There is a book from which I mashed up this title. It’s called Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway. You should check it out… so far its a great read. But I wanted to put my own lil spin on this whole fear business.

First of all, what the fuck is fear? And why do we feel it?

To me, fear is the body’s hard-wired mechanism designed to keep you ALIVE. That’s it, just alive. Our ancestors that looked over a cliff, didn’t feel any fear and jumped… well they guess what”? They aren’t actually party of our ancestry are they? They’re dead. It’s those people who had a healthy fear about real situations are the ones that lived long enough to procreate and pass on this crazy ass emotion we all feel today. We should rightfully thank them for that.

In today’s world though, more than half of the fears we feel just aren’t useful to our survival. I mean, we used to feel fear of unknown places (such as in the forest)… and this had inherit value back in the day because you didn’t know what crazy animal would come out of the bushes trying to chomp your face in. Nom nom nom.

But if you were to visit a new city today… I’m guessing there is a very high chance that you’ll do just fine. And yet, you still feel fear because the streets and prime locations are unknown to you. So what you need to do is feel the fear, accept that shit and go forward with what you need to do. We can’t eliminate fear. It’s not a computer program we can uninstall with a click of a button… but what we CAN do is learn how to control it and not let it get in our way.

And this concept applies to you in the gym as well.

Let me smack you with an example: Just a few days ago I figured it was time to up the weight on my bench for low reps. Pound-for-pound, my goal is to lift the max amount of weight and this is why I keep myself between 135-140 lbs. Being at 135lbs right now (summer time baby) a bench press of 205lbs works out to just over 1.5x body weight. Not bad… half way there to my goal of 3x (405lbs). Whatever, I’ll take it.

Needless to say, once the bar was loaded and I was under it… I could feel my heart beat faster. My hands started to get slightly sweaty and a shot of adrenaline rushed through my body. I knew this was fear… I could feel it. But that rush, that excitement that fear of the unknown is exactly why I keep coming back to the iron.

I was like “I live for this shit!” took a deep breath in and banged out a grand total of 2 reps. Next set, 3 reps and then back to 2 and finally ended off with 1.

I’m never gona get rid of fear. It’s there when I lift heavy. It’s there when I’m throwing double twisting somersaults and it’s there when I’m at the top of a massive cliff, about to jump into the lake. But guess what? I shut up, strap up and go for it anyway.

So should you.

- FitJerk

Originally Written By FitJerk for www.fitjerk.com – © 2010 All Rights Reserved – Content not to be republished without author consent.