We have guys who want to learn the Olympic lifts that do them once every two weeks and the other thirteen days are filled with cardio busting workouts, bodybuilding, and circuit training. Trust me, putting the bar overhead with 400 is NOTHING like doing 95 pounds for fifty reps. I know, if you do the math (!!!), you will find that 400 for one is only 400 pounds of total work but 95 for 50 is like, well, a lot more, but, somehow, 400 still feels heavier.

I get emails from people who want to lose some fat and spend time doing plyometrics. I just don’t get that either. I also get emails from people who watch a one-minute clip of my DVDs on youtube and ask if I can just send the rest to them. I always wonder if they want me to cook and clean for them, too, because they think I am their mother.

The problem is this: most of us are QIII. I embrace it. I love it. The greatest moment of clarity in my life came a few years ago when I had two full-time jobs, high school teacher and college instructor, two little girls at home (Kelly and Lindsay) and a wife on the road all the time. When I discovered, at best, all I could squeeze in each day was an hour of training, my career exploded. Oddly, it is the same advice I give my athletes, but there is no way I can possibly hear my own sound advice.

When you only have an hour to train a day, and to be honest you should consider what you would do with only an hour a week, you have an opportunity to scrape away the excess and decide (from the root “to cut” remember) what is important to you. It is a life changing, and in my case, life illuminating, moment.

True, QI, that wonderful time where you really should learn every skills, sport, game and movement, is a period that can be formative and informative for a lifetime. I learned how to Power Clean, Military Press, Front Squat and Bench Press as well as play golf, volleyball, soccer and dozens of other games and skills. I still drink deeply from this well of knowledge.

It is this beginning that develops this concept that the Greeks called: “Arete.” Now, sadly, when someone is discussing Homer and the twin epics, we often just sum this term today as “ethics.” It’s much more than this: it is more the notion of being good at things. I can only be a footnote here to the great work of George Leonard, but the concept of “Mastery” is being lost in many fields. Sadly, in fitness, mastery has been taken over by the idea of “Look, look at me. Look! I can do this and this and this and this and this and this. Look. Look!! Look at me!”

Arete is what Achilles had going for him. I never liked Brad Pitt until I saw “Troy.” The movie is an unwatchable, badly acted, over the top, “what the hell?” movie save for one part: the part that has Brad Pitt in it. I don’t have a man crush on him, but he nailed the qualities of Achilles. He was simply good at everything.

Quadrant One develops the tools and fundamentals to build this quality. I always argue: if not now, when? I feel the same, by the way, about reading Great Books. My shelves are lined with books from Homer to Harry Potter (Thank you J. K.). I also have “Jurassic Park,” the complete “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” “Dune,” and “The Godfather.” When I kept raging on last year about Paul Murray’s “Skippy Dies,” some of my friends thought I was crazy. (Crazier?) Yet, in this delightful book, we see the epic discussions of love, lust, death and God with fully played out characters.

That wasn’t a segue: the point I am making is important. I can read a modern book or series, like “The Hunger Games” or “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and layer back upon a lifetime of struggling and reading through the great traditions of classic literature. I have something to bounce the material off of in my brain.

I am working with a major league baseball player who grew up with baseball and bodybuilding magazines. He is convinced that he needs to train like a professional bodybuilder. Now, as a professional baseball player, he is drug tested, so he wants to train like a pro IN ANOTHER SPORT and, wait for it, wait for it, train like a pro in HIS sport.

I know, typing with capital letters is shouting. But, when you are talking to someone whose training is undermining his sport and the coaching staff has brought me in to talk some sense to him. I imagine half of my readers thinking: “They brought Dan John into talk sense?” That hurt.

The problem for this player, who is not as young as he used to be, is that pro bodybuilders often use supplements banned by baseball…now. Moreover, how can anyone train by trying to do two professions at once? Truthfully, maybe half a century ago one could do this and I am aware that Deion Sanders and Bo Jackson did this for a little while each. I have a hard time imaging how you could do two sports at the Division One level in this era.

The issue with this baseball player is that he doesn’t have anything to bounce this idea off of his head. He knows nothing of the Olympic lifts, kettlebells, wrestling, and many other things. He thinks a 315 pound squat in a workout is amazing, but he doesn’t know that this would be fairly standard in a typical high school weightroom. I am not being mean at all; this is a question of having the basics covered in QI. By the way, he may have, but it is not uncommon for good young ball players to only do one thing.

For the bulk of us, we move from QI to QIII and stay there. Sure, like me, you may have played a few years of football (QII), but the bulk of life is spent here. It’s my fault that QIII is thought to be feeble. I often joke that “we don’t do much and we don’t do it very well” in QIII.
Now, I always follow up that point with the minimums it takes to be an elite discus thrower:
400 Bench Press
250 Snatch
300 Clean
450 Back Squat

One of the points is that you need all four, but I found these numbers so light that I used to try to do them within days of starting up my new year of training. This is braggadocio, it’s exactly what I tried to do. Most of the people who train regularly their entire life will probably never get one of those lifts and all four are the minimum to have enough strength to achieve elite status as a thrower. Now, unlike our baseball playing friend, all I have to do in addition to this is master the discus technique.

And this is where the confusion comes in. I literally was woken up the other night from a dream where some Special Operators were asking me for clarity about this point. My dream got it right and I will do my best to explain it. As many of us know, I have been using the Yin Yang symbol to explain the dynamic relationship between, in the case of a discus thrower, the role of absolute strength and technical mastery. It’s pretty good, as the two “eyes,” as they are sometimes called, help show the carryover. That would be the black dot on the white side and the white dot on the black side.

My dream helped a lot and drove me back to my career in Religious Education. There is far better way to explain this: the baby. Now, before we go to far, “Either…Or” options are usually considered an issue in theology. It is used by some for specific issues, but often misses what I call “Radical Consistency” when measured against a lot of other things. If you want the whole lecture, pay me. “Both…And” tends to be a better way of viewing key aspects of theology. Let me use this example:

“Later, two prostitutes came to the king and stood before him. 17One woman said: “By your leave, my lord, this woman and I live in the same house, and I gave birth in the house while she was present. 18On the third day after I gave birth, this woman also gave birth. We were alone; no one else was in the house with us; only the two of us were in the house. 19This woman’s son died during the night when she lay on top of him. 20So in the middle of the night she got up and took my son from my side, as your servant was sleeping. Then she laid him in her bosom and laid her dead son in my bosom. 21I rose in the morning to nurse my son, and he was dead! But when I examined him in the morning light, I saw it was not the son I had borne.” 22The other woman answered, “No! The living one is my son, the dead one is yours.” But the first kept saying, “No! the dead one is your son, the living one is mine!” Thus they argued before the king. 23Then the king said: “One woman claims, ‘This, the living one, is my son, the dead one is yours.’ The other answers, ‘No! The dead one is your son, the living one is mine.’” 24The king continued, “Get me a sword.” When they brought the sword before the king, 25he said, “Cut the living child in two, and give half to one woman and half to the other.” 26* The woman whose son was alive, because she was stirred with compassion for her son, said to the king, “Please, my lord, give her the living baby—do not kill it!” But the other said, “It shall be neither mine nor yours. Cut it in two!” 27The king then answered, “Give her the living baby! Do not kill it! She is the mother.” 28When all Israel heard the judgment the king had given, they were in awe of him, because they saw that the king had in him the wisdom of God for giving right judgment.”

I Kings 3

There are lots of ways to look at this story. On Verse 28, some use the phrase “they all shuddered” as this story could also be a warning to the Northern Tribes that this King is willing to “cut the baby in half,” so forget about Civil War or Succeeding.

Others point out the notion that the loving true mother will always worry about her child. The story certainly supports this, too. I also love the inner dialogue, like Tevya in “The Fiddler on the Roof,” where we see this conversation of the mind.

Personally, I love the line: “Get me a sword!” If a couple divorces, cutting the children in half will work perfectly: each gets half. The downside is that the children die! In western tradition, and this has slowly changed, a spouse can’t go on trial in a criminal case involving the husband or wife as, legally, a married couple is one person, “the two become one.”

So, how does this relate to QIII? Think of this in the case of the discus thrower: there is strength and technique. But, it is not 50/50. You can‘t unlink the DNA from the father or the mother, so the child is truly 100/100 per cent each parent. With our QIII athletes, technical work is strength work, strength is technical.

For a fat loss client, the same holds true: the diet or food program must be linked so tightly to the exercise (I argue strength here, of course) program. In the same way, the strength program should inform the diet. This is the genius of Josh Hillis’s insistence that the personal trainer spend as long as it takes reviewing the food journal and the upcoming week with the client. Without the food journal and the peek into the reality of the week ahead, training is half a baby.

So, the longer I spend in this game, the more I realize that QIII is NOT an “either…or” proposition. Oh, certainly, we know people who move from fad diet to fad diet and get some improvements. But, it rarely sticks. And, we all know the modern cliché, “you can’t outrun a bagel/doughnut/twinkie/whatever.” It has to be “both…and.”

What is great about the image of the baby in this story, and, yes, I recognize that it is brutal, is the simple genius that if you use the sword, you kill the progress.

Until next time.

It’s from 1996. The computer I used to type this used floppy discs, so I can’t find anything to pop them open! So, I took pictures of them. I’m still happy that many long years later, nearly everything I wrote here stands up. I also include our “Winter” workouts of January. The memories are wonderful of this time. My daughters used to come over from Our Lady of Lourdes and watch me throw there at Judge Memorial…the little parking area was their recess area.

I am still happy this holds up.
So:

My free book, The Contrarian Approach to the Discus Throw, was based, in part, by this workshop in 1996. Click the “Discus” Link for it.

Checklists
Rituals
Deliberate Practice

Occasionally, due to overlapping qualities and needs, you might find it hard to distinguish between these three and I will do my best to highlight some examples.

If I could tell you one “secret” to success, it would be in making checklists. I’m not sure how I first came across them, but I know that I was developing them in the mid-1990s. Paul Northway, the great Judge Memorial Catholic High School discus thrower, had a laminated checklist for meets. As I recall, he had:

Discus
Shoes
Towel
Jacket
Water
Sunscreen
Snack Food
Money
Sunglasses
And many more little items, including a measuring tape as many high school track meets in Utah are so bad there isn’t always a tape for the discus.

The list included practically everything you could “forget.” Here is the key: as you do the same thing more and more often, you are going to slip on the basics. When I run a workshop, like an HKC for dragondoor, I send the host a checklist that includes the little things. Nametags are almost universally the most overlooked item because we worry about flights, meals and hotels, things that can be taken care of months ahead, and miss the tiny packet of nametags that will simplify my life for the entire workshop.

On a side note, Paul’s mom, Susan, took over my old position and she recently told me that she still uses the same Monthly checklist I came up with a decade or so ago and the 18 Month Checklist for big events. I used to try to do my whole monthly “To Do” checklist on the first day of the month, so I could focus my time on what I considered important.

That’s it, I realize, as I type this: checklists get your brain from focusing on a bunch of stuff and allows you to do what is important. Lou Holtz had that famous “WIN” formula of “What’s Important Now.” For me, it is rarely the items on the checklist, but forgetting any of them puts us into a difficult position. “What’s Important Now” could be “where are my shorts?” versus “let’s throw the discus far.”

At the NorCal Finals in 1977, we arrived early (in hindsight, thankfully!). I was sitting in the van and heard “Last Call, Men’s Discus.” Coach insisted that this couldn’t be right, but I grabbed my bag and said I would check it out.

“Oh, there you are,” said the Head Official when I walked down. The event had just started and I was thrower number eight. A very nice family covered me while I changed from street clothes into my Skyline College uniform. I couldn’t use my discus as I didn’t weigh it in so I had to borrow one from a competitor. My name was called and I walked over to the ring and threw my first throw of the competition. On my second throw, I threw my lifetime best.

So much for checklists!

But, let’s review: I had EVERYTHING in that one bag.

Part of what saved me is that my “other” checklist was ready. My technical checklist. I have argued for the better part of forty years that we should teach the discus throw turn the very first day and just build up the reps. The formal I use today is:

Stretch
X
One
Two
Three

To be honest, Stretch and X are redundant, but I don’t trust using fours in a list. For whatever reason, we tend to remember lists of threes and fives better. The standing throw is simply a “Three.” I worry about using too many terms in order NOT to confuse my people. I also argue that football should use this same idea. There is a group of coaches who believe their system should be put in fully in three days. I can’t explain it better than them, so read it here:

What checklists DEMAND you to do are these two things:
1. Tell me everything you need.
2. Tell me what is really important.

The longer you are in any game or job, the more and more you will “clump” these checklist items down. The first time you make pancakes, you read the recipe. The twentieth time, you don’t read the recipe but forget that one egg (or whatever). The hundredth time, you breeze over the recipe clumping together the various steps, but you still check the recipe!

When it comes to “what is really important,” this is where I get excited. For years, I have asked this question. For example, I was once sitting with the only person, I think, who has ever piloted an A-10 Warthog and an F-18 in battle. I asked him: “Okay, somehow somewhere someone once summarized fighter tactics for you. What did they say?” He smiled and said, “Well, it was three things…”

I laughed.

“What’s funny?”

“It’s always three things…but, go on.”

“Speed kills. Hit and Run. Long tails and short hooks.”

It was the secret to success and survival in modern air to air fighting and, yes, he went into detail and, no, I ‘m not going to explain it here.

The key here is the answer to “what is really important?” Usually, you can cut the learning process down to about three keys. In the discus, it’s “Stretch-X,” “2-3,” and stop talking and get your reps in.”

It all comes down to something I call “Etching.” Etching is the term we use for drawing on glass and I love the image for training…and life, too. Etching is doing something over and over so that all the excess fluff is unimportant. Superior athletes often seem to be so simple and effortless as they move. Go to a high school or Masters track meet and watch all the flailing and excessive movements that mark the marginal athlete. When you see mastery, it seems like something you can repeat yourself. In fact, it’s hard not to go out and try a sport after you watch it at the Olympics. Wear a helmet.

Checklists allow you to etch, I believe. You are saying “This is important.” That’s why I often talk about menus for a family and “Chore Lists” for every one in community. My wife, Tiffini, and I adopted this years ago. I made little cards and put them on the wall and in my cubby at work. For example:
Monday
Dinner: Steak, Salad Chore: White Laundry and Walk Through (everyone walks around the shared living areas and puts away books, shoes, jackets and junk)
Tuesday
Dinner: Viking Enchiladas Chore: Dark Laundry and Walk Through
Wednesday
Dinner: Jambalaya Chore: Clean Bathrooms and Walk Through]

I have discussed this in the past several times, but people miss the real key. We had laundry baskets throughout the house and I could walk by the white laundry bin six days a week and never, not once, think “the load is getting high.” Only on Monday did I switch on the gear that told me: Wash, dry, fold and put away white laundry.” Shopping was simplified on this system as you can imagine as was just about everything else. Honestly, we KNEW what we needed to buy and kept a piece of paper with the basics handy for any one to fill in.
Here is the Shopping List from “Mass Made Simple:”
The “Eat Like an Adult” List
* Poultry
* Sausage
* Bacon
* Fish
* Shellfish, if you’re not allergic to it
* Canned Tuna
* Salmon (in the can or fresh: the king of grilled foods!)
* Eggs (buy them in the five dozen containers)
* Heavy Cream, for coffee, if you use it
* Real butter, if you use it
* Cheese, (okay for some people, not for others)
* Salad Greens: everything you can eat raw!
* Vegetables (I use frozen bags and just microwave them as a side dish)
* Lemons and limes to sweeten drinks and squeeze on fish and salads
* Herbs/Spices
* Olive Oil
* The best “in-season” fruit

That’s not bad for most people, to be honest. Toss in Toilet Paper, various soaps and cleaners, and a few other things and put that in your pocket when you go to the store.

Etching is the primary technical tool. It is reinforced when the coach and athlete can both look at a checklist to insure that everything is being covered. Listen, it comes down to this: Excellence is the race to 10,000 reps a year or 10,000 hours of practice (read the three books that all came out at once about four years ago that all said this). I argue that the simplicity will get you to that magic 10,000 faster than complexity. I could be wrong, but I think I have proved it with my athletes.

In my blog post on Mental Set,I was wrong about coaching Defensive Backs. Well, in a way, I was wrong. I don’t have the ability to admit “total wrongness” ever. I thought a lot about reactions recently and it appears to me that we can use etchings and checklists to improve reactions.

Cover Three is a basic football coverage. It simply means that the three Defensive Backs, two corners and the safety in the middle, will divide up the deep area of the field into thirds. The corners also have the sidelines which will help as the ball carrier will end the play if he touches the sidelines or goes out of bounds there.

Simple, so far. The Corner has one third of the field, the deep part which is basically where long passes go, and it would be nice if he helped out on any runs or anything else.

Checklists, which are honestly just “Rules” if you think about it, will save him a bunch of running. The corner “counts” the receivers, the guys who can catch ball very simply:

One: this would be the widest receiver on his side away from the ball. We call them Wide Receivers, Split Ends, Flankers and a host of letters.

Two: this would be the second receiver “in” from the sidelines. One is closest to the sidelines, two is the next one in.

Three: this is often hard to find if everyone is “away,” but it is often a Running Back in the backfield.

The RULE: One can hurt me, but Two can kill me.

What? If, at the start of the play, One runs into someone else’s area (the Linebacker or Safety’s area), I look for Number Two with my eyes. Often, teams will send One underneath to trick me, the corner, into following and toss the ball over my head.

If I don’t see Two, or Three, attacking my zone, I can jump on One. If I see Two coming at me, I keep backing up and watching the QB.

Boy, that was a lot of writing, but what happens is that this is all less than a second: Ball snaps, watch One slant in, look for two, MOVE! My eyes make me react much faster than my feet!

Small caveat: Corners have to also have really short memories. No one in the stands knows when a guard makes a mistake, but everyone knows when a DB does. You have to put “Monkey Brain” back to sleep when you give up a touchdown. Oh, and for the record, the guy usually chasing the wide open guy who is scoring the touchdown is rarely the guy who made the mistake. But, Mom still thinks it was you.

So, with good rules, or a good checklist, we can speed up reaction times for ourselves. It is just like a shopping list. Now, I know, I just read the book too that says shopping lists don’t really help us NOT makes stupid decisions. I still think it is better to have a list than to wing it. I stand by this.

A shopping list that reflects a menu is going to allow you to spend your precious time and mental energy on making steak selections, for example, rather than buying some crappy, government subsidized form of grain that is designed to make you crave it and it will make you fat and diseased and drive you to listen to crappy talk radio that demeans women, but I digress. Years ago, Lindsay said she was “sick” of eating steak on Monday. For me, if you recall, all of this is “Managing Options” not “Managing Compromises.” So, I said “Fine, what you like instead?” She said, “Not steak.”

You see, I was being channeled into a compromise. I told her that anything she came up with would be fine, just let me know exactly what it is. We ate steak for a few more years on Monday after that. It still doesn’t matter what we decide to eat for any meal, just let’s make sure we shopped for it, have the items for it, and serve it on time.

So, how does Cornerback play, discus throwing and my daughter’s dinner all tie together? It’s simple: it’s all about, once again, Managing Options. Now, you can do probably seven football defenses, there are three basic approaches to the discus and there are lots of options for dinner.

Pick one.

Once you pick an approach, you can then use the Checklist (Menu, Shopping List, Playbook, Recipe, Coaching Points) to implement this idea. You want important things in your life to be repeatable. I want my throwers to succeed and pass down their insights to my next generation of throwers. I want my family fed by about six every night so we can enjoy a few quiet hours together. I want my defense to be in a position where the eleven athletes coordinate together to stop the offense.

The checklist shows you the path to etching!

Rituals are Checklists “alive.” I am a huge believer in them. As a teacher, I began each class with a short prayer:

“Lord, the sea is so large and our boats are so small.” Amen!

Then, I would clap my hands and we would “go.” I have had students do amazing imitations of me and they are always based on this little ritual that I have to kick off class.

I like starting a meal with prayer, not only to thank God, but to let everyone know it is time to eat! That’s the key to a ritual: it informs you of when it is time to get going.

Now, some of my checklist thoughts and ritual thoughts are going to interconnect. For example, I strongly recommend taking Sugar Free Orange Flavored Metamucil the few days leading up to any competition (or travel). Now, why again? Obviously, if you don’t know, you haven’t competed enough! For me, though, the taste of it begins the process of preparing me for competition.

I have so many small rituals, like smiling before I throw, that I think I might overwhelm myself with all of them. Except that they work! Now, there is always a good question: why don’t I list each and every part of my rituals?

Two things: first, the ritual is, in a sense, the checklist in action. Think about a wedding and the dozens, if not hundreds, of details that must be taken into consideration. Some have poems: “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.” Tiffini had me for the first one, so she only had to cover three more. Wise ministers will put a little Post It note in the prayer book reminding them of the bride and groom’s names as under pressure it is not unusual to forget people’s names you have known all their lives. So, in the middle of a ritual, checklists.

So, why not write everything in a ritual? Because it can be so much information that you get lost in the details and you lose the mission or the goal. I smile before I throw, you can see the video on my “Dan John” facebook page (Like it!), but that’s not on my checklist. Sometimes, a ritual is just that, something we do when we do it.

I won a poetry contest years ago with a poem about tossing a handful of dirt on my mother’s grave. I just stood there for a moment, then reached over and tossed a handful of dirt. Father Daniel Derry and my cousin, Bill Spillane, both told me: “We didn’t know how Irish you were.” I had no idea why I did it, it was totally spontaneous and all I can think, still, is that this is something I saw others do. That’s where rituals live when done best: they sit deep inside you and well up from that place when you need calming and control.

To ingrain etching and ritual, I believe in something that is best described as “Deliberate Practice.” I don’t like the term, but I can’t think of a better one. Yet. It’s this idea that I first heard from the Soviets: they did experiments with soccer players and discovered that some guys were scrimmage heroes. This group mastered every skills test, but often failed in games. Another group wasn’t up to par in these tests, but dominated the games.

So, a small change was added: a heart rate monitor. What they found is that there are athletes who can dominate something when the heart rate is 90 or so. And, that is very good, thank you very much. The sport, though, was played at, say, 150 beats. Those extra 60 beats a minute completely changed the skill set. It was like what I was told years ago by a famous basketball coach: one of the three keys to winning basketball games is making free throws when tired.

To master a game skill, it helps to be tired when you practice it! I used to do drills with my football team that my assistant coaches hated. One drill involved third down and fifteen yards. If the offense didn’t get the yardage, I sent on the punt team and we kicked. Then, we repeated third and fifteen. We did this over and over. Our young assistants HATED this, but my point was this: in a game, when we punt, we often only have nine or ten guys on the field. We have to PRACTICE getting the punt team on in realistic settings. For the record, we no longer had the issue after this drill.

For throwers, I am famous for my “One Throw Competitions.” We set up a track meet atmosphere but everyone only gets one throw. My athletes HATE it. “Track meets have more than one throw.” Right. I agree. Unless you foul twice, then you have one throw. Or, on your last throw, you need to win the Nationals. Now, you have one throw. What I am trying to teach here is for the athlete to practice the ritual (scan that checklist) under just a little bit of pressure. It works.

I used to think when I was in high school that South City had a two touchdown advantage at every home game. We were one of the very few schools with lights, so teams would come to our games without the knowledge of night games. Under the lights, they would sprint everywhere and fly around in the warm ups. I can remember hearing other schools talking about “under the lights” and “just like the pros.” An hour later, the game would start and their engines would be turned off.

The reverse was true my senior year: we had played every game under the lights, cinched the league championship and played our last game at Jefferson. I hadn’t played a day game all year. I hadn’t had to check out of class, take a bus, and warm up without the big lights. We could barely get out of our way in the first half. We came back to beat them soundly, but it was a lesson I never forgot.

I have mentioned before that the Utah high school state championships, as deadly boring as two days one can spend, begins at 8:00 am on Friday. As soon as I see the schedule, I start bringing my athletes who are called to compete early into school to get used to throwing at an early honor. Bowel movements, warm ups, breakfast and literally just waking up are all an issue. I am convinced that I have snuck in a state champ or two simply by teaching my kids that they need about an hour to “warm up” at 8 am versus the five minutes at two in the afternoon. That’s deliberate practice and it is the key to survival in sports.

By the time we got to Peter’s Café on Millbrae Avenue and El Camino Real, I was famished. One of the signs that your training is working is your ability to toss into your mouth everything in sight for a few minutes. I ordered three items. Yes, it was a vegetable filled delight, but I was starving.

Joe Lightfoot, a young medical school graduate from Manchester, England, had joined us for the past few weeks. Wisely, he is taking a few months off to work at Stanford University, sometimes known as the “Utah State of the West Coast,” and, even wiser, spend days with me. I made a joke and realized that my only British accent is a falsetto mature woman’s voice from “Monty Python.” He asked about why Americans enjoyed “The Flying Circus” so much. My argument is that after watching “My Mother the Car,” “That Girl” and “I Dream of Jeannie,” many of us were ready for a new kind of humor in America at the time.

From there, we turned and talked about education and, before you know it, I asked about Beowulf. Joe had read it, but didn’t remember much. Now, my first Masters degree (in history) was this and that and this, but my focus was on Beowulf. I still love it and, yes, I hated the recent film.

I began to describe one of the two great insights of the book that I discovered. I noted on my twentieth or so reading that the Warriors in Beowulf speak in a certain manner: Pure Present. When Beowulf is asked about his past exploits, he seems to ignore the question and press on. When asked about the future, he barely acknowledges that he will have one…maybe.

You see, Warriors live in the Pure Present. What happened before isn’t important because I might die right now. Tomorrow? Why even discuss it? There are movies that deal with this idea well, like “Thirteenth Warrior,” which is based on the great book “Eaters of the Dead,” by Michael Crichton. The book is based on Beowulf, so, well, who should be surprised?

Who lives in the Pure Present? Well, I always thought I read this first in the writings of George Sheehan, the running guru, but I couldn’t find it again. If anyone can help, please do, but those who live in Pure Present are:

The Dying. There is a wonderful clarity when you find out you are terminal. Hey, good news: everyone reading this is terminal! We are all going to die! I have never once thought of that as a negative thing. When I read “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl, I came away with the gem that if we have a “Why” to live, we can live with any “How.” As one speaker told me years ago, the Dying have this amazing ability to finish things that are important and not worry about things that are not. I can’t put the “secret to life” any better than that.

Children: Kids seem to live in the now. The famous marshmellow experiments with children where they test kids’ self discipline and ability to put off things is funny to think about. Tell a kid “we are going to Disneyland” and you are going to be pestered to death about this trip. A year, a month, or a day and you will be hearing “is it time to go” over and over and over again. I think about how many years summer vacation used to seem as a kid and how I would wait for years (!!!) for a new comic to come out each month. Delaying gratification is something kids struggle with because there is no future, it seems. And the past? When my dads and uncles would talk about World War II, I used to think: “Blah, blah, blah. That was TWENTY years ago guys!” Now, I have shoes I wore twenty years and they fit and look fine.

Artists: what have you done for me lately? I always think that Brittany Spears will be on a talk show in about thirty years and I will have to do that “Oh, yeah…she was the one” kind of thinking we do with former stars. Mel Gibson’s tirades would be okay, if it wasn’t for all of his recent flops. Pull out a list of stars from the 1970s and try not to laugh when you keep thinking: “what happened to him/her/them?” I feel for them, really. I used to work with Steve Mond, a child star whose credits include “1941” and “Different Strokes,” and he explained how hard it was to be a child star and to “never be treated normally.” It changed my view on everyone in the entertainment industry. I am sure that the original cave painter had to hear that his “newer work” didn’t stand up to the classics of deer and handprint.

Athletes: drop a ball in the endzone and that will be the only memory that anyone will have of your career. Athletes live by the last throw, last jump, and last play. When people ask if I like to go to Highland Games still, my injury keeps me from competing, I always tell them “God no.” There is nothing worse than being the guy who looks like the guy you used to be. From second to second, the athlete lives with no past and no future.

This is a terrible way to approach coaching, parenting, teaching and life, of course. Oh, I guess you could do this, but I can’t recommend it. The author of Beowulf offers another option: the King. In the King’s speeches in Beowulf, there is always this formula:

Past-Present-Future

Abraham Lincoln nailed this in the Gettysburg Address, a speech that is the model for saying the right thing well. He begins famously:

“Four score and seven years ago…” He invokes a sweep of history that leads us here.
“Now we are engaged in a great civil war,” and Lincoln brings us to the great question about whether or not we can endure this struggle.
“The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” And then, Lincoln reaches us beyond the now far into the future.

Years later, I was being driven to a weightlifting workshop and looked out the window. I asked my driver, “Is this Gettysburg?” The driver shrugged and said: “Yeah, it was like a battle or something.” Sometimes the job of changing the world involves more than three set of three or Front Squats.

My job as “Coach” is to be a King and teach my athletes to look at things like Kings. I always start off my athletes with stories of other people who have taken the same path. I learned this from Dick Notmeyer: “Oh, there was a guy like you who had weak legs. We didn’t do anything different, just kept on going on a simple path. Oh, they will come around.” I tell the throwers the first day about state champions who were struggling with that same problem and how we overcame it by coming back every day and getting a little better every week.

No matter how much we train the body, really what we are doing is training the mind. It is going to be hard to have a Warrior mindset with regards to Arousal Control as we are going to only have that one Pure Present vision. Honestly, there are times where you as an athlete, parent, or person don’t need a live or die mentality.

It’s just a warm up.
It’s just a swing.
It’s just a doughnut.

And, “next year” does exist for most of my athletes. It’s rare that we have to deal with the end of the world as coaches. Now, there are some times where it is true: high school seniors forget that this is probably the last time they will compete. Certainly, no one is going to fill the stands to watch you play pick up games with your school buddies. Also, the papers and news teams won’t be there either. I can’t tell you how many seniors have told me the week after the season ends that they want to tell the juniors that “it all happens so fast.” The play “Our Town” does a better job of explaining this and when the Stage Manager is asked if anyone realizes how precious life is, he responds:

“”No. The saints and poets, maybe–they do some.”

The saints are always worthy of a discussion when talking about life. As we always joke: “The difference between a Saint and a Sinner? The sinner thinks he is a saint and the saint thinks he is a sinner!” I imagine we should include the saints into our little list of those who live in the Pure Present. We do one transgression and “poof,” I guess, and no more saint! I don’t believe that, of course, but it is fun to discuss.

This poor senior football player (or whomever) wants to go back to the locker room, like the Rich Man of the Bible Story, and tell those juniors and underclassman not to miss a practice, workout or session and live….LIVE…every minute of that last season.

They can’t hear you, King. My wife and I have joked about a syndrome called BBD: Bigger Better Deal. Why work out when you can throw daisies with that cute girl or drink booze at a friend’s house or play video games? There is always something that seems more fun, more BBD, than doing cleans, squats or sled pulls. I know…go figure!

I think the first time you realize something is over is when King thinking begins to emerge. I have been in love…and lost. W. B. Yeats said it better:

“Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that’s lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.”

It was sung beautifully a few years ago, here:

When love crashes down upon you, like an athlete who has failed, you draw yourself up by knowing the path (your past), knowing where you are (the present) and hoping for a better life ahead (the future). My senior year, my track career came down to one throw at the Sectionals. I got in the ring, felt the wind rise and, like a fool, adjusted my feet to catch it better. The best throw of my life went out of the sector by about two feet. It was all over. My dream of going to the state meet was over.

Two years later, at the small college state meet. I got into the ring. It was a home meet for the best thrower in the state and I knew that I had to make him think. The local press had predicted that he was probably the only sure bet that evening. As I entered the ring, the winds came up again and I smiled knowing that the universe was just playing a game with me. It became my tradition of smiling just before I won. Two seconds later, the discus was in the air on its way to a state championship.

That’s it. That’s it right there: do you see how important a Kingly view is for the athlete? I used my experience to calm myself. The three Mental Set skills are:

Arousal Control
The Etching-Reaction Scale
The Physical Relaxation-Physical Tension Scale

Arousal for a Warrior is an “Eleven.” (See the last blog for details.) Every war movie has the clichéd screaming battle scene, but I could see myself getting pretty fired up to take on Edward I as they did in Braveheart. But, this is not going to get you through the Super Bowl. The first time a high school team has a game with TV timeouts, you can visibly see them flatten emotionally as the game goes on. It is hard to hold the intensity when everyone is waiting for one guy to wave his arms to get back into the game.

Arousal for a throw literally varies from the kind of competition venue to the kind of competition implement. It is really hard to do the Olympic hammer with a lot of arousal, it is simply too complex!

Extremes in either etching or reaction also need a lighter dose of arousal. Yes, you need to play with arousal control across the technical needs of your sport or activity. But, finally, you also need to fine-tune the amount of physical relaxation to physical tension you need.

Bud Winter’s impact on my career is hard to diminish. His text, “Relax and Win,” changed my approach to training and, later, my coaching. Basically, I learned that excessive tension, a fine thing in the weightroom, was hurting me in my sports. I had to teach myself to sleep on command, use sweat to prepare myself mentally, and use cue words to etch my mind. As I read this book, I bought meditation tapes, sleep tapes, and various devices to teach myself to relax, calm down and let myself get out of my own way and win.

Yes, when you deadlift: maximal tension. No question about this, you want to teach yourself to wedge under the bar and you are going to be as tight as you can make yourself. This is why I used to wear a mouthpiece while lifting: I was grinding my teeth apart! But, for the hundred meters, you need to be able to relax and let things happen. It should come as no shock that Usain Bolt’s coach is a part of the Bud Winter’s family of coaches.

It’s very hard to be “calm” when you think that this is a “do or die” moment. Bud’s original classroom was training fighter pilots in WWII to literally not freeze up in a “do or die” scenario. It is a tool you must have for every quadrant.

Be sure to see the subtle difference: you need to be calm to let your body work and still be able to react. But, you may need to ratchet your tension up or down according to your sport or occupation. Proper Arousal Control is a trainable skill: you NEED to practice at various states from hyped up to almost asleep and the whole range in between. It is a foundation of my approach to sports.

Again, the strength coach has the whole toolbox at their disposal. We can teach calm movement with Turkish Get Ups with a half a glass of water on the fist. We can teach intensity with max deadlifts. Of course, etching is much of what we do for the “Skill of Strength,” but we do have some games and toys that teach some reactive skills. As for combining arousal with physical relaxation, we can simply warm up or become more advanced and work on mediation. I’m a fan of that, obviously.

So, broadly: we need to coach the Warrior sometimes, but our job is to BE Kings. Think past-present-future and align your Mental Set Triads to the skills needed to succeed.

Enjoy.

He is right, you know, I use the one arm carries all the time to assess and test the “issues.” I can’t always fix them, but CLARITY is often the first step to success.