Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable (Tim Grover Winning Series) - Softcover

Grover, Tim S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1476714207 ISBN 13: 9781476714202

Publisher: Scribner, 2014

Synopsis

For more than two decades, legendary trainer Tim Grover has taken the greats—Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Dwyane Wade, and hundreds of relentless competitors in sports, business, and every walk of life—and made them greater. Now, for the first time ever, he reveals what it takes to achieve total mental and physical dominance, showing you how to be relentless and achieve whatever you desire.

Direct, blunt, and brutally honest, Grover breaks down what it takes to be unstoppable: you keep going when everyone else is giving up, you thrive under pressure, you never let your emotions make you weak. In “The Relentless 13,” he details the essential traits shared by the most intense competitors and achievers in sports, business, and all walks of life. Relentless shows you how to trust your instincts and get in the Zone; how to control and adapt to any situation; how to find your opponent’s weakness and attack. Grover gives you the same advice he gives his world-class clients—“don’t think”—and shows you that anything is possible. Packed with previously untold stories and unparalleled insight into the psyches of the most successful and accomplished athletes of our time, Relentless shows you how even the best get better . . . and how you can too.

About this title

From the Author

Tim S. Grover is the preeminent authority on the science and art of achieving physical and mental dominance. Since 1989, he has been the CEO of Attack Athletics, appearing around the world as a keynote speaker and consultant to business leaders, athletes, and elite achievers in any area who want to know how the best can get better in anything they do, teaching the principles of relentless drive, result-driven performance, and mental toughness. A featured columnist at SI.com and Yahoo.com, he also appears regularly on ESPN and other media outlets. He is the author of the national bestseller Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable and creator of digital training platform “The Relentless System.” He is based in Chicago.
 

Shari Lesser Wenk, co-writer of the bestselling Start Something by Earl Woods and the Tiger Woods Foundation, has worked on sports books as a literary agent, editor, and ghost writer since 1983. She lives in Chicago.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Relentless #1. WHEN YOU’RE A CLEANER . . .

. . . You keep pushing yourself harder when everyone else has had enough.

When you work with highly successful, high-profile people, there’s a saying you live by or you won’t be in that world for long: those who talk don’t know, and those who know don’t talk.

I don’t talk.

My clients have enough exposure in their lives; they have to know that what we do in their private training belongs to them. If I don’t have their complete trust, nothing gets done.

For that reason, little has ever been revealed about how I train my players, what goes on in the gym and everywhere else we work, and how we get the results that make the best even better.

But if you’re willing to take this journey into the world of intense competition and achievement, I’m willing to talk about what I’ve learned from working with the greats for more than two decades, how I work with my athletes and how I’ve come to know what I know, what they’ve taught me and what I teach them.

I want you to be able to take all of this and use it as a framework for yourself to achieve whatever you desire. You don’t have to worry about training like a professional athlete—that’s a full-time job, and anyone who says you can “train like a pro” by reading a book is just trying to sell you a book. The book might be a good start, but let’s be honest: you train like a pro by committing to work at the highest level of intensity, every moment, in everything you do, constantly working on your body, your skills, your preparation, leaving no detail to chance. It’s not something you can do for thirty minutes in the morning, then head to work or school or wherever your other obligations take you.

But you can take an elite athlete’s mentality and use it to succeed at whatever you do. Absolutely everything in this book can be applied equally to athletics or business or school or anything else you do in the world.

Because no matter what you want for yourself, whether your ambitions take you to the gym or the office or anywhere else you want to be, your ultimate power source will come from the neck up, not the neck down.

In sports, we spend so much time on the physical component—training, working, pushing the human body to be faster and stronger and more resilient than most people ever thought possible. And then eventually, we get around to paying some peripheral attention to mental conditioning.

That’s completely backward. Excellence isn’t only about hitting the gym and working up a sweat; that’s the smallest part of what you have to do. Physical ability can only take you so far.

The fact is, you can’t train your body—or excel at anything—before you train your mind. You can’t commit to excellence until your mind is ready to take you there. Teach the mind to train the body.

Physical dominance can make you great. Mental dominance is what ultimately makes you unstoppable.

You will never have a more powerful training tool than this: get your mind strong, so your body can follow. The true measure of an individual is determined by what you can’t measure—the intangibles. Anyone can measure weight, height, physical strength, speed . . . but you can’t measure commitment, persistence, or the instinctive power of the muscle in your chest, your heart. That’s where your true works begins: understanding what you want to achieve and knowing what you’re willing to endure to get it.

I want guys who want to work as hard as I do. I’m going to be relentless in my own pursuit of excellence, and I expect you to do the same. It’s my name on the work we do together, and it’s your name on the jersey. That better mean as much to you as it does to me.

And if you have to ask whether you can handle it, you can’t.

When I train my athletes, it’s a dictatorship with three rules: show up, work hard, and listen. If you can do those three things, I can help you. If you can’t, we have no use for each other. I will bust my ass for you every way possible, but I expect you to do the same for yourself. I’m not going to work harder than you do for your benefit. Show me you want it, and I’ll give it to you.

But we have to do this my way. No disrespect to your team trainer or dad or massage therapist, but if they knew how to handle the details of your situation, or if you knew how to do it yourself, you wouldn’t be here. What we’re going to do together is maybe 20 percent physical, and the rest is mental. You already have the talent; my job is to show you what you can do with all that talent so you can bust out of that cage holding you back. You may not like what I tell you, but if you stay with it, you’ll see the rewards. Without a doubt, I’ve had plenty of players who aren’t worth $2 million getting paid ten times that because they’re in my program, they stick with it, and that means something to the teams. If you’re working with me, they know you’re serious.

If you’re a professional, that means you’re managing your career and we’re going to approach it that way. Your body is a business you have to take care of, or the business goes away, and if you forget that, believe me, I will remind you. I’m not here to draft on your fame or your success. I expect us both to commit to hard work and dedication, and hopefully the result will be a professional relationship we can both be proud of. I see so many trainers who want to be friends with the players, trying to keep them happy for fear they’ll lose a big-name client, going easy when the players say, “Enough.” Believe me when I say this: I don’t need to be your friend. You already have plenty of friends to tell you how great you are. What you and I do together is professional, not personal. If we end up being friends, that’s great, but it’s more important to me that we take care of your career and your future.

Some players like to be involved in planning what our work will entail; others are content to let me handle the details. Kobe wants to be part of figuring out what we have to do together; Michael was the same. Kobe will come to me and say something like, “Listen, when I jump off with my left leg I’m getting a pain in my knee.” So I’ll go back and retrace his steps: When did you start feeling it, what part of the game? Then I’ll go to the video and replay everything he did, looking for something that might have affected that knee. Or was it something we did together working out? And I’ll go through all the exercises to see if we might have aggravated something. I can say to him, “Remember in the Utah game, during this play, when this and that happened . . . ?” And he’ll know what I’m talking about, we’ll review the situation, until I can eventually say to him with some certainty, “I think your knee problem might have started there, and now we need to do this and that to fix it.” Total collaboration.

So I’m happy to listen to your input and ideas, but once you’re working with me, you agree to let me do what I do. No options. Most people have too many options, and they rarely choose the tougher one. Do you want to work out for ninety minutes or thirty minutes? Most people take the thirty minutes. Here, try this, but if it’s too hard, we can make it easier. And they automatically make it easier. So I’m not giving you options. Nothing for you to think about. Let me do all the thinking for both of us. I’m making your life easy by doing all the homework and giving you the answers to the test. Just show up, work hard, and listen. That’s your part of the deal. Do the work.

Do. The. Work. Every day, you have to do something you don’t want to do. Every day. Challenge yourself to be uncomfortable, push past the apathy and laziness and fear. Otherwise, the next day you’re going to have two things you don’t want to do, then three and four and five, and pretty soon, you can’t even get back to the first thing. And then all you can do is beat yourself up for the mess you’ve created, and now you’ve got a mental barrier to go along with the physical barriers.

For my guys, I’m the thing they don’t want to do. For you, maybe it’s something at the office or at home or at the gym. Either way, you have to do those things or you can’t improve, you can’t be the best, and you sure as hell can’t call yourself relentless.

Cleaners do the hardest things first, just to show there’s no task too big. They might not be happy about it, they don’t ever love it, but they’re always thinking about the destination, not the bumpy road that takes them there. They do whatever they have to because they know it’s necessary, and you usually don’t have to tell them twice. More likely, while everyone else is slumped over in complete exhaustion, they’ll want to do it all again, and then they’ll say the second time was the best.

Of course, most highly successful people aren’t accustomed to being told what to do. Yes, I know the team staff doesn’t make you do this, that’s the problem; they can’t throw your ass out when you don’t show up or you refuse to do the work. I can. The hot tubs, the cold tubs, the therapies, the late nights . . . once we’re working together, it’s not up to you. Cooperation is mandatory. If you big-time someone on my staff and refuse to get in that cold tub, he’ll tell me so I can tell you, “Get in the fucking tub.” And unless something dramatic has happened to you in the last twenty-four hours that I don’t know about and you can change my mind, you’re going to get in the tub.

Yes, I know it’s uncomfortable. I’m not telling you to love it. I’m telling you to crave the result so intensely that the work is irrelevant. If it makes you feel better, I don’t make things comfortable for myself either. I could take these great athletes, maintain their level of fitness, keep them healthy, and everyone would be content. But the challenge for me is taking someone great and making him even better. Michael, Kobe, Dwyane, my Hall of Famers—Hakeem Olajuwon, Charles Barkley, Scottie Pippen—and so many others . . . they come to me because they’re not satisfied staying where they are, they’re committed to enduring the pain and discomfort of improving on near-perfection, and they know I’ll push them until they exceed their goals. If you start with someone average, someone with limited expectations, everything is an improvement. Anyone can do that job. But when you work with someone who’s already the best in his field, the opportunity for improvement is a lot less obvious. I’m looking for every detail, every slight variable, to see what we can work on, anything to get the slightest edge. In the early days, I trained only Michael; later we added some Bulls teammates. Michael used to say, “I don’t pay you to train me, I pay you not to train anyone else.” He didn’t want anyone else to get that edge.

And while that sounds flattering, here’s the truth: no trainer or coach or expert can make you good or great or unstoppable if you’re not going to do the work, if you’re waiting for someone to make it happen for you. It’s on you. And that’s why I’m telling you all of this, not because I want you to know what I do for my guys, but because I want you to know what you have to do for yourself.

Bottom line if you want success of any kind: you have to be comfortable being uncomfortable. Every time you think you can’t, you have to do it anyway. That last mile, the last set, the last five minutes on the clock. You have to play the last game of the season with the same intensity as you played the first. When your body is screaming and depleted and telling you, “No way, asshole,” you work harder and tell yourself, “Do it. Now.”

You control your body, it does not control you. You shut out the fear and emotion and physical stress and you do the thing you dread. You don’t go through the motions and watch the clock until it’s over. You invest in what you started, pushing yourself again and again beyond where you’ve already been.

This is not a Hollywood movie or a shoe commercial with a thumping sound track and special effects. No drama. No fantasy endings. If you want a feel-good story about a trainer bringing a guy from ruin to riches with a warm, fuzzy ending, go watch a Rocky movie. This is real life. If you pass out in the middle of one of my workouts, I’m not standing over you to coax you back onto your feet with compassion and support. I’m going to make sure you’re breathing, and then I’m leaving you right there. When you finally come around and you’ve cleaned up your puke, come find me and we can get back to work.

We always get back to work.

I’m always thinking up new ways to see how I can push someone, shock the body and rock the mental stamina. If you do what you always do, over and over, you’re always going to get the same result. My goal is to make it so challenging in the gym that everything that happens outside the gym seems easy. The work is about testing yourself and preparing all your options, so when you’re performing, there’s nothing to think about. Do the work before you need it, so you know what you’re capable of doing when everyone else hits that panic button and looks at you. Anything you do with me will be so much harder than you’ll ever experience in a game situation, you won’t have to think about what’s happening. You’ll just know, and your body will follow.

You tell me your limit, and I’ll show you how much more you can do. The question is, what is that limit? When Kobe suffered a broken nose and a concussion in the All-Star Game, he was insistent on playing in the Lakers’ next game. Why? He had to know how his body would respond to the trauma, and what he was capable of doing under those circumstances. Few people know what they’re truly able to accomplish, and even fewer want to find out.

Can I push you beyond your limit and not break you? How far can you go, and are you willing to go there? You have to be with me 100 percent, not thinking about what you’re doing tonight or the bills you have to pay. Complete focus for complete results.

When I get focused with a client, I’m watching everything: facial expressions, heart rate, how he’s sweating, which leg is shaking, everything down to the smallest detail. Then I take all that information, process everything, and decide: Am I willing to push this a little bit further? Because if I do, his progress is going to double in half the time. But he has to be willing to deal with what I’m asking of him.

A lot of my work has involved bringing athletes back from serious injuries and surgeries, and I always tell a player that when I return him to the game, he won’t be the same as he was, he’ll be better. He has to be better. Because if he comes back just as he was when he got hurt, he’s probably going to get hurt again. So I make him do more than he’s ever done and push him harder than he’s ever worked, so he can be stronger and more powerful than he was before.

But that fear component is a powerful obstacle, and often when we first get started, these guys are just scared to move. For the first time in their lives, they can’t rely on their physical abilities or control their own motion, and now they’re afraid of their own bodies. It’s one of the biggest obstacles to recovery; they no longer want to move. And when you’re an athlete who doesn’t want to move, you lose your hunger and focus, especially when there’s a guaranteed contract with your name on it. Remember when you were a kid and an injury might have meant losing your spot on the team, so you fought like hell to come back to action? You’d throw some dirt on it and get back in the game. Not the case at...

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1476714207
• ISBN 13: 9781476714202
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 272