The importance of being: honest

I was only half-listening to a conversation between friends the other day when I thought I heard someone say “the importance of being honest”, when actually, of course, they said “the importance of being earnest”.

It made me laugh at the time but as I thought more about it, I realised that being honest, particularly being honest with yourself, is much, much more important.  Especially when it comes to progressing in the gym.

Being honest as the catalyst for improvement

As I thought about it, I realised that the moment I started being honest about something was the moment that it started to improve.  Here are just a few examples:

• Hip mobility: I only started to improve my hip mobility when I saw photos of myself on the beach with hyperlordosis, looking like I had been chained to a desk for at least 10 years and certainly not like I was fit and healthy.  The photographic evidence forced me to be honest about the situation and I took action as a result.  I am sure that without being honest with myself, I would have continued to ignore the problem and eventually would have got myself into difficulty.  I am now much better than I was and the improvement I’ve made so far gives me confidence to assess myself more honestly and keep pursuing  additional improvement.
• Left shoulder problems: recently, upon getting back from a cycling holiday, I tweaked my left shoulder when I tried some benching.  This was actually really good for me for two reasons.  Firstly, it made me get on and try some different pressing exercises, including one-arm press ups, which I haven’t done for ages.  And secondly, it made me be more honest about the rotator cuff, rhomboid, deltoid and pectoral knots that have been building up on my left side in the last few months.  Now that I’ve faced the truth, I’ve hammered them really hard with my soft tissue implements (very grand way of saying my foam roller and hockey balls) and suddenly my shoulder-blades are moving much more comfortably and I am pain-free in almost every exercise (except the damn bench press!) but I have confidence that with more dedicated work I can gain even more improvement. 
• Back squats: having sorted out my hip mobility, I was delighted to discover that after a year’s enforced lay-off, I could now back squat again.  It was fun to branch out into doing other leg exercises: my deadlift shot up with the increased attention and I worked up to a half-bodyweight pistol.  However, it was starting to grate that I couldn’t work on that most basic of lifts and it really made my day when I finally got my groove.  What delayed me from improving again, though, was the initial refusal to accept quite how much I had lost off my squat.  By consistently overloading the bar for several weeks, I kept missing lifts and made little or no progress until I finally called it a day and forced myself to be honest about where my squat was now.  Since then, I’ve been making steady progress and while it’s not a big squat, it makes me happy because it’s still going up.   
• Dieting: dieting is one of those areas that should come with a sign saying “honesty required for this to work”.  I have lost track of the number of people I have had conversations with at work recently who seem surprised with how fast I’ve managed to lose a few pounds.  They also seem surprised when I tell them how simple it is.  All you have to do is to plan what you’re going to eat and then stick to the plan.  It’s basically forced honesty.  You can’t deceive yourself into eating more than you intend if you have a plan and stick to it.  I have been staggered by the success that I’ve had this year with dieting, simply because I’ve created a diet plan and stuck to it 100%.  The added bonus is that you can get away with doing the diet for less time because you make more progress faster.
• Form: I have never found it straightforward to assess whether my form in an exercise is perfect, good enough, or needs improvement.  What I have found, however, is that there hasn’t been a signficant difference in my progress between exercises that have perfect form and good enough form but there has been quite a big difference in my progress between exercises that have good enough form and those whose form requires improvement.  Too often, I laboured away with an exercise (mainly row variations) using body english or leverage to keep driving the weight up when what it actually needed was a healthy dose of honesty, a lower weight, more control and ultimately better form.  Now, I enforce honesty by starting low on exercises that I am not confident about and grooving the form for a couple of weeks, by pausing at the top and bottom of the movements and by putting the weight up more gradually.

Have your strength or physique goals been similarly impacted by the simple application of honesty or am I unusual?