Dancers: Embrace the work before the work

One of the easiest ways to turn me into an awestruck 12-year-old boy is to walk me by a construction site in a big city where people have figured out how to erect huge buildings in between other huge buildings.

Recently I read all about the painstaking work that goes into erecting the giant cranes that make building a tall structure possible, because in true 12-year-old boy fashion I thought to myself, "okay, I see what the crane is doing, but how'd they get the crane in there?"

It's the work that one must do in order to do the work. And there's no skipping steps. If these companies don't do the crane work well and safely, then calamity awaits.

At the risk of forcing an analogy, I can't help but think about fitness. So many people want to rush to what they think the work is, and they race right past the "work before the work."

I'm always pushing back against the idea of "discipline" as a deciding factor in training efficacy, and it's not because I'm a soft coach. It's more because I believe in process, and I believe in taking into account our basic human nature.

The work before the work in fitness--the building of the crane--is things like arranging schedule, identifying impediments to sleep, and thinking ahead on nutrition. All of these are the things that can allow us to work really hard and with utmost safety in the gym, all the while smoothing the path to making us want to be there.

I've yet to meet the person who can skip these steps while training at a high level consistently. That doesn't mean they lack discipline in the gym necessarily. It just means they haven't done the work before the work and they either got injured, burned out, or gave up because they weren't seeing the improvement they wanted.

The brilliance of the work before the work is that it makes the "actual" work easier and more effective. We just have to have the, ahem, discipline, to slow down and trust ourselves enough to prioritize process.