How Train Legs Made Me More Ambitious

This is The Stephane Andre and today I will talk about train legs and ambition. When you practice a sport, you set a goal and you create a program with a deadline to reach it. This goal is your ambition. Once you reached it, your create a higher goal and on and on. More you goal is high, more is difficult. This is why it’s important to have the mind and the body connected to work well. I’m sure you know the motto: “No pain, no gain”, it means the pain is a part of the process and you can’t avoid it. Feel good in your body is a good help to go through the pain.

A video of my legs day

Resilience

What is the harder pain to handle, physical or mental? It’s mental pain. Train your body help you to be healthy, stronger and learn resilience. The resilience allow you to recover quickly from difficulties. You know the life, difficulties are everywhere, so you can use resilience outside of the gym. It helps you to set higher goal in your professional career or in your relationship.

Train Legs

The first week when I started to train like an athlete to gain muscles, the worst day was legs day. You need to lift heavy weight to build legs and aches the following days are intense. I was afraid of squat and deadlift, you know. When you do these exercises with a bad form, you can have injuries. I forced myself to do legs day because I didn’t want to have chicken legs.

After 6 months, my friend Marcus noticed that my body changed and asked me if I knew Ronnie Coleman. I knew this name because he won 8 times the famous bodybuilding competition, Mr. Olympia, but not more. Marcus advised me to watch a documentary about Ronnie, “Cost Of Redemption”(2005). This documentary completely changed my mindset. Coleman is so enthusiast when he trains, it’s contagious. When he trains his legs day,it’s epic.

This legend showed me what means to be ambitious in this sport. Since I use the Ronnie’s motto: “Lightweight baby !” to encourage myself during my trainings. Little by little, I started to like legs day and I can tell you it’s my favorite day, now. Don’t forget train legs.

Ambitious

Sport is a good place to learn ambition because it’s a competitive environment. If you want to be in the top 3, you need to have a plan and have key actions to reach it. In my case, Taekwondo taught me to be patient, consistent and be responsible of my losses. Once I was in Miami with a cousin and we met a successful black man who told us to consider life as a sport. It sounded weird, but it looked cool to see life like that. When I worked for the first time during my summer’s holidays, I saw a lot of co-workers who didn’t like their job. They told me to have nice grades at school to have the choice to have the job of my dream.

At the time of my parents having a bachelor or a master guarantee you a nice job for life. Today, the global economy is changing a lot and fast because of new technologies. Jobs disappear and new type of jobs are creating, this is make the job market very competitive like a sport.

Mindset

When you set a goal in a sport, it’s ambitious because you’re going in a uncomfortable situation. You do it to have access to the benefit of this success. Once you reached it, what do you do ? Do you stay here or do you go to the next level? The competition in this world is harder year after year, you can’t stay here. Soon, somebody will take your place and you will lose the benefit you earned.

I don’t know if this world will be less competitive in the future. I hope, but today it’s not the case. Think about sport. Each year, the championship start again and the champion can lose the title. Some rules in the game change too. It means every year the athletes need to be better. This is why they have a special, personal program to be on the top and it’s flexible. Nobody knows what can happen during the season.

Athletes learn new things and practice everyday to have the best performance. These ambitious are a virtuous circle.

Life changes

Sometimes you have a great goal and coming from nowhere, a problem comes and changes a lot of things in your life. Is it a reason to stop to reach your goal ? Do you think an athlete can stop to play in the middle of a season because he/she have a problem in his/her private life ? No. Do you think I stopped to do squat because I learned 6 months ago that my father has Alzheimer’s disease ? No, even if I know one day, my father will not recognize me.

I decided to go to the next level. In fact, I have a bigger ambitious than I had never thought before. I can’t stay in this place, I can’t keep this lifestyle, I can’t. The more my father loses his memory and the more life will become more complicated for all the family. I have new problems in my private life and in my family. People outside are jealous and want to destroy my life. The truth is athletes live the same thing and I’m sure you too, so what do you do?

-Steph