The Straw that Broke the Camel’s Back

Here, it is Monday afternoon and I am still on my high from Saturday Morning Boot Camp. On my way home from the awesome session, I was thinking to myself that after the two and a half month’s since launching the program, “the camel’s back has finally broken.”

It was about three weeks ago that I was seriously considering changing the boot camp to a later time than our usual 8:45 a.m schedule since there weren’t enough people showing up to my satisfaction, which I thought had to do with it being too early for people to attend the camp. Whether that assumption was correct, I had to think scientifically and keep pluging away by developing a stronger marketing strategy, encourage word-of-mouth from the campers and keep the overall program consisitent. Giving up on the project altogether was definately out of the question. And what do you know? Wah-lah, Saturday Morning Boot Camp is like a friggin virus! . Campers are talking about their experience when attending to their friends, who in turn come to the following camp, the phone is blowing up and I am meeting new and totally energetic people every week!

This same experience and the following concept can be applied to your personal fitness, nutritional and lifestyle goals when trying to achieve them.

There is an idiom or expression often used in figuritive dialogue which has become cliche-ish, almost to the point where one can hear the phrase without really registering it in their brain or thinking about what it actually means. “Thats the straw that broke the camel’s back” easily flys off of someone’s lips like bread crumbs when referring to the THING that made someone abruptly “snap” mentally or change a path one was previously traveling.

Do not worry, I know this is going somewhere deep but bear with me; I’m going to bring everything back together into perspective as it relates to your health and fitness. Let me finish with the introduction and point first. As a scientist, with my specific field in biology (dialetic materialist philosophy also hammers this in.), the fundamental thing that helps us to understand how occurences manifest themselves is by understanding quantity and quality. Quantity is simply “how much of something” and quality is “its physical features.” For example, if you boil water there is a quantity represented by “temperature” in how much heat is necessary to transform the pot of water (on earth) to a vapor (boiling point). If you sit at the stove with it on “off” and try to boil water, you are wasting your time, in as much as you are if the temperature is as high as 99.9 degrees. But, once you keep adding more heat to the stove, the pure water is going to abruptly (at 100 degrees) “BOOM” and boil, making a qualitative change from liquid to vapor thus, enabling you to persue with your cooking. Do you feel me ? This process applies to ANYTHING in life and I guarantee the cloth’s on my back this law is impossible to disprove in a natural setting (this is the basic reason why religion and science has not yet found a common-ground. but that’s another topic you may not ever hear me go there with you ). In other words, there is a reason for everything that happens in natural life. Or, for every phenomenon, there is an explanation as to how the situation happened.

Now, as it relates to you, this blog and our overall fitness, Saturday’s experience for me reiterated that our goals or bodies are transformed based on the amount of “straws” we place on our back.

The straw that broke the camel's back

Going back to the “camel’s back” analogy; when you hear this term, the straws representing the quantity
of the work we place on ourselves will eventually create a change in quality. This is how we reach our goals.

At times, it may not seem as though you are not dropping the pounds or building muscle fast enough, even though you may be “doing everything right.” You may be on an annoying plateau no matter what you do. But, keep it up. Continue to add the “straws” to your workout. Right before your eyes, you will see the work you did payoff qualitatively.

Here’s another idiom – If each of your workouts were drops of water in a glass, then eventually there will be that one last drop that makes the glass overflow.

Make it happen!

Tags: Damon Reio fitness, fat loss st. petersburg, fat loss stpete, fitness stpete, st. petersburg boot camps, st. petersburg personal trainer, stpete fitness