There is NO OFF Season for The GOAT
By: Elite Coach @MattLindland & Dr Steve @SportsShrink
As a Psychologist and athlete I enjoy studying the minds of great coaches and competitors. When explaining to people my concept of “No Time Off,” I often quote the great words of football Coach Lombardi, “The will to win is not nearly so important as the will to prepare to win.”
Most competitors have the will to win. The rare ones are those willing to put in the hard work over time required to prepare to win.
This is why; there is NO OFF SEASON for The GOAT (aka, The Greatest of All Time). The greatest competitors have that rare will to prepare all the time and stay prepared both mentally and physically.
Everyone knows that the best way to stay in shape is to never get out of shape. However, few are this committed and only the best employ this high level of discipline year round.
Why? Because it is difficult…
Most people lack the will to meet the ongoing demands needed to stay focused day after day for extended periods of time.
This is why the class of Elite is exceptional.
Elite Coach and World-class athlete Matt Lindland explains:
The most important part of training isn’t just the preseason or pre-competition, the six to twelve weeks before when you are preparing to compete. The most important part of training is the strides and improvements you make in the times others call the “off-season” or “in-between competitions.” It’s when you are out of season for your sport or when you do not have a scheduled fight to motivate you to train every day. This is when the best are separated from the rest.
They say character is what you do when nobody is watching. The same goes for training. Your work ethic, your value to your team, is multiplied by the way you work when you’re not the guy getting ready to compete and nobody is looking or keeping score.
Endurance, toughness, and the ability to recover quickly are keys to any prep training cycle (training camp), but those are the qualities you want to refine in the off-season or in-between competitions. The toughest battles are won when you are tired and fighting exhaustion, whether it is on a goal line stand in the 4th quarter or the 5th round and final seconds of the championship round.
You have to learn to push through and build mental toughness. That doesn’t happen just in training camp, it needs to happen off-season or “out of camp” when you don’t have the motivation of a game or fight in the immediate future.
This is the time when you push yourself as hard as you can and don’t have to worry about over training. This is the time to build skills by spending countless hours drilling over and over.
Set specific goals—weight gains or losses you want to reach, positions and skills you want to improve on, your strength, your speed and endurance…what will help you perform better? Work until you are tired—then keep working past that.
That intensity you train with when you are tired will put you in the right mind-frame. This is when you develop mental toughness and develop an Elite Mindset.
Realize it is the high volume training cycle that is more important than the preseason training or fight camp in terms of becoming a greater competitor and performer.
A lot of athletes think that it’s just staying in shape in the off-season or in-between fights, and that’s the wrong way to look at it. It’s really about becoming mentally and physically stronger every day.
Game time and the fights are the time and opportunity to showcase how you improved from before, but training through the off-season and in-between competitions is when you truly develop and grow as a competitor.
Again; There is NO OFF SEASON for The GOAT. The greatest competitors have that rare will to prepare all the time and stay prepared both mentally and physically.
We are active beings every day we live, so there is always an opportunity to grow stronger both mentally and physically. In reality, there is No Time Off.” #NTO – Dr Steve @SportsShrink There is NO OFF Season for The GOAT
