The Spartan Commandments:
1. Earn your shield
2. Power in appearance
3. Always perform a pre battle ritual
4. Prepare for battle, prepare for glory
5. Fight from habit, not feeling
6. No place for weakness
7. True strength is the warrior beside you
8. Endurance is the foundation of strength
9. No retreat no surrender
And we go again…
7. True strength is the warrior beside you
The Spartanomics spin on dream work makes the dream work.
When it comes to achieving any goal, we want to make it as easy as possible and as closely aligned with your current routine and behaviour's as possible. Why? If the goal is to get shredded, you’ll find it almost impossible to get shredded if your current diet consists of pizza and beer for every meal.
In other words, we want to take up behaviour's that will allow us to achieve the goal.
A habit is an automated behaviour that is influenced by our environment. And each behaviour follows this feedback loop:
Having a close group of family and friends on hand to keep you accountable will help to make your desired goal more attractive and it will help to curb any cravings.
Telling people in the office about your goal will help to achieve a similar outcome. However, they may not be as supportive… just try not to spend too much time around temptation e.g. the office biscuits, the post work bar crawl etc. That’ll only deplete your battery of willpower and lead to an all out derailment on the track to your goal.
Having a mentor, a coach or just a YouTube channel to follow with goals aligned to yours and battlefield experience to match (hint hint Spartanomics) will help to guide you on the path to your goals.
Not only will the above provide you with support and accountability, but it will provide you with a little competition. And a little competition never hurt anybody.
8. Endurance is the foundation of strength
There are two sides to this coin.
Physical endurance. Fundamentally all exercises are a movement. And guess what? You’re moving ALL DAY. A movement is a sum of motions that occur at each joint, which generally can be categorised into the following:
Push/pull
Hinge/squat
Lunge
Balance
Rotation
Gait
In order to develop strength, we must first develop a solid base of endurance. The more we can endure, the more we can tolerate load and the more we can apply progressive overload.
This leads to a development of physical strength and injury resilience. If you want to get into the nitty gritty of this then check out Foundations to Performance I over on SPTV (there’s a two-week FREE trial).
Now, the other side of that coin. Mental resilience.
In the same train of thought, you can only develop mental strength by staying in the game and keeping it moving. By enduring your current circumstances.
Key skills in this arena come in the form of commitment, discipline and grit. You can have all the odds in your favour but if you fail to do the work and stick to the plan, they mean f*ck all.
And if you check out the lifestyle section on SPTV, the blueprint series is all about helping you become a Spartan. And making it easy. As long as you do the work.
“In phalanx warfare, agility, cleverness and speed were NOT as important as grit, fortitude, and stamina.”