Diaries of a Coach 017 || Don’t Be A Scoundrel

Alright guys. The Open is upon us. Sometime tomorrow we will know the first of five 2018 Open Workouts. With all the hype that has led us into this season, it’s no wonder nerves are at an all time high.

 

First of all, that’s good. A good dose of healthy humility never hurt anyone. Let’s be confident of where we are and how far we’ve come, but humble as we admit our weaknesses and the abundant areas of opportunity to improve. The Open will be a great measurement of current strength and skill in order to dial in our practice and training over the next year.

 

Secondly, don’t let these nerves get the best of you. Don’t let the desire to do well, to excel above others or even yourself, lead you into areas of dishonesty. Don’t be shady y’all.

 

When it comes to the rigid judging system put in place for these Open Workouts, there will be no where to hide when it comes to rep standards and completion. But more than that, it’s important that we cultivate integrity, whether we are in Open season or not. Why? While it’s tempting to get caught up in the hype of competition, scores, winners, losers… the goal should always be diligence in training. When we are diligent in practice, our performance improves. When we do things like count insufficient reps, or shave reps completely (think, doing 10 reps instead of the prescribed 12), we do nothing but hurt ourselves and our progress toward better, stronger, more efficient movement.

 

Now, hopefully you guys have heard this before from your coaching staff. In fact, Coach Gen touched on this last year in a post on Integrity In Training, just before the Open. If you missed that, click here to read more.

 

What’s important here is not your score, it’s practicing proper movement in order to progress over the long haul. If not, what’s the point? Let’s keep ourselves and those around us from self-sabotaging progress tomorrow for the sake of a score today.

 

I’ll leave you with this. In order to make my point, I went looking for a good definition of integrity. Here’s my favorite, “Integrity is a personal quality of fairness that we all aspire to — unless you’re a dishonest, immoral scoundrel, of course.”

 

I’ll just leave that right there.