TO SUCCEED I MUST FAIL

  Its a difficult and humbling experience to learn that my greatest accomplishments in life will come when I FAIL.  Most people are afraid to fail, in fact I am terrified of failure.  I do not fear failure, I am so afraid of it that it keeps me awake at night and haunts my dreams.  The fear of failure has impeded me countless times on my journey through life.  And yet I learned the lesson of failure through training since I was a young child, in order to succeed you must fail!  This post is not just about fitness, it is about life and how what we do in the gym or on the field can translate and inspire us in our daily life.
  Many of you may not know who Kai Greene is or may see him as a common juice monkey meat head.  Kai was an orphan and lived on the streets before he came to the Bronx to live in a piss infested rat hole housing project where he has sacrificed everything to follow his dream.  Listen to the first minute or so of this video and hear his passion and determination as I feel he is one of the most inspirational men around.  When faced with failure he pushes on and gets closer and closer to his goals.  Those failures do not deter Kai they motivate him, they push him harder and he becomes better.

  If you are not failing you are not trying hard enough.  I have seen so many people come into the gym and do a couple sets where they just pump out a couple reps never in any real jeopardy of not getting the weight up or coming even remotely close to their bodies limitations.  Those same people come into the gym week after week, year after year and they never change, in fact usually they look worse despite their hundreds and hundreds of hours in the gym.This happens everyday outside the gym in the real world where people just do enough to coast along in their jobs and year after year they show up doing the same thing getting no where.  Sometimes they can do this for an entire lifetime and sometimes they walk in to work one day to find a pink slip because no one can figure what it is they do anymore.

  I have a client I train who is extremely successful in life, achieves things in his professional career as if there is nothing that can impede his success.  Every time we meet I setup him up for failure, I set a weight that I know he can not do.  Each and every time we do it he apologizes to me and says "sorry its just too much",  I   smile and tell him "IN HERE WHEN YOU FAIL WE SUCCEED".  I want you to fail! Not only is it important for your body to adapt so that it can change and grow, it is important for your mind to know that soon you will accomplish what used to seem impossible.

  I still fear failing more then anything else in life, yet I fail every single day in the gym and I consider it a success.  My failure at the gym never gets me down or makes me depressed, it motivates me, makes me stronger and more focused.  It lets me know that next time I will succeed, I will do what I could not do before.  These are the lessons that we must apply to life, this is what pushing our bodies to the limit can teach us.  

DO NOT FEAR FAILURE

Lastly I leave you with a workout by one my favorite guys Dwayne Johnson.  This should inspire you!