If you can get past the shiny red ball complex, you’ll find just how artistic boring really is.
“Most people can’t handle boring anything, much less boring training.
But the beauty of boring training is that is reserves all of your bandwidth for effort.
IF you can get past the shiny red ball complex, you’ll find just how beneficial & artistic boring really is.”
-Ray Zingler on X
I am at a place in training where I care very little about outcomes.
I don’t really care about body fat percentage, what my muscles look like, or even what exercises I am doing or not doing.
I obviously understand the benefits of training, but again, they aren’t even why I am training.
I am training for the sake of training.
I have a deep affinity with the concept of voluntary struggle.
It’s where I feel most alive.
And because I love the concept of effort as much as I do, I understand that to be able to put as much as I can into something, there has to be a “take” portion of the give.
And in my case, that “take” is usually excitement.
I know that the more simple and boring I make my training, the more emphasis I can place on effort. And again, I’ll take effort over excitement 100 times out of 100.
Sleds & Squats for example. It was the same thing every day. For 42 days. Some may argue painfully boring.
But while I was callousing my brain with the redundancy, I felt the wind. Every bead of sweat. I saw the birds. Smelled the dirt. And this added to the experience of pulling that sled with my heel and bending my knees with the kettlebell.
I stopped my program as scheduled after the 6 weeks, not because I couldn’t take it anymore, I could have kept going another 16-weeks, but because I wanted to leave that beauty for another day.
I fully recognize that many people aren’t like me.
And their reasons for training are far different than mine, but something I implore all people to work on is this:
Learn to become “okay” with boring.
You don’t have to run yourself into the ground with it, but you don’t need nearly as much excitement as you think you do.
In fact, this constant need to be entertained is precisely why people never make any sustainable progress.
If you’re always looking for the “next thing” and “what’s new” you’ll never really be where your feet are.
You’ll never make the lifestyle change that is required to be the best version of you.
Lean into boring.
It’s beautiful.
