Throughout my squash career I trained quite hard, most days this lead to me being sick in the front yard after school on completion of the dreaded beep test. I’d do this most days to try and better the last, not stopping until I was successful or completely exhausted. Not the best way to go about training but at the time I didn’t know much better. One thing that was a constant though was my ability to push through the pain barrier again and again making sure there were no shortcuts in my desire to be one of the best in the world. As it turned out, I only made it to 98th in the world before retiring at the age of 26 to begin a new life but the same mentality followed me into Personal Training.
You may wonder what the title “The Line” has to do with any of this? Shortcuts are a common practice in day to day life and it’s no surprise that we’d see them being taken in workouts as well. It’s common knowledge amongst those that train within the Push Your Limits studio that taking shortcuts are not only a no no but if a shortcut were to be taken, they’d receive a lecture on “The Line”.
”The Line” is used to describe the difference between good and great. If you’re doing shuttle runs and one athlete is stopping just before the line and the other is going a little further past the line what does that say to you? are the benefits of going that little bit further going to make much of a difference? Well probably not specifically on that run but what it does say to us is that athlete B has a stronger mental approach than athlete A and because of this they are less likely to be taking shortcuts full stop! Athlete B will take a shortcut here a shortcut there and before you know it, athlete A isn’t progressing at the same rate as athlete B and it all started from taking the 1 shortcut!
So if someone were to ask you the difference between a good athlete and a great athlete, the answer is most likely 10cm. This means they’ll complete the extra push ups, chin ups, practice the technique until they’re happy with it and never give up until the last point/ metre has been completed.
As you can probably start to picture, this doesn’t need to be sport related for you to relate this back to yourself, there’s a whole lot of things that we could be doing to improve, we just have to take notice and make sure your continually improving on what you are currently doing to achieve the best results you can.
There are many ways to work on improving your technique or making that extra 10cm. We recommend private personal training sessions with Push Your Limits to get the maximum out of yourself each workout.
Justin Beard Pn1