Becoming a Person I Can’t Stand; an Apology

Yesterday I became the person I detest. Yes,  with great sadness, I must admit: I am now ultra-specific-coffee-order guy.

There I was in a public coffee house and asked for an espresso in a “for here” cappuccino cup with a tiny amount of water. Listen, I didn’t love how it sounded coming out of my mouth. I didn’t love it, but I had to do it.

Specificity gains importance over time.

Here’s the Segway, folks. Believe it or not, one progresses toward coffee snobbery the same way one progresses in training. It’s not the first time I’ve referenced this quote from Olympic speed skating legend, Anton Apollo-Ono, who once joked that when he was a young national champion, “push ups made [his] quads stronger.” To his point, in the beginning, any and all training will make you better. After he became an Olympic champion with more than a decade of elite training under his belt, surely his training would need to become more sophisticated. 

After some adaptation, the training stimulus will need to become more and more refined to have adaptive success. Maybe you’re more interested in the progression of strength training towards specificity than any coffee preferences, but the lesson remains.

After you’ve done this for some time, one specific way you can continue to progress in the gym (and in GPP class, for example) is to make extremely accurate choices when choosing your loads. As you become more seasoned, you cannot afford to make vague, general load progressions.