus. Find a third data point so you can triangulate your results for accuracy and significance. If our singular focus is a number on our heart rate monitor, we ignore the effects on heart rate of other factors in our lives, such as stress and caffeine intake, which both moderate heart rate. The more data points we collect, the better we’re able to measure intensity and recovery.

The best use of your heart rate monitor is to combine with other data sets. Use the monitor as one of a set of three data points. Two other metrics to track would be your performance, and your mood. To track performance, monitor your interval times, your lifts, how many rounds you accomplished, or how easy or hard your efforts were. If you haven’t noticed, mood can be the number one predictor for a workout. If you start a race in a bad mood, chances are you’re going to have a bad race. Give yourself a simple questionnaire on how you felt before, during and after the workout, and record your honest answers.

Return to Nature

The purpose of the heart rate monitor is to provide information about your metabolic shifts, the reality of our survival in nature. Our metabolism shifts as activity output changes. Animals feel these shifts. When we pay close enough attention, we as human animals can feel these shifts too. It’s not the number on the monitor that’s important; it’s the understanding of changes in the body. The fun comes in connecting the dots of changes in heart rate, making your own conclusions and building your own correlations.

Heart rate can undoubtedly be used as a correlate to stress – when stress increases, so follows heart rate. If you’re stressed all day with work or emotional baggage, you are existing primarily in a sympathetic state (fight or flight), and you will have a higher heart rate than someone who fluctuates between sympathetic and parasympathetic (feed/breed/rest/digest). In training, the harder we exert, the more our heart rate and respiration increase to meet metabolic demand. In both the anaerobic and aerobic processes, we use oxygen (breathing) to increase metabolism.

We each have specific heart rate zones that correlate with our increased efforts. It is extremely valuable to us as athletes to determine where our individual heart rate zones are and when our metabolism shifts between aerobic and anaerobic processes. That’s your individual code to decipher.

Those markers shift every single day, all day long, based on how tired or stressed you are. If we can understand these markers from a recovered state – truly feel those shifts at different heart rates – then we no longer need to observe the heart rate. We can rely on what we know about our own bodies. For example, typically breathing will change into a double-breath pattern at the aerobic threshold, and if we know that, then to thy own self we can be true. We can understand change and build our own correlates.

Be Your Own Experiment

Understand your heart rate monitor as a legitimate scientific tool that can be used to make changes for your singular self, and use your technology to return you to the tools provided by nature. Be responsible for your own physiology and for understanding it; this is how we make great changes in our being and our performance.

We actually encourage our athletes to find their baseline HR zones by doing a metabolic test every so often to understand the feeling of the shifts in energy and efficiency. The same lessons apply here as well — learn from the numbers and collect your data points, and to find your complete story.

Learn more about our training by checking out SH//FT’s All-Access Membership.

By Darrel Wang

When I think back to the days that my old man used to be a book full of cliché quotes, I typically chuckle and brush it off. However, there are a few that have stuck with me… especially on the topic of grit and willpower.

One of my favorites goes like this: “Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.” Man. How can a statement be so true? You’re telling me that talent exists? It’s not all hard work that gets you to where you are? Some people are born naturally gifted? The answer: yes.

A great example that I can think of is the mindset necessary to try out for any Special Operations/Special Forces selection pipeline. It’s not typically the strongest and fastest that make it through the training… it’s the ones who have accumulated mental fortitude beyond their time. The ones who come back after getting their teeth kicked in… over and over again. These folks eat knuckle sandwiches for 3 out of 3 meals of the day and smile while they’re dining. Why? Because they know, in the grand scheme of things, that the payout is totally and unarguably worth it.

The funny thing about grit and willpower is that you can train this yourself. Think of the one thing that you don’t want to see during the workout of the day. We all have it. For me, it’s any workout with high amounts of ring muscle ups. Not because they’re a highly-skilled movement or that a high volume of them may mess up the way my hair sits on my noggin (voted the best hair in the unit 2 years runnin’ you all), but because I am so terrible at them. But you will never hear me bitch, scream, moan, or gripe about having to do them. At some point (better sooner than later), you have to attack your weaknesses, or they’ll hunt you down, break your legs, and steal your girlfriend. The biggest part is having the willpower to accept that circumstances, for now, will suck. But I can assure you this — it gets better.

This is my challenge to you: Spend 15 minutes with that external or internal demon. Physiological or psychological need not matter so long as you are fighting the fight.

“Nobody is coming to save you. Get off the floor and save yourself.” -Brenden Dilley

By Jeff Ford

When you type your credit card information into the checkout cart for your event and click the finalize payment button, everything changes. You’re not only filled with excitement, but you immediately recognize that your schedule is going to change. You’re now in training.

Thoughts of eating better and mobilizing more this season flood into your head. You think to yourself that this is the training cycle, the one in which there’s no way that you’re ever going to miss a workout session. You’ll train at 10pm at night if it kills you.

If you’re like me, you tend to believe that your life and habits can improve with a click of a button. You’re optimistic that when you set a goal and simply find a little bit more self-control everything gets better. It’s this idea that when something isn’t going right in your life, all you have to do is buck up and find more willpower.

The fact of the matter is that if it were a willpower game, you’d easily qualify for Kona or run a sub 3-hour marathon with the snap of your fingers. You’d instantly change your nutrition and always remember to breathe before bed. Unfortunately, it’s just not that simple.

Your attitudes, beliefs and perceptions surrounding what you do and how you do it is an insurmountable factor when it comes to your execution. Willpower is a limited resource, and your environment dictates whether it quickly depletes or builds up reserves.

Strengthen Your Perception

No matter what kind of athlete you are, there will be races you look back on that were dictated by your attitude. You just couldn’t go hard that day because you didn’t have it. Ask yourself, is this your body talking or is this your personal limiting belief? Could you have shaved off three minutes on that swim, or was your perception standing in the way?

Whether you’re working on managing your weight or training to get faster, your beliefs while you’re executing are absolutely everything. The mere thought that you may lack willpower is why you can’t rely on it.

Understand that your self-control improves over time with every repetition. It is dictated by the mind that you set. Each time you say no to unhealthy food at a restaurant, you’re proving to yourself that keeping it clean makes sense. You’re perceiving it as important.

You’ll never ‘willpower’ your way to a marathon finish. You train yourself to perceive suffering as the only option. Your belief is what allows you to cross that finish line.

Do Your Toughest Thing First

Every time you resist an impulse, temptation or deviate from what you had planned, willpower is depleted. You’ve had those days when everything was planned out yet that one unexpected incident in the morning screwed it all up.

Whether you’re working on hitting every training session or bypassing the foot long sub at lunchtime, every decision you make, makes the next decision that much harder. You’re immersed in a world of information overload, and the rate at which you receive things today, when you’re reading this, is crazy different from even a decade ago.

These things considered, make sure that your toughest or your most important objective (the thing that needs more grit) comes first. Your perceived belief will change when the objective you’re working on building gets your initial attention in front of everything else.

You are not achieving the things you want because you have not developed the belief or suffered enough. Anything that’s important to you is a part of your day because you placed it there. You developed it and now perceive it as valuable.

Dictate Your Own Environment

Why is that when you’re out to dinner and order last that it’s not originally what you planned to pick when you sat down? Someone ordered what you wanted, and you had to be different. The whole table went around and each of your friends got a drink, so you had too. It wasn’t your willpower that dictated the outcome — it had a great deal to do with your environment.

Now, don’t let yourself off the hook completely because you were the one who made the decision to sit down at that table. You are the one who orders in pizza because you’re out of food or skipped your training because your bike needed service.

Unfortunately, you’ll never live in a perfect environment. Nothing in this world is going to help you. Look at the addition of chairs and gluten-free foods? Cushioned shoes?

Instead of trying to self-control your decision-making and rely on willpower, get yourself out of as many environments that call on it. Every decision you make, makes the next decision that much harder so why are you making so many freaking decisions? You can’t rely on willpower because your environment dictates just as much.

Your Action Is Everything

Taking action develops your perception and beliefs. Every time you do, it weakens willpower and puts execution on you. There’s no relying on willpower at that point — your outcome is all your own. Do your newest objectives first thing and dictate your own environment. Your grit to focus on these steps over blaming willpower is everything.