Today’s guest post comes from my co-worker and good friend, Tony Giuliano.

Tony is the hardest working dude I know, and a great coach. I’m honored to be able to give you guys this short article he wrote.

This guy wanted to give everyone a quick philosophical tip. And he even talks about a car wreck!

Alright, enough man crushing. Without further ado, I present to you Tony Giuliano.

—

I was waiting in bumper to bumper traffic, coming home from my favorite place in the world (hint: it rhymes with IFAST). I was in a rush to get home after a 10 hour shift, and traffic was backed up for a half mile or so on 37 near 116th Street. After 15 agonizing minutes of a 15mph crawl, I saw what was causing all the backup. Someone seemed to be in a rush to get home as well, because their silver Lexus rear-ended a red SUV at a stoplight.

If the driver just took their time and noticed the traffic light was red, or the brake lights turn on in front of them, they might have avoided this unfortunate event all together. Twenty minutes was added to my drive home that night, but I didn’t mind.

It made me think about how I see clients rush home all the time, trying to get to their goals the fast way rather than the right way.

Training, much like driving home, requires a route and a destination. People cannot be expected to just walk into a gym and drive around aimlessly, hoping to get home. When this happens, I hear the most overused phrase in all of fitness:

“I was making some great progress before I hurt myself”

This is the silver Lexus speeding home, only to be stopped abruptly by the red SUV. Progress, by definition, is forward movement. Too often I have seen people try to rush home, instead of going with the flow of traffic. When you consistently drive yourself into the ground and prevent your body from adequately recovering is when you will stall with seeing progress. Having a route planned out for you in the gym, managing how much weight you use and the exercises you perform, can significantly impact the results you see in the long term.

That is why having an experienced coach around is invaluable. A good coach tells you to constantly hit the gas, but a great coach gives you options. They will tell you to brake when a red SUV is in front of you or tell you to floor it when the traffic has cleared, so make sure you communicate with your coach this week to let them know exactly where on the road you are.

—

About the Author

HIMYNAMEISTONY

I’m a full time comic book fan that just so happens to run the day to day operations over at Indianapolis Fitness and Sports Training. I’m an office manager by day, strength coach by night, and wannabe sports scientist in my free time. Being around all these great minds here in Indiana creates a lot of questions for me and I try to make sense of them using numbers and models to guide me.

I have had some great mentors at Stanford University, SUNY Buffalo, and Absolute Performance Training that guided a very misguided coach from Long Island through the paces of being a performance coach before I took my final internship at Indianapolis Fitness and Sports Training last summer.