This past week I got a valuable reminder about the importance of training for life.
I've always been someone who likes to keep busy, but this summer in particular is shaping up to be one of the busiest yet.
Along with the normal responsibilities of being a husband, a dad of two, a business owner, and someone who trains daily and rolls jiu jitsu multiple times a week, my son made the All-Star baseball team, I’m soaking up one of the last summers with my daughter living at home, and for the entire month of June I’ll be in the police academy from 8-5 every day while also doing homework to prepare.
Somewhere along the way, I partially tore my quad.
Honestly, I’m not exactly sure when it happened. Maybe it was from not recovering properly. Maybe it was from doing a few hundred lunges on the beach with a buddy. Maybe it was an intense BJJ session. Probably a combination of all of it.
What I do know is that it got bad enough that walking hurt, bending my knee hurt, and at one point I had to ask Kaden to help me put on one of my socks.
Standing there while my son helped me put on my sock was one of those moments that makes you stop and think a little deeper.
It reminded me that training hard also means training smart.
There’s a difference between pushing yourself and constantly running yourself into the ground.
And I think a lot of us are guilty of this, especially during stressful seasons of life where you’re not sleeping great, work is busy, the kids are keeping you up, and you’re still trying to train like you have unlimited recovery.
I’ve had to remind myself that fitness should support your life, not take you out of it.
That doesn’t mean lowering standards, and it definitely doesn’t mean stopping training.
It means listening to your body enough to adjust before your body forces you to.
One of the reasons we built TRAIN HARD Daily with both 3-day and 5-day options is because life changes.
Some seasons you can push harder, sometimes recovery matters more, and some days the win is simply staying consistent without digging yourself into a hole.
That’s still training hard.
The older I get, the more I realize the goal isn’t to prove how tough you are during one workout.
The goal is to maintain the ability to do the basic things in life for as long as possible.
To get up off the floor easily.
To move well.
To play with your kids.
To carry groceries.
To train with your friends.
To still feel capable at 50, 60, and beyond.
To move well.
To play with your kids.
To carry groceries.
To train with your friends.
To still feel capable at 50, 60, and beyond.
And what bothered me most about the sock moment wasn’t pride, it was realizing how quickly things can change when you stop paying attention to the signals your body is giving you.
I never want to put myself in that situation again.
Keep training hard, and do it in a way that lets you stay at it for a long time.
-Jason
