“Do the reps, you get the results. Don’t do the reps, you don’t get the results.”
I’ve been saying these words lately.
Do the reps, you get the results. Don’t do the reps, you don’t get the results.
I’ve said them to myself, my teammates, and my coaching clients. As regular readers know from my sidchas and standard procedures, I live them.
When I search the web for them as a quote, I don’t find them, so maybe I created the quote. They ring true, particularly based on the Martha Graham and Jocko Willink quotes I live by.
Graham:
The dancer is realistic. His craft teaches him to be. Either the foot is pointed or it is not. No amount of dreaming will point it for you. This requires discipline, not drill, not something imposed from without, but discipline imposed by you yourself upon yourself.
Your goal is freedom. But freedom may only be achieved through discipline. In the studio you learn to conform, to submit yourself to the demands of your craft, so that you may finally be free.
And when a dancer is at the peak of his power, he has two lovely, powerful, perishable things. One is spontaneity, but it is something arrived at over years and years of training. It is not a mere chance. The other is simplicity, but that also is a different simplicity. It’s the state of complete simplicity, costing no less than everything
Willink:
Discipline equals freedom.
It bears repeating:
Do the reps, you get the results. Don’t do the reps, you don’t get the results.
Now here’s a picture of me doing some reps. If any activity involves reps, rowing does, though even if every stroke looks identical from the outside, they differ. I learn and grow from each one.
Seeing it for the first time in a while, I have to explain that that picture is from when I competed in the CRASH-B rowing competition, the last weekend before the pandemic turned American life upside-down, the day after I gave my TEDx talk and University of Connecticut.
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