Before I chucked my first aerial, a terrible realization hit me: I was probably going to fall. And it was probably going to hurt. Most people can’t get over this hurdle. They put their hands down, often unconsciously. It just happens. The advice in this situation: stop being a little girly man, and accept the [...]
Before I chucked my first aerial, a terrible realization hit me: I was probably going to fall. And it was probably going to hurt.
Most people can’t get over this hurdle. They put their hands down, often unconsciously. It just happens.
The advice in this situation: stop being a little girly man, and accept the gravitational raping.
Now, the aerial is like an entry level gymnastics move. Five year old girls can throw them. It’s not a strength issue. Not a power issue. It’s a coordination issue—something a little easier to understand than the internal physiological workings in the name of body composition because you get immediate visual and perceptual feedback.
And, yet, to land an aerial, you have to embrace a little suck.
The deal with suck and being stuck
Ah, the suck. And the stuck. Stuckness and suckness.
You’re stuck, and you know it’s going to suck a little bit in order to make it out.
Fixing both of these comes down to your mindset.
Although I don’t take supplements, I love it when people take supplements that taste like farts, and I love it more when their faces curdle simultaneously with their stomach.
Why?
Because it’s awesome. You’re willing to go through some suck in order to make yourself better. (Not saying that all supplements actually make you better, but the person taking them thinks they will. And who are we kidding: the placebo effect is probably the most powerful part of the majority of supplements out there.)
I’m willing to bet that most people that are on the “other side,” are the people that not only survive the suck, but embrace the suck.
It's not inbred, this embracing of suck
Here’s the truth: in order to change your body composition, you probably can’t eat a ton of processed, tasty junk food. You have to learn how to like vegetables.
See that?
Learn.
Most of us that come from eating sugar and fat injected foods won’t like raw carrots, and that’s just reality. We won’t want the sweet potato without the brown sugar. We won’t want to eat oatmeal unless it’s teeming with some kind of sweetner.
Learn.
Learning is the suck.
In order to trick, you have be willing to fall sometimes. In order to really change your body, you have to be willing to face the reality that putting forth effort under the bar sometimes leads to injuries.
Learn.
Got it?
Good.
But to move on, you have to know that there’s one thing about stuckness and suckness that you absolutely shouldn’t expect.
Expecting this is an immediate failure
Where old man had to spend an hour building up a fire, we can throw something inside of a contraption for one minute and get the same result.
It’s the microwave culture instilled within us.
I know that, in the previous essays, I’ve been citing Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance a lot, and if it seems like I’m just plagiarizing him, it’s because I basically am.
But no other book really illuminated how to fully explain and write about this wonderful world of physical training that I’ve steeped myself in quite like it, so that’s how we got here, and it shouldn’t be surprising that I’m doing my fair share of quoting.
Alas, with stuckness, you shouldn’t expect for it to resolve immediately. You can’t have microwave mind.
Instead, you need this mind.
Your mindset moving forward
When explaining the upper-left hand brick, I mentioned that the cure for stuckness is mental. Pirsig explains this:
Stuckness shouldn’t be avoided. It’s the psychic predecessor of all real understanding. An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of Quality as revealed by stickness which so often makes self-taught mechanics so super to institute-trained men who have learned how to handle everything except a new situation.
How to you stare this frustration in the eye and be OK with it? I’m not sure there’s a perfect way, and I’m not sure any way seems like it works in the short-term. Being aware of suckness and stuckness doesn’t help much, save for the thin slice of hope knowing that it’s an essential part of learning. (Just because you think the supplement is good for you doesn't make it taste good.)
But in the next essay, I’ll share with you the mindset that I was introduced to from the get-go that I think helped me along the way. Immensely. And I think it's a mindset that you should take with you from here on out.