Coach AA's Sunday Newsletter
Coach AA's Sunday Newsletter
Oct 11, 2020
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Oct 11, 2020

Hello there!

Hope you are having a good weekend. Mine’s going pretty well. I spoke with a few folks from The Quad community yesterday about how to think about nutrition over the long-term. Most of us make significant progress towards our goals in the short-term but by the end of the year, we are mostly back to where we started. How many of you have made a goal but are not there today - either you gave up, or you hit it and slipped up?

On to the 3 things I want to discuss today.

  1. on seeing the progress we make

  2. on the transformation of identity

  3. on a day something clicked for me

Just one last thing - I’d hugely appreciate it if you can share one of my posts with ONE of your friends/family.


on seeing the progress we make

You lost 15 kilos.

You fit into your college pants after decades.

You are back to playing sport after years and years.

You look good. You feel outstanding.

And yet, if you don't look at your progress and your journey, you will be unhappy.

If you keep yearning for a future place with a ripped body and 6-pack abs or a 10k in 45 minutes or whatever arbitrary and extreme goal you have in mind, you will miss out on all the glorious work you've done, on the amazing progress you've seen, on the transformation of identity that you are capable of, on the enjoyment of the process.

Open your eyes. See all the things you've achieved and not the (maybe unrealistic, maybe requires a lot more time/effort) arbitrary goal you've set for yourself.

Happiness is a choice.

See the progress you've made.

Halfway up a mountain is still halfway up a mountain.

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on the transformation of identity

Most of my students at The Quad start at the bottom. From rank beginners who've never done any fitness related activity in their lives to people like me who were sporty as a kid but had completely forgotten all of it over the next decade or two.

That's something that both the Raj and I can relate to. Closely. The Quad was founded because we saw what smart fitness could do. So, when someone new walks in - helping give back their love for activity and seeing them fall in love with fitness is the ultimate joy.

I always felt like an outsider. An imposter. How could someone who struggled to run 500m be part of a running community? How could someone who couldn’t finish a workout be in the same league as folks who were beasts!?!?

Slowly and steadily, as I kept my efforts up and as I kept my eyes open for the micro-progress I was making, I started to believe. And a few months in, I did not feel like an outsider. I felt I was part of it! My identity transformation was complete and it felt good.

In the beginning, when someone comes in and cannot even squat and needs a pole to do a squat, there's not much talk about progress or results. There's the inevitable question of fat loss and we answer all of them with "fat loss is a side-effect of all the other things that you are gonna do". In a few months, or sometimes a couple of years, people transform themselves. Not ripped bodies and 6-packs but more impressive. They transform the way they think about themselves.

From not being able to do a squat and needing a pole to assist, to squatting without a pole, to being able to goblet squat with a light bell - these are all huge jumps in progress. And as these happen, and as one starts to feel good, as one starts to look forward to the grind, to the journey, amazing things happen.

Their identity evolves to being someone who is fit and healthy.

They eat better. They focus on sleep. They meet their friends on the badminton court and the turf and on other sporting locations. Running/cycling clubs become a part of their lives.

And that is far more impressive than most other results, in my opinion.

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This one’s one of my favourite memories when it comes to my own journey. It happened back in 2009 when I was training in San Francisco CrossFit.

This one is a long read, and the original post is over here. Here are some excerpts from it.

My initial days were terrible. From nearly passing out in my trial class to being barely able to just complete the warmup. Finishing a workout was a dream. The founder of SFCF is Kelly Starrett, an amazing coach and a celebrity in the CrossFit circles. He's also an amazing physical therapist who's been pushing boundaries on how we can work on mobilisation and recovery. I had no idea about any of this or who he was, obviously.

In one of Kelly's classes, as he was coaching, he mentioned the concept of neuromuscular adaptation. To move smoothly and gracefully because your brain and your body are in sync. We see this in action anytime an elite athlete performs. They just move SO well. And if we are good at a few things, we move rather well but less well than them. But way better than someone who has no skill in that.

Kelly was talking about how things will be difficult when we start because our nervous system and the muscles haven't yet figured out how to perform this skill. And then he mentioned that it takes anywhere from 12-18 months for this to start to happen.

I had never heard these words (well, I had never heard of almost 99% of the things that came up in class) and I just nodded along. I was in this for the long-term. I was doing something I was enjoying, something I looked forward to daily. A year, while rather far, was not a bother to me because I was enjoying my journey and I had nowhere specific to be except "not here".

This did take hold in my memory although I did not think about this incident until about a year later.

We were doing thrusters. It is a move where you squat down and explosively push the floor away and stand up with the bar locked out overhead. It is not a squat plus a press but an alloy of the two.

As I was doing a set of thrusters, it suddenly started getting easier and easier. As opposed to getting harder. I was mystified and I was wondering what's going on and I realised that the energy was just flowing through my body. As I pushed the floor away, I could feel that transfer through my feet, and my hips added to it, it passed through my trunk and the bar started to float and I used my arms to finish. Instead of spending more power and energy, I was spending less and being precise.

It was exhilarating and I felt like I was dreaming. I wanted to pinch myself because this was night and day! It just felt magical. And coincidentally, Kelly was coaching this class and I saw him see me.

As soon as the workout was done, he came over with a beaming smile and high-fived and in his typical fashion just said "Didn't I tell ya!!!" referring to his comment about neuromuscular adaptation. It was unbelievable that he remembered, that he saw what I felt because I felt it in me. I felt the flow, the grace, the connectedness of my movement that day - something I had never felt before in the previous 200+ workouts I had done.

While there are many people who’ve been an integral part of my journey, that day and that memory with Kelly is one of the most important ones in my fitness journey and my life.

Progress is not just weight loss. Or muscle gain. Or lifting more weights. There's progress all around us. All the time. We need to be aware of all of it. Even if we the goal is to "squat heavier", there are so many smaller things that you are doing better that you should not be blind to. If we are, then we will miss all the joys of our journey and keep yearning for a destination which is nothing but a brief blip on the way.

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