Long Island only has one sports team that we can truly call our own.
Sure, when I was a little, little kid, Dr J. and the New York Nets called the Nassau Colosseum their home court but by the time I turned 4 the ABA merged with the NBA and the Nets moved to New Jersey.
So we were left with the Islanders.
If you’ve followed hockey for the past 40 years you would think this was pretty bleak news. I mean the Islanders have had no more success than our other “cannot win a championship teams” - namely the Knicks, Jets or Mets - since Reagan was in office.
But in the early 80s the Islanders were not only great, they were a dynasty. Winning four Stanley Cup Championships in a row and adopting Queen’s “We Are The Champions” (a new song at the time, if you can believe it) as their surprisingly appropriate anthem.
Personally I didn’t care much for hockey. The puck moves fast, the rinks are cold and I have no idea how to ice skate.
My older brother, however, was a big fan of the Isles.
The middle of their championship run correlated with his high school years. So during the playoffs he would invite his friends over to gather around the television, a small Stanley Cup replica ceremoniously sitting on top for good luck, to watch these games.
And some of these friends were girls. They’d show up to our house with snacks, smelling like hair spray and wearing oversized jerseys of their favorite players over leggings.
This made an impression on my 12 year old self.
A big impression.
To the point where if I still see someone casually wearing a sports jersey I feel some sort of way about it.
My wife has the same thing with J. Crew catalogues. Growing up in suburban Connecticut and going to prep school, J. Crew was “the look” the boys wore while she developed her first crushes. And, if she had her way, I’d probably spend my days wearing slightly pleated khakis and a cardigan over a crisp white shirt.
And this all just goes to prove a simple point: early impressions tend to be a big deal.
You don’t choose what wires itself in early, you just deal with it later.
The same can be said for training.
Your introduction to exercise will have a major impact on your training career for the rest of your life in two major ways.
First, your body just learns what you teach it. Performing exercises with good technique as early as possible sets you up to get the most out of those exercises. It also mitigates the risk of injury when volume and intensity inevitably increase.
As humans, we are adaptation machines. And while that is what allows you to see positive changes from training, it is the same mechanism that will ingrain bad movement patterns.
To put that simply, your body learns to do bad reps from every bad rep you do. So every bad rep is something you will have to unlearn down the line. Twenty years of bad reps will ultimately require a lot of unlearning.
Second, you learn what training is supposed to feel like. Understanding the push and pull of training intensities, volume, what sessions should feel and look like put you on the path to getting the most efficient and effective hours in the gym.
As we discussed recently, people tend to fall on extreme sides of the spectrum. They either sleepwalk through every workout or they end their life every time they step on the training floor.
Gaining an understanding of how to modulate training, how to perform in the difficult moments and how to follow programs as prescribed will lead to the best outcomes. So you are going to want to start that as soon as possible.
“But Daaaaaan. I’ve already been training for 15 years and some of us didn’t have the luxury of working with a good trainer or getting good advice. So what am I supposed to doooooooo???”
Well, they say the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is today.
As I’ve already mentioned, your body is amazingly adaptable. And just because you’ve taught it some bad habits it doesn’t mean those bad habits can’t be unlearned.
The key to doing this is having the humility to take a step (or three steps) back and turn your focus to quality, technique and range of motion and away from performance and intensity.
Don’t worry! You will still get plenty of training stimulus. You will still make strides towards looking good in your tank top and bikini in a few months.
But you’ll be doing so much more. You’ll learn what training is truly all about. You’ll begin to ingrain the patterns that should have been the foundation of your training when you started all those years ago.
When you were mobile and pliable and easily fell in love with older girls in hockey jerseys.
Some early impressions you never shake. The good news is, your training doesn’t have to be one of them.