We’ve all been there. We’ve all caught ourselves peeping onto the leaderboard throughout the day and seeing either where our scores stack up or what we have to beat later on in the day. I am the biggest culprit of this. If I see Zach put up a certain score, I will stress myself out thinking about HOW I can possibly outmatch him. The same goes when I put up a score in the morning and have to wait all day to see if Benji is going to smoke me in the afternoon…
This can cause a lot of fog when it comes to growing and increasing our abilities. We get so caught up in comparing ourselves to everyone else that we often lose sight of our “wins” that we accomplish in almost every single workout because the overall outcome didn’t match what we expected. We counter this by saying “bump the leaderboard... It’s me vs me.”
What I mean by this is if you’re constantly comparing yourself to the abilities of others… you can’t effectively grow as an individual. For example, let’s take a benchmark workout like Isaballe. 30 Snatches for time at 135/95 lbs. Maybe I am not at a level to where I can cycle that weight just yet BUT I saw that Curtis knocked out the workout as prescribed. Me being caught up with beating Curtis at his own game chooses to go the RX route and I COMPLETELY miss the desired stimulus of the workout. Curtis was able to to cycle sets of 10 snatches and I was only able to do singles. So by choosing to compare myself to Curtis, I missed an opportunity to increase my barbell cycling abilities therefore failing to grow… other than my ego.
This is a common factor that we see daily and we are here to tell you that the leaderboard DOES NOT MATTER! I would rather see you accomplish a daily goal and be happy with yourself rather than get capped out on a workout and get absolutely nothing from the workout other than a slap to the ego. We are here to build you up physically, mentally and spiritually.. This can’t be accomplished if we are constantly downing ourselves by the product of others.
So how do we conquer this? Simple, we set goals for ourselves every day, every workout. Our workouts are constantly changing, we are constantly changing as athletes, so our goals should constantly change…
All in all, we should never let our vision become blurred by what the leaderboard says. Instead of you vs everyone else, It’s you vs you… that is how you truly see results.
