“Go One More” and Push Past the Physical and Mental Barriers Holding You Back

The following is adapted from Twenty-Five Hours A Day.

Many people limit their chances for achievement by jumping into projects with preconceptions about their possibilities. Those are walls they build before they start anything. Before starting a business. Before going on a workout. Before starting a new job.

Your expectations about the limits of your mental and physical performance are almost always far less than what you could actually accomplish if you push yourself. Fight back against those barriers and decide to “go one more.” Run one more mile. Try one more new thing. Reject the boundaries you’ve set for yourself. 

Going one more is a natural way to push past those self-imposed limits and let your mind and body work to their full potential. It should hurt. It should not feel easy or comfortable. Find what you think is your limit, then go beyond it. Believe me, when you find yourself beyond your “furthest” limits, it’ll be one of the greatest moments of your life.

Learn how to tap into the power of pushing yourself to break past the physical and mental barriers that separate you from where you are and where you want to be.

Reject “Tiny Heart Moments” 

At its simplest, the idea is to go one step beyond the line you’ve drawn for yourself. Another way to look at it is, the moment you start making excuses for yourself, for not meeting a goal or for not hitting your end state for the day, things I call “tiny heart moments,” that’s when you need to make the conscious decision to not only do what you said you were going to do, but to go one more. 

Let me explain what these “tiny heart moments” are all about. When I was in ROTC and getting ready to commission into the US Army, my instructor Master Sergeant Ortega taught me how to “go one more.” 

He dragged me through my first twelve-mile ruck march while I carried a fifty-pound pack, forced me to run endless sprints up an old ski mountain, push water cans uphill while low-crawling, and put my body through a world of hurt. I loved all of it. 

MSG Ortega would take us on long workouts and push us until someone began falling out of the run. Ortega would use the opportunity to talk about “tiny heart syndrome.” He said it’s a self-induced disease caused by an individual allowing their body to control their mind and their forward movement.

Greatness doesn’t come from people with tiny hearts, those folks who run up against obstacles and struggles, then turn around and walk the other way.

If you’re on a run and it’s supposed to be a ten-miler, and your mind and body begin making excuses to quit at mile seven, you need to recognize that for what it is: BS. Instead of completing those ten miles, embrace the idea of going eleven. The benefits you’ll gain from that extra six to ten minutes of effort will far exceed the work you put in.

This has implications for your broader life, too. Imagine if you put in one more day of work. Or one more week pushing to start your business. One more year of going balls to the wall to make your dream job work?

Break Down Expectations

No matter whether it’s a set in the weight room, or starting a business, or going to a school in the military, people tend to go into these things with expectations. Those expectations are often based on fear, or false beliefs about the limits of their own potential. Going one more is about erasing those limits and helping people realize they’re capable of far more than their minds and bodies are telling them. You can always do one more rep. What you think failure is, is not failure. You can fail more. You can fail better. 

The trick is to get outside of your own head, especially when things get tough. I used to think of it as if I had a clone of myself, and when things got really bad, that clone would push me harder. You’ve got to go outside yourself and see the situation for what it is, not what it feels like.  

We’re trained as children and then into adulthood to crave comfort and to avoid pain. It’s a mindset that hampers us because it means we’re never working at capacity. We’re definitely not exceeding capacity, which anyone who’s involved with fitness can tell you is the secret sauce to getting stronger. Our minds have the ability to adapt the same way our muscles adapt and grow stronger due to repetitive stresses placed on them.

Your body is merely an accessory to your mind, not the other way around. If you can pull yourself away from that inner struggle, you’ll find yourself achieving things you never thought possible.

Trust the Compounding Effects

The effect is compounding. Critics might say, “Running one more mile isn’t really going to offer that much improvement.” OK, true. But that’s only if you look at the one individual workout. Compound that extra mile over a year’s worth of workouts, and then what have you got? 

It’s never just one thing. Go one more once, keep it up and the next thing you know you’ve gone one more 1,000 times, then those thousand things turn into 10,000, and before you know it, you’ve broken through every barrier you’ve ever imposed on yourself. People will be amazed at your success and want to know your secret. They probably won’t believe that it’s something so simple as putting in that one extra unit of work. Good. Less competition for you. 

It’s a lot like compounding interest on investments. You put $10,000 in the bank at today’s lousy interest rates, and over time, you’ll still have that $10,000 and not much more. Invest that same money in the stock market or a mutual fund, though, and over that same time, thanks to the miracle of compounding interest, you could turn that $10,000 into $100,000 in the same amount of time (or lose it all, I suppose; that’s why we mitigate risk by doing our research). 

Applying the go one more mentality to everyday life will have similar results. What if you learned one new thing every day? Taken individually, not all these new things are going to be super important, but collectively, after a year or two and you’ve added hundreds, if not a thousand, new skills to your toolbox, that’s an amazing compounding effect. Those 1,000 more skills will make you 1,000 times better than you were before.

Live a 25-Hour Day

It’s natural to want to protect yourself by setting limits that you can easily bump up against. This gives you the false impression of really working to your capacity. In reality, it just means you’re working within your comfort zone.

Get out of that comfort zone and go one more. It’s that simple. May your days be so full that you cram twenty-five hours of work and play into the day. 

Whatever you think is your limit, go one more. Whenever you think you’ve done all you can do, do one more. Forget the haters. Move forward and let the things you’ve learned build upon each other, compounding their effects on your growth and success. Look for that moment when you’re feeling your weakest. Somewhere in there is the key to breaking through and becoming whatever it is you want to be in life.

For more advice on going one more, you can find Twenty-Five Hours A Day on Amazon.

Nick Bare is the founder and president of Bare Performance Nutrition, a seven-figure supplement company with a focus on high-quality products. Nick has a Bachelor of Science in Nutrition, served four years active duty as an infantry officer in the United States Army, and completed US Army Ranger school. He completed a 150-mile ruck march to not only raise money for Hurricane Harvey victims, but also test his mental and physical strength. Nick, who lives in Austin, Texas, has built a community of hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.