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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 6675954" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Great post here and great series of posts.  I made almost the exact same point on a thread similar to this (about martial healing) a few years back.Ditto great post.So yesterday a good friend of mine (who I've barely seen in the last few years for various reasons) decided that he would join me at the park from some cross fitness.  He doesn't regularly perform any physical regime to keep his fitness level up, but he is an avid outdoorsman and very mentally tough by nature.Just for the hell of it I decided that I wouldn't let up on him.  I'd put him through something hard (for science!).  He had a rough understanding of the clean and jerk (C&J) technique (from way back when) but I refined it for him quickly.  We then set about warming up by (a) doing a series of weighted push-ups (putting plates on your back) and (b) 3 sets of C&J working toward our max.  Hysterically and predictably, he tried (successfully) the exact same weight as me (more than a little) throughout.  It was a frigging struggle for him, but he pulled off the push ups with the same weight on his back as I and pretty close to the same max C&J.  No WAY should he have been able to do that basically cold.Then I put him through an extremely difficult gauntlet aimed at keeping your heart rate amped just below the red line for 3 minutes straight > short rest > repeat * 4.[sblock]3 minutes:10 ground to overheads with 45 lb plate 10 overhead lunges with 25 lb plateshort rest3 minutesalternate 1 burpee with 1 box jump over and over and over and over...short restRepeat[/sblock]He didn't tap out.  Stayed with me the whole way.  UTTERLY RIDICULOUS.  He should have fallen over dead.He didn't.  You know why?  Because he didn't want me to be disappointed in him.  And he didn't want to be disappointed in himself for falling short of what he expected I expected of him (which he expects of himself!).  He believed that if I put him through that, then I must expect that of him...and come hell or high water he was going to do that.  And that fed back into his own expectations of himself.  In short, martial inspiration/HP restoration.  I was his Warlord last evening.This is an utterly common phenomenon in martial endeavors.  Belief, never say die, and the utter unwillingness to quit despite your body being long since spent is contagious like a disease.  You see it in basketball with absurd team shooting streaks/runs, you see it in utterly improbably come-from-behind team rallies, and you see it when the stakes are much higher (eg a loved one or a vulnerable innocent is in peril).  People do hard stuff.  Inexplicably.  Unbelievably hard stuff.  Stuff that they can't even understand how they're doing it and, upon reflection, how they did it.Mundane, martial inspiration is a thing.  A big, big, big thing.</blockquote>

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