REMINDER: Perception Leads

Consider this. I’ll bet the farm that you’ve never met anyone who’s expressed their movement potential. I didn’t say what you thought I said, either. I’m not saying that you’ve never met someone who’s reached his/her potential, while that is also true. I’m talking, rather, about the expression of one’s potential right now in this moment, rather than a future more developed self. Said differently, no one is operating at their peak capacity. Period.

I know this because the way movement works despite our desire to simplify it as muscles and effort is based on perception. The classic mother deadlifting the car off of the baby example is an archetypal expression of this concept. Put the same mom in a gym setting and ask her to deadlift three hundred pounds and the bar won’t move. Put her in an environment that removes perceptual filters of her capacity and things can change.

The innate human desire to conserve energy reserves is, in part, manifested as a governor for what’s really possible. This phenomenon is backed by science namely the continually reconfirmed work of our friend, Dr. Romanov. What we have in training, then, is an opportunity to drive performance through a change in perception. The reason that fringe level performances move the needle on our abilities is that they expose ourselves to greater perception.

The human ego wants to believe that you can lift heavier weights because you have bigger muscles, but time and time again we bump into direct contradictions to this assumption. There are too many people with smaller muscle performing much greater feats than folks much larger, for example. Consider, rather, that your muscles get bigger because of their exposure to loads that also change our perception.

What does this mean for you? This isn’t a muscle bashing post or an argument nullifying the importance of training. It’s quite the opposite. This is a call to the importance of skill, awareness, and exposure to that which challenges you.

 

Logan Gelbrich   

@functionalcoach