“Small disciplines repeated with consistency every day lead to great achievements gained slowly over time.” -John Maxwell

Consistency is key to any good training plan.

People who succeed aren’t usually doing anything super complicated or fancy. For the most part, they’re just mastering the fundamentals: doing the small, simple things really well. They do them over, and over, and over again until their results begin to compound.

So whether you’re starting a new training program or tweaking your current routine, it’s usually best to:

1.) Start Small

Making a lifestyle change is challenging for both beginners and veterans. So choosing one, simple step at first will make it easier to do it every day and build a new habit.

Beginners to OCR will want to start working on their running and grip strength. A couple of small action steps might be:

-jog (or walk) 10 minutes every day

-dead hang for a total of 60 seconds each day

If you are more advanced and you’re trying to improve:

-make only one or two tweaks to your training plan at a time

-if you aren’t already, start training outside as much as possible; as the weather gradually gets cooler, you’ll get used to it and race day won’t feel like such a shock.

Once you’ve been consistent with your new habit and gained some momentum, the next step is to:

2.) Slowly Increase Difficulty

Once you’re consistent with walking or jogging every day, start running longer distances.

A good rule of thumb for increasing your weekly running mileage is to add about 10% each week.

If you’re more concerned about risking injury, maybe you want to be closer to 5%. If you’re more experienced you might be able to progress a bit faster.

And don’t forget about that upper body and grip strength! If you started with dead hangs, the next step is to work up to active hangs, then pull-ups and bent arm hangs with your chin over the bar.

If you can already do several pull-ups, then it may be time to start transitioning that upper body strength into race-specific skill. Getting some grips to train on will go a long way toward getting you ready for race day.

And then finally…

3.) Stick With It!

Don’t keep changing from one thing to another. Progress takes time. If you just watch the pot, it feels like the water will never boil.

Instead of letting yourself get frustrated because you’re not where you want to be yet, focus on becoming the type of person who shows up every day, does the right thing, and puts in the work.

Results can be finicky, they go up and down. Sometimes you progress quickly, sometimes it feels like you’re going backwards. But you can always choose to be consistent. You can find satisfaction in knowing that you’re doing what you’re supposed to do. You can build confidence as you look in the mirror and see that you are becoming a man or a woman of character and integrity who does the hard things when no one is looking, when there’s no short-term reward for it. And once that happens, those up-and-down results will inevitably trend in the right direction!

Written by Mark Robinson

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