So those of us who are gym regulars, who end up in the gym day after day no matter what, you know that we have good days and bad days. It's easy to wake up on those bad days and find a reason to just not go. You're body needs the rest, you're avoiding an injury, it's cold. ect... ect.... ect... There are a thousand ways you're brain is looking to get you to stay in that bed, go home straight after work instead of the gym, or in general keep you from going after what you really want. If you are relying on being motivated alone, you're going to stay in that bed, it's fleeting. You're going to need something a lot stronger than that.
Before I go that direction, I don't want to sound like I don't think motivation is important. I am a huge sucker for the simplest form of motivation. Quotes. Give me two lines of superficial insight and I can motivate myself for a month. The little story I put at the top of this post is one I go back to time after time. I am at a point in my Journey where I am constantly hitting what feels like my limits, and whenever I feel that way I think back to this and I eventually find a way through. I refuse to allow myself to accept that I have reached a limit, because if I have gone as far as I am capable of going why keep pushing myself? Then it's just maintenance.
The problem is that it will always take me time to pour that motivation back into my workouts. In the meantime I have to rely on something more fundamental, obsessive habit. Through time and frustration I have built working out, and working out hard, into a habit that is required. To the point that if I don't do it, it is an itch in the back of mind. Unrelenting and all consuming until I feed the beast. I took my OCD, my addictive nature and funneled it into this. I have days where I know I am not pushing at 100, but I still get in there, I still grind, and I embrace all the awful. It took me years to build that habit in a way that it's just part of me. I might be taking it a bit to far, but I know this much, when my motivation meter hits E, my habits keep me going, and that meter hits a E a lot.
I have been running into that E a lot lately because of plateaus. I feel a lot like I am running into the extent of what I am capable of. I have been stuck at the same level of strength in a variety of lifts (all leg) forever. I couldn't seem to break through on them. Just kept running into impossibilities. Then I made a list. I sat down and went through everything I hated and sucked at. Every time a WOD came up that had something that made me think "Ugh, I hate this workout" I added it to that list. Then I spent some time ranking that list. When I examined that list, a pattern became clear.
After I ranked and explored my weaknesses, it became clear to me that I sucked at the things I wasn't naturally good at, or just didn't enjoy. I could be 100 pounds up on those lifts if I hadn't avoided them for 4 years because I didn't enjoy, and I'll tell you something, that makes me furious. I have left so much potential on the table. I haven't plateaued. I have let so much of what I could be just sit there because deadlifting is way more fun that front squats. While that makes me angry it wakes up that animal in me that says, oh I cant? Watch me.
