Mastery

Posted on May 21, 2007 - 10:32pm by MarkFu in Gym, Training Log

In 1992, George Leonard wrote a great little book titled "Mastery", in which he defines mastery as "the mysterious process during which what is at first difficult become
progressively easier and more pleasurable through practice", a
"…long-term, essentially goalless process…" He also talks about "loving the plateau".

This is helpful to me right now as I am on a plateau.

It is ok and I am fine with it. I have a had a good run of PR’s in my lifts, lower times in some of the timed WODs. I have many more personal bests in me but right now, I am in a maintenance mode and even in some areas, have dropped off in performance a bit. A couple of reasons I can attribute is the lack of a similarly motivated training partner. I have said before that training with Brent was helpful in improving my times and skills and was also a lot of fun. I have had some outside stresses that affect performance and sleep and my diet is not as dialed in as it has been. It is all good though and it will not last. One of the benefits has been that nagging injuries have been healing nicely.

Today, after 3 rounds of the CFWU, it was time to do a max effort in my push-ups and I did 60, which was 10 less than 2 weeks ago. (Love that plateau!)

I moved on to do some back squats, a 7×3 session which turned out better than when I last did it on the 12th. On further review, the last time I had done squats was in the second week of March, so I was definitely rusty. I did go up 30# over the last workout.

The stats for the squats were:135/155/175/185/195/205/215/, all x 3 reps.

Now, go ahead an order a copy of "Mastery". there is a lot of wisdom contained in that book.