It is the holiday season, we just had Christmas and New Year’s Eve is tomorrow.  That means a lot of people are setting some goals for the next year.  I set a few goals for 2021 myself.  There were a lot of goals I almost set.

I almost set the goal to become really good at chess.  With the goal of even playing tournaments and trying to get a “Master” rating and title.

Writing and publishing a blogpost every single day of the year sounded like a productive and fun thing.

Regaining my computer coding ability that I have lost always sounds good.

I tossed out all these ideas.  There was too much weight to these goals.  I can do things with some weigh to them.  Right now, these are too heavy for me.

My brain for whatever reason likes “do something every day for a whole year” type of goals.  To pull off the above goals, I would have to work almost daily at any of them to pull it off.  Doing something daily takes a lot of effort and work, it also means you rearrange life to get it done.  Daily requires a level of obsession I’m just not ready for at the moment.

I almost slipped into setting goals like this anyways.  I didn’t think about the weight of what those goals really meant.  I started off 2020 writing and publishing blogposts for something like the first 60 days of the year.  It started to become the only thing on my mind and an obsession.  This habit was starting to rule my life.  I finally broke my streak, and it was like a weight was lifted.

As I get a little smarter, I try to think about the weight of things.  I have set some weighty goals for 2021.  If I pull them off there should be some good benefits.  Weighty goals for things like hobbies though, I’m not going down that path again.

Every week I spend a lot of time reading and looking for new ways to get stronger, healthier and more awesome.  Here are some of the best things I have found this week.

Strength and Conditioning

A nice article on fixing weak points in the squat with minimal equipment.  https://www.t-nation.com/training/the-squat-one-barbell-no-weak-points

This hack was so simple I had to include it in the newsletter.  https://dieselsc.com/upgrade-your-back-training/

I found this to be a good straightforward article on improving the bar path in the bench press.  This is something a lot of people have trouble doing right, and it’s easy to fix in a lot of cases.  https://www.strongfirst.com/bench-press-more-by-optimizing-your-bar-path/