Good job, the next step in your progression is to progress to eating nails for breakfast. You'll know your ready for the salty spittoon when you "can eat nails without any milk". 🗿
Forget to ask Will. Did you hear about the study of ATHLETES who came a manual labor background?? The study indicated that the individual who came from farming, construction, mills and other physical and mentally demanding jobs with hard conditions, performance was slightly better performance on and off the field of sports.
Absolutely I do muay thai and while I'm still a beginner alot of it is developing the mindset of getting hit some people might naturally be OK with getting hit but it's still a pretty scary thing to go up against someone you know is better and prepare yourself to be absolutely destroyed but everytime you do its not as scary the next so toughness is absolutely a trainable quality
Mental toughness comes from not only doing workouts that are themselves tough but also doing workouts in adverse/non optimal conditions I.e. off of little sleep, in cold weather, at awkward times in your schedule due to lifestyle constraints. Obviously it’d be nice to have optimal conditions and it’s a good idea to set up your life to minimise the chances of doing a workout in adverse conditions, but sometimes necessity calls for it and it has to be done. I find that it’s these workouts, when you have so many barriers and adverse conditions to even starting the workout and yet you get it done anyway that make me not just physically tougher but also mentally tougher too.
Toughness is more often than just not just having extremely good preparation for the task. Whether it’s a ‘preparedness’ or ‘toughness’ - you can’t really fake it. You have to work for it and experience something demanding.
I think I agree it’s a fine line though imo. Take Japanese baseball pitching coaches as an example. No coach in America is going to make their pitchers throws 50 innings in a week long tournament but the Japanese do exactly that and the belief is it builds mental toughness and so they can learn to keep technique during high arm fatigue. I don’t know how many of those guys they are injuring over there but they did produce ohtani.
A lot of guys think lifting - like camping, going for a walk, what snacks you eat, among other things they like to ruin for themselves - is a chance to show how Early Man they are. You're not a warrior, you're an athlete. Warriors crouch in a ditch of cold water for 12 hours, then eat packet mac n cheese. They don't take a contrast shower, then a nap, wake up, Theragun, and cook bison risotto. The ancient Greeks made that distinction (Xenophon noted that levied troops had better physiques than full time soldiers).
Hard work makes me vulnerable and tired. It's challenging......that is why I TRAIN. Focusing and conditioning is the the reward. If anything Will, hard TRAINING makes you HUMBLE. This is my view on TRAINING. Once again you're on the money. Have a wonderful day Will.. Thankyou always for sharing you're philosophy and training.
It could be combination of things. Resilience, durability, mental strength, and focus. Definitely more internal. But I used to watch Julio Cesar Chavez when I was younger and his bones and skull were unusually thick, and so he could just walk through punches. Perhaps he got a lot of sunlight, I don’t know.
Most team sports don't require you to be tough because any physical contact is an instant yellow card and you could get an advantage for playing up the roughness of contact to get the other guys carded. In these sports training Toughness is absolutely a waste of time. However Toughness in combat sports will make or break you. I train my mental toughness by curling in the squat rack during rush hour at the gym.
