Strength Within: What is it?

External strength is what we are familiar with. Building strength through increasing load or volume, honing in our techniques, improving our skill, being more efficient, etc. This is what we do day in and day out at the gym. 

Strength within, or inner strength, is something we may be aware of but not know much about. There are different degrees of inner strength. The highest degree is often referred to as being “in the zone” or “flow”. When everything seems to fade away except for the moment and activity at hand. Here, the athlete becomes completely immerse; the sense of self dissolves, time dissolves. In this state, peak performance is reached. When this experience occurs, athletes usually don't have to think about what they are doing at the moment but rather, it just seems to happen on its own. It happens in a way so spectacular that it surprises the athlete him or herself.

Bill Russell, a former NBA Boston Celtics player, is a 5 time NBA MVP, a 12 time All-Star, and an Olympic gold medalist. In his memoir Second Wind: The Memoirs of an Opinionated Man, he describes his experience, “Every so often a Celtics game would heat up so that it became more than a physical or even mental game, and would be magical. When it happened, I could feel my play rise to a new level...At that special level, all sorts of odd things happened: The game would be in the white heat of competition, and yet somehow I wouldn’t feel competitive, which is a miracle in itself. I’d be putting out the maximum effort, straining, coughing up parts of my lungs as we ran, and yet I never felt the pain. The game would move so quickly that every fake, cut, and pass would be surprising, and yet nothing could surprise me. It was almost as if we were playing in slow motion. During those spells, I could almost sense how the next play would develop and where the next shot would be taken....There have been many times in my career when I felt moved or joyful, but these were the moments when I had chills pulsing up and down my spine...On the five or ten occasions when the game ended at that special level, I literally did not care who had won. If we lost, I’d still be as free and high as a sky hawk.”

This not only occurs for athletes, but also artists, performers, in academics, work life, and spirituality. For example, a dancer who gets lost in the dance where every move begins to flow naturally and gracefully. Or a writer who suddenly becomes immerse in the story and sees and feels everything so vividly that writing it becomes effortless.

We may have experienced it to a certain degree ourselves and may not have realized. Maybe a competition where we were able to hit a new, all time personal record. In the heat of the moment, we reached an altered state of mind, tapped into our strength within, and did something we didn’t think we could. For most of us, we probably have no idea how it happened. Or even so, may have not been able to duplicate it since.

The strength within us is far greater than we know. When external strength is coupled with inner strength, this is where extraordinary feats happen. 

This “zone” or “flow” state is the optimum experience an athlete can have. It requires a certain level of mastery of the physical activity as well as a certain inner state. In the Strength Within class, we begin to explore this at the fundamental level. 

More blog posts to come. Stay tuned...