Monday Motivation 5/22/23

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Arnold’s Monday Motivation

One of my friends sent me this joke, and it made me laugh, and then it made me think, so I wanted to share it with you.

Last week, we shared a study about how some of the influencers you follow for fitness might be doing more harm than good.

This cartoon explains one of the biggest problems of social media for fitness. You’re making comparisons to other people who are only posting their best photos, their best lifts, and their best runs. They aren’t posting the photo where they forgot to hold their stomach in or the video where they failed their lift or quit their run early.

There is only one answer to this, and it’s been the same answer even before social media. You have to compete with yourself.

Even back in my competition days, Sergio Oliva or Frank Zane wasn’t my main competition: I was. I knew I was competing against them at the main show. But in training, I was battling what I saw in the mirror. The calves that needed to grow? Not my competitors. Mine. The definition that needed to increase? Not theirs. Mine.?For 364 days of the year, my competition wasn’t the people I would face on stage. It was me. And if I couldn’t win that competition, nothing else mattered.

You can try to compete with everyone on social media, but you’re never going to win.?You will only win when you recognize the whole competition is against yourself. You can control the weights you lift every week. You can control what you eat every day. You can control whether you spend all day getting trapped on your phone. You can’t control the lighting and trickery on someone else’s social media posts.

You know that you get stuck competing against siblings, classmates, and everyone else. What if you told yourself that was all fake? What if you let yourself know the only competition is you? I know you can do this. Don’t fall behind anyone else. Get ahead of yourself.