Have you ever seen the movie “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”?
It’s a documentary that came out, I don’t know, 10 years ago. Maybe it was 15. After that “Toomer’s Corner” post a couple of weeks ago, I’m not doing any deep research for a while.
“Jiro” is simply about a man who owns a sushi bar tucked inside a subway station in Japan. That’s it. That’s the whole movie.
He doesn’t get bought out by a big fish conglomerate. He doesn’t get some incurable illness. There isn’t a covert commentary on the risks of over farming the seas.
It is literally about how this man makes sushi and operates his restaurant.
And I think it’s the greatest movie about training ever made.
Sure, you have the Rocky montages, Bruce Wayne learning staff fighting from Liam Neeson in “Batman Begins” and Baby dancing her face off with a dreamy Patrick Swayze, trying to learn the steps for the big finale in “Dirty Dancing”.
But what makes Jiro the best, in my not so humble opinion, is that it hits all the core principles that make for a bullet-proof training program.
The first (and maybe the most important) is consistency and reps. Jiro and his team have been perfecting the art of sushi making for decades. They are studying the best techniques. They are sourcing the best vendors.
He isn’t trying to figure out expansion. He’s not entertaining the thought that maybe he should add a hamburger to his menu in order to appeal to Western tourists. No, this guy wakes up every day and tries to make the best sushi possible.
There is nothing that will influence your results in the gym to a greater degree than consistency. In fact, everything else (program, environment, motivation, community) are really just factors put in place to help drive consistency.
Repetition cannot be short-cutted or defeated. Consistency is the key to success.
Throughout the film you see Jiro surrounding himself with like-minded people who share his obsession. His rice vendor follows generations of family tradition to grow the perfect grain of sushi rice. His sous chef makes thousands of attempts before cooking an egg correctly.
While you can argue that being obsessed about anything - and training in particular - can be harmful, surrounding yourself with others driven to success and wanting to solve problems will elevate your game in a way that could never be accomplished on your own.
You can go faster alone. You will go further together.
Lastly is the idea of simplicity.
You’ll notice that Jiro doesn’t fancy up his food. He lets the fish and the rice take center stage. Sure, he may add an embellishment or two but he isn’t drowning his sushi in sauces or putting together thirteen ingredient concoctions in which you’d be hard-pressed to find the star ingredient.
This is true of other regarded restaurants as well. Go to any top end steakhouse and they just put the different cuts of meat, sourced and aged and cooked to perfection, on the plate. No sauces. No sides. No garnish.
Meat. Plate. That’s it.
Training also thrives off simplicity. For sure there will always be new ideas driven through research and experimentation, but most great training programs are steeped in simplicity. Tried-and-true exercises and techniques done with precision and meticulousness.
It’s very easy to get caught in the marketing traps of 15 minute HIIT workouts done in a 93 degree room surrounded by mountain goats.
But while I’m as big a fan of goats as the next guy, those types of workouts are really marketing stunts designed to attract your attention while distracting you from the actual hard work necessary to reach your goals.
The more experience you have with training the simpler your training typically becomes. This is not by accident. Advanced trainees have been around long enough and experimented with enough to know that mastering and utilizing the basics is the key to get the most out of training.
More fish. Less sauce.
I’ll be the first to admit that watching a man slice fish and source seaweed isn’t as exciting as The Mighty Ducks coordinating the ‘flying V” or Willard learning to dance in “Footloose” or a team of Jamaicans figuring out the bobsled in “Cool Runnings”.
But watching an old man show up day-after-day in a Tokyo subway station in order to perfect his craft may be the best training montage of all time.
He may not have anything nearly as cool as Sylvester Stallone’s beard in Rocky IV but what he lacks in muscles and dancing ability and facial hair he makes up for in putting in the reps, surrounding himself with winners and pure, unadulterated simplicity.