The Monthly Challenge: There are a lot of reactions to it. Some of the athletes have excuses such as “it’s not my strength” or “I have to wait for the one that I have a chance of winning.” On the other side of the continuum, there are those who are excited about it, perform well, but forget about it once they perform it. There is a sweet spot between these two extremes where you should strive to be: you should use it as an opportunity to reflect on what you did well and where you were weak. Then you should determine how to move forward. The varied reactions of our athletes is very interesting. Through my athletes, I have learned to focus on my performance when doing the monthly challenge. I wish to thank my athletes for that reflection.
When I came up with the idea for a monthly challenge, I wanted to take people out of their comfort zone. I wanted to expose weaknesses to athletes in hopes that they would view it as an opportunity to get stronger overall. Most people tend to be good at one thing and focus on it, and they avoid their weaknesses. Simply if you are not a competitive athlete preparing for a race or a professional athlete earning a living, then you should be a hybrid athlete. A hybrid athlete is someone who is good at all things and doesn’t ignore weaknesses. They should be able to do anything that life presents to them; they should be functionally fit. My thought process is that if you want to be the best at something for a specific reason — you’re either competing or earn your living with a sport — you have to give up something. However, if you want to be a hybrid athlete who is functionally fit, then you can be about 60% fit in all categories.
So when you go into a monthly challenge, use it as a way to discover your weaknesses. I recommend you perform the challenge in the first week of the month in order to assess your strengths and weaknesses. Then you should use the intervening two weeks to improve on your weaknesses. During the last week of the month, you should retest yourself. See what progress you made. It’s really pretty motivating to see how quickly you can progress.
Most of us like positive feedback and like to be good at certain things. Simply, it makes us feel good. However, if you want to become a better and more well rounded athlete, focus on your weaknesses and improve on them. It will keep working out interesting, and make you a stronger person overall.
If the monthly challenge is not enough for you, commit to the Basic Foundation Program I have created it for this purpose. The program will soon be up on our website. This program is a great plan to follow for overall functional fitness. It will test every fitness system in your body. It will expose strengths and weaknesses. By the end of it, you will know specifically what areas you need to focus working on, and what program you should do next.
You should start the next Monthly Challenge on April 1, at the Lululemon sponsored event at Pat’s Gym. We will be having an Open House. We will perform the Monthly Challenge at that event. The Open House starts at 5:30. You should use this as an opportunity to try to uncover your weaknesses, so that you can focus on them during the month, and then retest yourself at the end of the month. I hope to see you on April 1.
