Celebrating Failure

1. As a person that Is in the gym four to five days a week, failure is something that you must learn to live with because it happens almost every day for us. You’re either unable to quite hit that max lift that you have been aiming for the past couple months or you can’t hit a certain amount of repetitions on a set. For me, right before the semester began, I was able to hit 315 pounds for my bench press max. It was also right before I left for Germany to see my sister before the fall semester started. I was ecstatic because I have been recovering from a surgery from last May that has prevented me from working out effectively up until this past summer. A labral tear in your shoulder really is one of the worse injuries that I have ever had to my body. However, after I returned from Germany, I couldn’t hit anywhere near on bench than what I did right before I left. It put me in a serious slump that messed with my confidence for a bit that I was gone for a little over a week and I could barely do the sets that lead up to my one-rep max. It is disheartening to fail at something that you have successfully done in the past and getting stuck in that cycle of failure.
2. I decided to take a step back from my current workout regiment for chest day and research some potential solutions that I could use to help solve my problem. On Youtube, I’m a fan of Jeremy Ethier, a Youtuber that is a graduate student in Kinesiology from Canada that posts scientific-based workout and therapeutic exercises to improve your body. I reviewed his chest-based video and adopted his exercises into my current program along with adding more lightweight exercises as a build-up to increase strength. I spent around a month working through the program that I built for myself from my experience and Ethier’s recommendations. I started to see improvements slowly come from working through the regiment. My shoulder slows down my progress a bit because of the extensive amount of damage that was done when I dislocated it and tore the labrum around the socket. However, I was able to return my max bench press up to 315 pounds recently, but I was also able to increase the number of repetitions I was able to do at 225 pounds from around 10-12 to 20 repetitions. What I learned from this is:
1. Do not let failure and the roadblocks that come with it discourage you from achieving what you want to achieve.
2. Sometimes, you need to take a step back and reevaluate what you are doing and researching a better method of doing things to improve your chances of succeeding next time.
3. Don’t mess up your shoulder because the recovery process is long and painful.
3. Failure is embarrassing to some, but I believe I see it as an opportunity to learn from the failure to improve yourself in the future. For me, I see failure as a love-hate relationship because when you fail at something, you despise it for what it is in the moment, but after going back and understanding why you failed and fixing the mistakes or adjusting what you are doing, you love to see yourself to be able to overcome it the next go around.