If you want results in the gym, you gotta play the long game.
No single workout will make much of a difference. But the collective impact of hundreds of workouts? That’s where the magic starts to happen.
We live in an instant gratification world, and the gym really is the antithesis of that. I think that’s a part of its draw to people. Deep down, we don’t actually want everything to be easy. We want to have something that’s EARNED.
And your fitness is earned.
So that long game….
How do you stay in the game?
You stack up little wins over and over.
And you can actually use our Fitness Benchmarks to do that!
Use Fitness benchmarks to not only find a way to make incremental gains every time you train, but to also know where you stand in terms of physical fitness.
At RCTF, we have multiple Fitness Benchmarks “levels”.
These are a collection of Strength and Endurance benchmarks that you’ll hit along your fitness journey. These levels range from novice/beginner to elite.
That means that no single metric exists in a vacuum.
First they serve as an opportunity to see if your fitness is balanced or not.
If you’re crushing level 4 strength standards, but can’t yet meet the level 1 endurance standards, you know you need to work on endurance. See these benchmarks aren’t just standards to strive for, they’re opportunities to acknowledge your own biases in the gym. We don’t like doing the things we’re not good at. But here’s the good news:
That’s the stuff that’s going to be easiest to make progress on! And if we’re playing the long game, we need to stack up little wins over days, weeks, months, and years.
Inching slowly but surely towards these Fitness Benchmarks is the way to do that.
Instead of just seeking to add another five pounds to your 300 pound deadlift, maybe you need to successfully do a push-up from the floor or Row 500m in under 2:00.
Once your deadlift ceases to exist in a vacuum, you get to see where you stand in the COMPLETE landscape of fitness.
With Five to Nine Standards at every Benchmark Level, you’ll always have SOMETHING to work towards in the gym.
And incremental progress is now the name of the game. You have your next benchmark as that big target. But in the interim, so long as you’re tracking your progress, you’ll get to observe yourself inching closer and closer to reaching that next goal.
Your SkiErg pace improved by 1 second.
You lowered your Bar Push-Up by a notch.
So even if your 300 pound deadlift isn’t moving, you don’t get disheartened. You’re still making progress. Meaningful progress.
And if you can do that every day, you can play the long game.
Next week, we’ll discuss some of the actual Benchmark Standards and you can start to think about where you sit on that progression.
