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If each part of your body grew IN PROPORTION to the area of the brain concerned with its sensory perception, you’d have hands like party platters and a mouth like the infamous Sarlacc from Star Wars (another reference, I know…)

Think about how when we develop as toddlers, we pick stuff up and put it in our mouth. It now makes perfect sense to me, after hearing about this “homunculus” concept yesterday at a kettlebell workshop taught by Franz Snideman, of La Jolla, CA. The point Franz was making was another “aha” moment (so frequent in the RKC community whenever a movement makes suddenly sense to you, or you get how to do it and what seemed like an insurmountable mountain is now barely a curb) about how if we do not develop our grip, we may never tap into our actual strength.

Things have seemed to line up for me strangely lately, but all for a reason. I was greasing the groove on my deadlifts and went for another sub-maximal PR (i.e. I lift heavier than I ever did prior, with some fuel left in the tank). I wasn’t happy though, because I wasn’t tired and knew I could eek out an extra 10lb, but my grip was faltering and I had to resort to straps. I almopst considered buying special hooks I saw at Sports Chalet, but what’s the fun in that? That would be like surfing with a propeller!

There are a few grip guys out there, and they bend nails and tear phonebooks. I always thought it was something that wasn’t for me. I’m sending an application now, I want to bend, rip, tear, hold stuff in weird ways because all that was stopping me from lifting heavier was my grip!

We place sooo much emphasis on our physical appearance, but neglect how we get there. The answer is amazingly obvious: we pick the weights with our hands, and how we look is based on how we hold the stuff that’s in our hands and how we put stuff (with our hands) in our disproportionally sensorily small mouth.

Check out the link below to see what we’d look like if we actually matched in size our hands and mouth to the amount of sensory perception they respectively pick up.

http://www.juergenhaenggi.ch/index.php?mcid=1&scid=141

In George Lucas’s epic saga “Star Wars”, and more particularly in Episode IV, “The Empire Strikes Back”, much emphasis on training the mind is made, a Yoda would say.

Training begins in the mind. When you wake up, and make your breakfast choice. When you leave the house with your work briefcase and your gym bag. When you step into the gym.

What about AT the gym?

You brought your A-game, your discipline, you’ve made the time and now time for the effort.

Remember what Yoda said when Luke said he’d “try”? Don’t try, do. Or Don’t. But don’t try.

Trying is leaving things to chance. Trying is working without a plan. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail! A carefully crafted training program, along with a dietary plan WILL yield results. Don’t go about training haphazardly doing this and that for a few weeks and then deciding it doesn’t work.

Assess your weaknesses and address them first. Don’t paint a dirty car, as I once heard.

Then, persist.

You can’t possibly see results at “reality TV show speed” where losing a few pounds is considered failure. When contestants’ job is to workout all day supervised by a team of experts, it’s easy. But you have a job and responsibilities.

So, stop trying and start doing!

Sensory Homunculus