The Difference Between "Working Out" and Training
Athletes at Driveline Baseball don’t “work out.” Working out is something the casual gym goer does when he struts into the gym three times a week and benches the same amount of weight for three sets of five to ten reps, does some leg extensions, lat pulldowns, and bicep curls. Working out is a social activity meant to burn up your time and make you feel good about yourself with some indiscernible health benefits that doctors are always talking about on television interviews.
No, we train. Training is setting a short-term, medium-term, and long-term goal plan for yourself arranged around your current desires and abilities. It combines nutrition and physical exertion into a cohesive plan with incremental progress markers on the way to the aforementioned goals.
Training means failing – there’s no way around it. To train effectively means that you will be pushing your body (and mind) to the limit so you can consistently get past the previous level of skill/strength/speed/athleticism you had. And sometimes, this means failing a rep or needing to deload entirely for a week. Maybe it means getting shelled in your scheduled start or striking out six times in a week’s worth of tournament baseball games.
To train, you must be willing to accept that you will be failing. Often. But in competitive athletics, is it any other way? You never learn anything by playing against terribly inferior competition and dominating them. You must constantly challenge yourself to get better, and so it is with training.
Don’t “work out.” Train.
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