It’s the final 30 seconds of a workout. Are you the person who:
- Has watched the clock for the last couple of minutes, taking it easy so you can blast it hard
- Is happy with what you’ve accomplished already and will just ride it out
- Will continue to work at the pace you’re at, unaware how much time is left as you’re focused on a strong finish
“How you do anything is how you do everything”
This quote pops into my head at various times when my brain is trying to tell me to take shortcuts. It would be a classic cartoon sketch of the devil standing on one shoulder and an angel on the other. When the angel says the quote, my conscience gives in and I pick the right thing to do.
The final 30s seconds of a workout may seem insignificant but it’s not. You can learn a lot about yourself depending on how you handle that time. Are you happy with “just enough” or do you want to always be pushing those boundaries?
I always work to the very last second. If there’s 3 seconds left and the next movement is 5 pull ups, I’ll try to get at least 1 of them done. It’s hard to explain what fuels that but I know I’d be disappointed in myself if I didn’t.
Over my coaching career I’ve witnessed many different endings to workouts. They usually fall into one of the three categories I mentioned above.
Person 1 is the most amusing. This person likes to have a strong finish, usually sprinting 5x faster than they moved all workout. They end up in a heap on the floor feeling like they gave it everything. But if you watch closely enough, you can see they were tactically keeping reserves ready for that spectacle.
Person 2 is probably wishing for the end, the entire workout. When they see it’s close, they give themselves a pat on the back and cruise home. They did the workout, so they feel good but they probably know that they had a bit more in the tank.
Person 3 is who we should aspire to be. This has nothing to do with fitness. It’s all about what’s going on between the ears. It’s ok to have some awareness of the clock, usually from the coach calling out the time, but not so much so that this is a focal point of the workout. The focus should be on the task at hand, giving it your best effort and pushing through continuously.
If we imagine that our whole life is a long workout. We wouldn’t want to waste the middle part by taking it easy, watching time go by only to try to sprint to the finish line. Similarly we wouldn’t want to let those last few years fade away while achieving nothing.
The smart play is to work hard achieving things all the way to the end. In life the focus switches as the decades go on but our time is finite and wasting any of it (in the middle or at the end) is criminal.
Setting your intentions for small things, like the final 30 seconds in your workout can build habits and routines that allow you to set better intentions for the bigger things. It’s hard to control the next 6 months or even the next few days, we never know what will get thrown our way. But for that period of time we have chosen to workout, we can be intentional about getting the most from all the time we have.