What Are Your Numbers?
The critical information for your goals, and the help you might need.
“What are your numbers?”
That’s one of the first questions I got asked by the two best coaches I ever trained under.
Put a different way, “How strong are you right now?”
The follow up question was something like “What do you want?”
The answer to the first question was my Point A. The answer to the second is Point B.
In order to get anywhere, you need both. In strength performance, we are constantly assessing where we are in relationship to where we are trying to go. Even though I lift for many reasons (the viiibes) that are less quantifiable in an empirical way, I also train to perform in contexts with objective outcomes, like a strongman competition. I have numbers I am aiming for; these numbers help me play and enjoy the game of competing as well as I possibly can.
Sometimes there is nothing more clarifying than the vicious, glowing truth. But actually getting it, sticking with it, and building from it is not always a simple task.
I’ve been re-visiting long-time strength coach Dan John’s book, Intervention: Course Corrections for the Athlete and Trainer. Coach John talks about the critical need to know your point A, and your point B. Highly motivated individuals often know their Point B - what they want. But they don’t actually know where they are starting: their point A. For some folks, it’s the opposite. They are all too aware of the issues they’re currently beset with, are so overwhelmed, they struggle to clarify Point B.
You need to know both, whether we are talking physical fitness goals, health goals, artistic ambitions or career aspirations.
To meet the oracle and receive higher wisdom and guidance, you must aim to know thyself.
But it’s not always simple, or clear, even when you have a strong analytical skillset (sometimes that’s actually an obstacle, because we mistakenly believe we should be able to see everything.)
That’s where the Consultant comes in.
The Consultant
Sometimes the push out the door, the fire under the ole’ keister, that thing that we really need to hear is simply the truth that someone else could usually tell us, if they knew the degree to which we were wasting time on things not truly relevant to our enjoyment, our aims, and our work.
This is not a moral failing, this is the limited and subjective nature of the individual’s perspective. I have animated most of my adult life through my belief in the human being’s ability to self-direct, self-cultivate and grow, but one thing that I also hold in tension and complement with that ability is our need for outside feedback, support, and orientation.
But we cannot always reliably get this from our peers - our close ones may not always be fit for helping us assess, not because they don’t care, but because affection is often marked by seeing the best in someone; we don’t always see our friends flaws, tensions, and obstacles the way they might actually need us to. This is why we hire outside professionals, to tell us what is really going on - to point out the scum around our bathtub or the disingenuous friendship that we just don’t want to deal with and have thus blinded ourselves to, or the lack of the skill we need to develop; allowing it to fade into background noise while it methodically siphons our energetic reserves through our avoidance of it.
I once trained a fellow in his late sixties who made a career being flown around the country to walk into major corporations, and tell them exactly where they were fucking up. He told me he could walk into a room and know in about 10 minutes who was a liability, who was an asset, and where the communication and productivity knots were. He always did his work in person. Companies hired him to sniff out problems. He was also the first person to recommend Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich* to me, and said he followed it to a T. I believed him and every aspect of his life that I saw, spoke to the nobler expressions of those tactics (happy family, strong relationships, generally cool and funny person I enjoyed being around. He was a giver).
This kind of insight is worth a lot, and for good reason.
A good Consultant/guide/oracle/Seer of the Shit, can come in many forms. Acknowledging that you might need one can sometimes simply the perspective re-orientation that we need that allows that person to manifest, that helps listen for the advice we actually need to hear.
Ask, and you will receive.
*The reliably thorough, thoughtful and earnest Mitch Horowitz has a solid piece on Hill here.
Time Leeches
I don’t know about you, but I hate wasting time. Time wasted is time I could be doing the actual work I am here to do, want to do, love to do.
And I think we have an inner radar for that busy work: work that doesn’t cultivate, doesn’t generate, and doesn’t even prompt inner reflection or subtle in-process. Work that eats us up, work performed because we think we “should” do it. Work that drains. I know the difference in my bodymind, in my psycho-emotional-spiritual physical energy field. When I’m on fire with drive and purpose and in flow with meaning, I have energy even when I’m tired, and I can work all day. When the work isn’t right, it’s a fucking slog. I used to not trust that sensation, but I’m growing at recognizing its warning: re-assess what you’re doing.
I see too much of this busy work in fitness. Pointless “activation” drills, exercises performed at such low intensity they cannot possibly produce an adaptation stimulus. What they produce is a false belief in “I’m doing what I ‘should’ be doing.” This sucks if you actually want to progress because it steals time you could be doing the real thing.
We waste a lot of time leaking energy doing pointless shit that we believe is productive, again, maybe because we maybe just don’t know any better. This is also an infinite problem in fitness, because, as a consumer industry, it is constantly shitting out “wellness” products and flooding the cultural dialectic with propaganda about you needing this new protocol or supplement or what have you, under the auspices of knowing better than you. Only the most disciplined singular mind (which I am not, I assure you) could resist the distraction and the weakening of focus that this creates.
Every new piece of information is a like cloth wrapped brick through the glass house of your ambitions and wants. It’s disruptive. There’s a note tied to the brick with some fear-mongering tactic designed to get you to be interested in the thrower of said bricks “solution.” This is happening constantly through the onslaught of advertising we face daily, and it’s a massive drain.
An antidote to this is a system and plan grown from the truth of who you are, and what you need. That’s where the importance of the Consultant comes in. They can help you turn that glass house into Helm’s Deep, with walls so thick and high you can barely even hear the bricks hit the wall, and you have the mental equivalent of the baddies of the Riddermark and the Huorns composting the brick-tossing, peptide-shilling doofus brigade into fertilizer.
Those distractions are literally life stealing. This is your life, and it’s being eaten, one LLM-AI-Gen written supplement ad at a time. Shore up your defenses, get good advice, and then go after your mission.
Seek Truth Through Dialogue
I don’t claim to know some capital “T” Truth, but I think we can work towards cultivating a current of truthfulness in our work, our bodies, our relationships, and our spirits. And having a system in place for your goals and your work, that is grown in that current of truthfulness, is something we can create for ourselves, with help when we need it. Sometimes we will really, really need it. That’s where our Consultant comes in, and what they help us do. They don’t tell us what to do, but they help us clean house, and strengthen our tactics.
Many people can fill the role of the Consultant - sometimes the container of a good conversation with a trusted colleague, collaborator or acquaintance can provide you the feedback you need; can help you connect to the profound depth of your inner knowing, which is truly greater than we realize.
Sometimes it might not even be another human being.
Sometimes just sitting down and just straight up praying will yield great insight. This practice is deeply underrated. Athiests, agnostics, pagans, occultists and heathens of all stripes would do well to remember the art of praying; of being in true heartfelt dialogue with your higher power/higher self/Gods/ancestors.
Sit down, and talk to them until you have metabolized or learned something. This it’s own titanic topic, but I’ll leave it at: don’t knock it until you’ve actually tried to sustain it as a practice. Sit down, ask questions (out loud. Literally talk it out. Writing is a good alternative tactic if necessary, but vocal expression has it’s own transformative and metabolic powers that should not be slept on).
Describe your Point A in the greatest detail you can. Describe it many different ways. Exaggerate the negatives. Exaggerate the positives. Repeat with your Point B. Repeat again. Do this until you have some actual tactics. Do this with people or powers that you trust.
Then put those tactics to work.
Good luck, good lifting, and groove on,
⚡️Clay
I’m Claymore, aka Coach Clay. I’m a strength and performance coach, an artist-filmmaker crafting movies about the wild, strange and heroic, and a writer-speaker on many things human development and performance, spirituality, metaphysics and magic.
All inquiries may be sent to caraclaymore at gmail dot com
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