“Win everyday” ~ Me. Enjoy the journey. Embrace the struggle. Endure the pain. Reap the rewards. Something I have been saying lately is rather than getting overwhelmed with thinking about all the future goals or plans that you have rather try focusing on today. Focus on what needs to be accomplished for you to take one step closer to that end goal. Having a direction you are heading is important but if you are not taking the steps forward daily you will not reach your goals. Its fairly simple and merely a shift in focus. Win today and do that consistently and before you know it you will be on your way to spreading much BUTTER!!! #kinnickbutternation…please pass the BUTTER!!
I have learned so many valuable lessons from my time spent being mentored and taught by Coach Blauer but I think these 3 lessons are so simple yet so valuable to everyone. These 3 lessons I learned after my first experience at a Be Your Own Bodyguard seminar with Coach Blauer.
1- My Body is Hardwired to Protect Itself
The first time I heard Coach Blauer say this I wasn’t really sure what I thought about it. It kind of made sense. I mean we do have a rib cage that protects our vital organs, eyebrows & eyelashes to protect our eyes, and our body builds callouses when we work with our hands. So in that sense I believed it. But I couldn’t fight like the guys in the movies or in the boxing ring or in the UFC. I didn’t know how to wax on or wax off and I sure as heck didn’t look like those fighters. I have been in my fair share of sporting event “fights” but I never put up my dukes and started jabbing and upper cutting or doing round houses. But after taking 1 course with Coach Blauer I realized he was right! In that first day I didn’t become a professional fighter nor do I have the desire to do that. All that happened was I realized that my body does certain things intuitively and instinctually that sets me up to protect myself without having to think about it. This natural and instinctual defense mechanism is hardwired into our body and is referred to as Startle Flinch & Push away danger. Coach Blauer merely showed me how to recognize that and use it. What changed was my mindset. Your MINDSET is the key.
2- Pay Attention
Coach Blauer has told me and I have heard him tell so many seminars full of people that if you are defending yourself then you missed so many opportunities to avoid and not have a violent encounter or fight/ambush. He talks about the 3 D’s. Detect, Defuse/De-escalate, & Defend. So if we pay attention to our surroundings, have the correct body language and choice speech that says that you don’t want to fight we can avoid a large portion of altercations. It is better to know if something bad is going to happen 30 yards away than it is to find out when the bad guy is in your face. Here is a great question that I want you to ask yourself. If you were a “bad guy” where and when would you attack yourself? We all have routines and if we aren’t paying attention we can leave ourselves open for trouble.
3- Have a Plan
This is HUGE for me. It relates and applies to all aspects of life. It is all about mindset and allowing your mind to relax by creating a plan. Coach Blauer spends a good deal of time on Mindset and Fear Management. He couldn’t possibly spend enough time on it in my opinion. For me, if I have a plan laid out for my day I have so much more success following it and I don’t spend as much time trying to remember what I have to do. Now when I see my workout on the board I immediately make a plan. Sometimes that plan changes mid workout but making a plan takes me out of the F.E.A.R. Loop. In any and all scenarios in life you need to have a plan. Sometimes you can plan ahead but other times you get ambushed or caught off guard and need to make a decision on the spot. This is such a huge paradigm shift for me. In any situation when I make a plan I give myself control over the situation rather than the situation controlling me.
Coach Blauer has devoted his entire life to making people safer and to opening their eyes to the tools they already have in their possession. As human beings we all flinch. This is a gift from God. We owe it to ourselves and our loved ones to recognize it and use it. Coach Blauer has transformed his Be Your Own Bodyguard seminar and joined forces with Crossfit HQ to provide a life changing course called Crossfit Defense. I have been working with Coach Blauer since July 2011 and have been to three Personal Defense Readiness Instructor Courses along with countless BYOB seminars. I am now helping Coach Blauer bring this course to the Crossfit Community and could not be more thrilled and honored to bring such an amazing & life changing course to my peers. I have no background in fighting or martial arts and this has had one of the greatest impacts on my life next to finding Crossfit. I strongly urge you to attend a course. This weekend Coach Blauer and I will be at Foundry Crossfit in Bermuda Dunes, California. Follow the link for MORE INFO and Follow this link to REGISTER for the course. Please check the schedule for upcoming events in your area. This is real life. Pretending things aren’t going to happen to you won’t help. Take action and take your personal safety into your own hands.
I have learned so many valuable lessons from my time spent being mentored and taught by Coach Blauer but I think these 3 lessons are so simple yet so valuable to everyone. These 3 lessons I learned after my first experience at a Be Your Own Bodyguard seminar with Coach Blauer.
1- My Body is Hardwired to Protect Itself
The first time I heard Coach Blauer say this I wasn’t really sure what I thought about it. It kind of made sense. I mean we do have a rib cage that protects our vital organs, eyebrows & eyelashes to protect our eyes, and our body builds callouses when we work with our hands. So in that sense I believed it. But I couldn’t fight like the guys in the movies or in the boxing ring or in the UFC. I didn’t know how to wax on or wax off and I sure as heck didn’t look like those fighters. I have been in my fair share of sporting event “fights” but I never put up my dukes and started jabbing and upper cutting or doing round houses. But after taking 1 course with Coach Blauer I realized he was right! In that first day I didn’t become a professional fighter nor do I have the desire to do that. All that happened was I realized that my body does certain things intuitively and instinctually that sets me up to protect myself without having to think about it. This natural and instinctual defense mechanism is hardwired into our body and is referred to as Startle Flinch & Push away danger. Coach Blauer merely showed me how to recognize that and use it. What changed was my mindset. Your MINDSET is the key.
2- Pay Attention
Coach Blauer has told me and I have heard him tell so many seminars full of people that if you are defending yourself then you missed so many opportunities to avoid and not have a violent encounter or fight/ambush. He talks about the 3 D’s. Detect, Defuse/De-escalate, & Defend. So if we pay attention to our surroundings, have the correct body language and choice speech that says that you don’t want to fight we can avoid a large portion of altercations. It is better to know if something bad is going to happen 30 yards away than it is to find out when the bad guy is in your face. Here is a great question that I want you to ask yourself. If you were a “bad guy” where and when would you attack yourself? We all have routines and if we aren’t paying attention we can leave ourselves open for trouble.
3- Have a Plan
This is HUGE for me. It relates and applies to all aspects of life. It is all about mindset and allowing your mind to relax by creating a plan. Coach Blauer spends a good deal of time on Mindset and Fear Management. He couldn’t possibly spend enough time on it in my opinion. For me, if I have a plan laid out for my day I have so much more success following it and I don’t spend as much time trying to remember what I have to do. Now when I see my workout on the board I immediately make a plan. Sometimes that plan changes mid workout but making a plan takes me out of the F.E.A.R. Loop. In any and all scenarios in life you need to have a plan. Sometimes you can plan ahead but other times you get ambushed or caught off guard and need to make a decision on the spot. This is such a huge paradigm shift for me. In any situation when I make a plan I give myself control over the situation rather than the situation controlling me.
Coach Blauer has devoted his entire life to making people safer and to opening their eyes to the tools they already have in their possession. As human beings we all flinch. This is a gift from God. We owe it to ourselves and our loved ones to recognize it and use it. Coach Blauer has transformed his Be Your Own Bodyguard seminar and joined forces with Crossfit HQ to provide a life changing course called Crossfit Defense. I have been working with Coach Blauer since July 2011 and have been to two Personal Defense Readiness Instructor Courses along with countless BYOB seminars. I am now helping Coach Blauer bring this course to the Crossfit Community and could not be more thrilled and honored to bring such an amazing & life changing course to my peers. I have no background in fighting or martial arts and this has had one of the greatest impacts on my life next to finding Crossfit. I strongly urge you to attend a course. This weekend Coach Blauer and I will be at Valley Crossfit in Van Nuys, California. Follow the link for MORE INFO and Follow this link to REGISTER for the course. Please check the schedule for upcoming events in your area. This is real life. Pretending things aren’t going to happen to you won’t help. Take action and take your personal safety into your own hands.
I received a lot of great feedback after writing about my experience at the end of the Track Triplet at the 2012 Reebok Crossfit Games. It got me thinking, this can be dangerous at times, and I realized that very few people are writing about what is going on inside there head during the Crossfit Games. So I have decided to write a series of blogs about my experience at the Games. This was my 4th trip to the Games, my first was 2008, second 2009, third 2011, & fourth 2012. I have learned so much every single time I have come and I am still learning so much about the Sport of Crossfit but more importantly about myself and what drives me. Here is a look into my mind at the end of the Track Triplet and where these thoughts or overcoming these thoughts come from.
Little moments like this when you challenge yourself and break through mental barriers. This is what its about. When you have nothing left but you sprint to the end. (I preach this to the athletes at our Box, Crossfit Kinnick, day in and day out. So its nice for me to be able to practice what I preach. I can talk a lot sometimes but I prefer to lead mostly by example and let my actions speak for themselves.) Then you look back and realize maybe you had a little more in the tank than you thought. For me the Crossfit Games is 100% about battling not other athletes but your inner voice that tells you to stop or slow down or it hurts or you don’t really need to go that fast or the guys around you are better than you and so on. Overcoming those voices and overcoming our body wanting to get out of the pain cave is what the Crossfit Games are to me. As I am running the last lap all these thoughts and so many more are flooding my mind. Mixed in there are the quiet voices from the crowd around me…like Jake Mannion (Crossfit Kinnick Head Trainer & good friend) cheering me on, then Jonathan Kinnick (My younger brother, the guy who made me start Crossfitting, Co-Owner of Crossfit Kinnick & Co-Founder of Beyond the Whiteboard), then my coach Brian Mackenzie (Crossfit Endurance Founder, my friend, my coach & programmer this past year). I want to make these people proud and push harder but those voices can’t make me push any harder. As I come to the last turn before the final straight away it hits me. I reflect on the past year and the sacrifices that I made and that my family has had to make for me to train and prepare. Those countless hours spent at the gym when I could/should have been home. And that is what flipped the switch for me. My desire to fight for my family, for my 2 boys Carson almost 4 years old & Clayton almost 1 year old. And for my wife Giermaine. The women who tends to my every need so that I can keep going and focus on my training and making sure that I am doing everything in my power to be prepared and to be able to be in the position to Glorify my Lord through my actions. In front of God, my family, and the rest of the world. The placement isn’t the important part. Its me against myself. I am my toughest opponent. I am the one who makes me go slower or doubt myself in situations. Its about not letting the sacrifices of others take second behind my selfish desires of my body to not endure more pain. I refused to let my body win. At that moment there was no way that I was not going to catch the guy in front of me. I share this with you guys because we all face these choices daily.
As some of you may know, I have spent a lot of the past year or so working very closely with Tony Blauer, Founder of Blauer Tactical & the SPEAR system which stands for Spontaneous Protection Enabling Accelerated Response. I have been to countless Be Your Own Bodyguard Workshops both as a student and as an instructor. I took and passed the PDR Instructor Course in Encinitas, California at Seal Fit. After meeting Tony for the first time I was drawn to his system as it immediately resonated truth, much like my addiction to Crossfit. The physical aspects of the system have given me a mental edge in my daily life knowing that I now have some tools in my arsenal but more importantly the mental/psychological aspects have truly altered my entire life from my understanding of how our mind works and processes situations in daily life to improving my Crossfit life by understanding how my mind affects my performance before and during my WODs. We have to give our self permission to be our own bodyguard and protect our self because no one else will. How this is done is by first realizing the 3 P’s (PERSONAL, PASSIONATE, & PRESENT). What is important to you, what you need to get home to, what you need to protect yourself for. For me, my 3 P’s are my sons Carson & Clayton. They need me to be there for them. To raise them and teach them how to be a man. To protect them from people who want to do them harm and lead them astray. To provide for them. This is what drives me. What makes me fight back in those moments when I don’t think I can. When I am stuck in the FEAR Loop and cannot make a decision or snap out of the paralysis that has overcome my body and all the negative thoughts and reasons why I can’t fight back. In that moment as I was running my last lap I had to remember my 3 P’s and fight back because I was stuck in the FEAR LOOP unable to move any faster. This element of Tony’s philosophy has dramatically improved my performance in Crossfit and in life.
I hope that this insight will help and aid you in your life & Crossfit. Expect more insights into my experience at the 2012 Reebok Crossfit Games coming soon. If you have any questions I welcome them. Let me leave you with this one last piece or bit of advice that I have heard Tony tell classes and people so many times. Right now is the best you are. There is nothing you can do to improve your body. The only thing you can do is adjust or change your mindset.
Pictured above: Jonathan Kinnick (my younger bro & co-founder of Beyond the Whiteboard & Crossfit Kinnick) is practicing the “Slapping SPEAR” very effectively on my neck. If you have not been to Tony Blauer‘s “Be Your Own Bodyguard” Seminar, I would strongly recommend looking for one at a Crossfit gym near you and learning his method of using your body’s natural instincts to protect yourself. This picture is from PDR31 this past weekend at SEALFIT in Encinitas, Ca. This is the Personal Defense Readiness Instructors Course.
QUESTION:
Jeremy,
I have two questions: Is sealFit as cool as I think it is? and how does strongman help you? I run a donation-based garage gym, we just got a big donation from running a small online competition and I’m contemplating between two purchases: CFFB cert to increase my coaching skills or a yoke… any suggestions?
ANSWER:
Steven,
Thanks for the questions. I am not sure how cool you think SealFit is but I would guess that its much cooler than you think! Beautiful facility just off the beach. I didn’t get a chance to workout there but it was an awesome place!
The philosophy behind Strongman goes perfectly with Crossfit. Moving a heavy load using unconventional objects. Strongman is a lot about grip strength but also getting your body used to heavy loads on your body or in your hands. It has taught me to be able to cope and deal with suffering under heavy weight. The Yoke has been a huge staple in my training since before the Open, Regionals, and Games. Whether its Yoke walks or Zercher carries. If you have never done the Zercher Carries I suggest you experience that. I love them. The stones are amazing as well teaching you to move an odd object. We just recently got the Farmer Handles and those have been BRUTAL. Grip strength has been a weakness of mine but with all the work with the Stones and now with the Farmer Handles I think its making a big difference. You can also use the Farmer Handles for a Fat bar deadlift. I could go on and on about how its all helped me but I think that gives you the jist of it.
Now this last question is a tough one. I have never been to a CFFB cert but I am a huge fan of increasing your skill set. But the yoke is SO amazing. It all depends on your goals really. The yoke is only one piece of equipment where as the CFFB could help with ideas on programming and coaching. But if I had to choose I would pick the Yoke and learn to suffer under that thing!
Hope I answered your questions for you Steven. Thanks again.
Jeremy Kinnick 