Let’s talk numbers...

I have rarely posted this year about numbers in terms of my training. They still happen. They still are what they are, but they don’t reflect how I want to measure my progress so I have chosen not to focus on them.

Numbers are arbitrary. Sometimes they’re motivating and sometimes they’re not, depending on what value we CHOOSE to give them. It’s in OUR POWER to use them to make ourselves feel good, to empower us, but also to recognise when they disempower us—and that point, we can choose not to use them, or reframe the value we give them.

For the first time in all my years of training, I’ll be honest and say that I’ve found this year really tough. At the beginning of the year, I was feeling beat up, I was doing too much volume, pushing my body to the limit with weights I just couldn’t sustain, and a lot of the time, I didn’t feel motivated to train. So I had to re-think what I was doing. For me, that’s been about showing up, and returning to a more intuitive body-building style of training which has involved me lowering my volume, shortening my sessions, having more rest days, and more importantly just looking after myself—none of which can be measured with numbers. 

But YOU also get to define what numbers mean to you, and YOU get to decide what value, if any you give them. Because you will go through times in your life when you can’t lift as much, train as much, have as much muscle or be as lean, be as fast, or where your weight-loss stalls, whatever it is, and we need other ways to be win. 

We can disempower the hell out of ourselves by focusing on scale-weight, or clothing label sizes, or how much weight we’re not lifting or we can choose more empowering ways to measure our progress, that keep us showing up:

Are we feeling healthier?

Are we feeling more confident?

Are we having fucking fun?

Are we respecting ourselves?

Are we making choices that we are proud of?

Because high fucking five to all of those things.

Am I saying that using any form of numeric measure is useless and I’ll never use it again? Of course not. But I’m saying I get to choose if and when I do, and when I do, it will be on my terms, because numbers don’t have the power—I fucking do 🤘😎