I don’t care about the blisters and burns on my hands afterward because throughout the following days they’ll serve as a painful reminder that it can be done - that feeling Resistance isn’t a reason to stop - but the exact reason for me to pick up the pace. Whatever it comes up with in those 12 minutes won’t help because I’ve set my eyes on a random number and there’s no way on earth that I won’t get it. I want that voice to get inside my head and yell at me and ask me to please stop doing this to myself. I’ll tell myself to take it slow this session because I’ll still need some energy for basketball practice or that I’ll annoy my neighbours with all this puffing and grunting.Īnd that’s exactly why I do this. I know beforehand that in those 12 minutes I’ll come up with the lamest excuses for why I should quit. They’re the 12 minutes that make me hate my life most, but also the ones that are best at waking me up. What I often do to train this is try and improve my score of total kettlebell swings in a 12 minute time period. And I truly believe that going past the point where Resistance creeps in, will make us stronger. I have known for a while now that our minds are great at creating imaginary comfort zones - telling us to stop way before our actual limits. Whenever it’s telling me to push the breaks and stop, I do the exact opposite and push harder - going even further than I had planned initially. What Griffin says here reminds me of the Resistance that Pressfield talks about or Julien Smith’s Flinching.Įver since I read their books I’ve been using that little voice in my head as a guide. You can walk away from it afterward knowing that you surpassed a barrier that makes most humans curl into the fetal position and weep for Jesus. You prove to yourself that pain is just that, pain. But by pushing past the pain, you become progressively tougher. Running at that speed for that duration doesn’t come naturally to anyone - it’s hideous, absolutely horrible. Every other day, I’ll rev that sucker up to twelve miles an hour and do three five-minute intervals.

Personally, I use the treadmill to accomplish this. How do you develop this kind of toughness? The answer is simple - do things that make your body and mind scream at you to quit, but don’t. Here’s a great paragraph on developing mental toughness I read in Got Fight?, Forrest Griffin’s book on… well, everything.

Got fight by forrest griffin