EP47, Beyond The Barbell PRs

If you only celebrate the heavy lifts, you're missing about 90% of the actual progress happening in your body, your training, and your life.

This week's solo episode came straight off our Goal Review form. A member asked their coach, "Are there other ways to measure PRs besides the heavy lifts?" Best question Matt's seen on that form in a while. So in this episode, he digs into the five categories of personal records that get overlooked, and why one of them might be the most important thing you measure all year.

In this episode, we deep dive into:

• Skill PRs: Why your first strict pull-up, your first stitched-together double unders, and that first real kip count just as much as a 10-pound bump on your back squat. And why these don't go away the way a 1RM might if you take three weeks off.
• Conditioning PRs: Why a 90-second drop on your 800 meter run is a bigger PR than a 10-pound back squat bump in Matt's book. The engine work that shows up in the rest of your life faster than any other kind.
• Consistency PRs (Matt's favorite): Why the person who shows up three times a week for ten years will outlift, outmove, and outlive the person who goes seven days a week for two months and burns out. Consistency isn't a side effect of fitness, it IS the skill.
• Quality of Life PRs: Sleeping through the night without your back screaming at you. Hiking without paying for it the next day. Picking up your kid without that quiet "is this gonna hurt" thought. The PRs that don't show up in pounds or seconds, but in the moments your body just does what you asked.
• Mindset PRs: Showing up on the bad day. Asking for the scale even after you went RX last week. Walking into the class scared and staying anyway. These are the PRs that make every other PR possible.

Unstoppable Challenge: Before you walk into the gym this week, pick one PR from outside the barbell and pay attention to it. Just one. Track it. Notice it. Then tell your coach, or send Matt a message. He wants to hear them.

🎟️ Support the Show & Win! For as little as $3/month, you're entered into our monthly raffles AND you help keep the show going. Our next drawing is May 2nd, and we're giving away a full seat to the next Ultimate Bootcamp Challenge ($199 value). Link in the show notes.

Transcript

Skill PRs That Stick

Conditioning PRs Beyond The Gym

Consistency As The Real Win

Quality Of Life PRs

Mindset PRs On Hard Days

The 1% Better Framework

Support The Show And Challenge

Matt 0:16

Let's go. Welcome to Unstoppable by Design, where we talk all things fitness, mindset, and what it means to truly be unstoppable inside and outside of the gym. I'm Matt Terry, and today's topic came straight off our goal reviews. So for anyone new to the show, every 90 days our coaches sit down one-on-one with our members and ask them a handful of questions. One of those questions is, What do you want to learn more about? I was reading through the responses from this past month and one of them stopped me. A member asked their coach, Are there other ways to measure PRs besides the heavy lifts? Best question I've seen on that form in a while. So today we're gonna dig in. Here's the thing about personal records. We default to the barbell because it's loud, it's measurable to the pound heck. We have five pound plates, we've got two and a half pound plates, one and a quarter pound plates. I mean, the lifts look great on Instagram. Let's say we've got five plates aside, big lift, big celebration. Everybody in the gym claps. I love that. We should celebrate it, but that's not what I'm pushing back on. What I'm pushing back on is the idea that the barbell PR is the only one that counts. Because if that's your only metric, you're missing about 90% of the actual progress happening in your body, in your training, and in your life. So today I want to walk through the five categories of PRs that most people don't track. And I'd bet money that everyone listening has hit at least one of them in the last month. First category, skill PRs. These are the ones where the weight didn't change, but what you can do with your body did. This could be your first strict pull-up. First time you stitched together two double unders in a row. First time you got a couple total bars without dying. PR for sure. First time a kipping movement actually felt like a kip and not flailing by accident. These are huge. These take weeks, sometimes months, sometimes longer. It took me about a year, honestly, to start stringing together double unders, and that is countless reps of me whipping myself with a rope. God is frustrating. But the wild thing about skill PRs, they don't go away. Once you can do a pull-up, you can do a pull-up. You don't lose that the same way you might lose a one rep max if you take three weeks off. Skills compound. If you've been working on a movement for a while and you finally got it, that is a PR. Tell your coach, write it down, it absolutely counts. Our second category, conditioning PRs. This is where the barbell isn't the star, the clock is. This could be a faster mile, a better row split, quicker recovery between sets in a strength piece, or walking up the stairs at work without being winded. If everybody's been to Juggernaut Fitness, you know those stairs, and by golly, a lot of folks track these for a few weeks when they start and then they stop paying attention. Don't do that. If you came in six months ago and an 800-meter run took you about six minutes, and now it takes you four minutes and thirty, that's a massive PR, bigger than a 10-pound bump on your back squat, in my opinion. Because that is your engine getting better. That's your heart and your lungs working more efficiently than they did before. Conditioning PRs show up in the rest of your life faster than any other kind. Hiking with your kids, playing with your grandkids, getting through your workday with energy left over. That's the dividend. Our third category is consistency PRs. And this one might be my favorite. This is actually a goal for a lot of our members right now because life is just crazy. But this could be the longest streak of weeks in the gym, most months in a row hitting your check-ins, the first time you went four classes a week for a full month and it actually felt sustainable. Here's why this matters fitness is a long game. The person who shows up three times a week for 10 years will outlift, outmove, and outlive the person who goes seven days a week for two months and then burns out. Consistency is the actual skill. Everything else is downstream of it. So if you just hit your most consistent month in a year, that's PR. If you came back after a tough stretch and put together two weeks in a row, that's a PR. If you're someone who used to disappear in December, but you're still here, that's a PR. I'd argue it's the most important one that we measure. We have a lot of people who are just trying to come in two times a week until the next goal review, 90 days out. If you can do that, that's a PR. Fourth category, quality of life. This is the stuff that happens outside of the gym. The reason most of us are training in the first place, even if we don't say it out loud. This could be sleeping through the night without your back screaming at you, going on a hike that would have wrecked you a year ago and feeling fine the next day. Could be picking up your kid or your dog or a heavy box without the little hesitation in your head where you go, is this going to hurt me? Climbing stairs and not thinking about it, sitting on the floor and getting back up without using your hands, carrying all the groceries in one trip. That's a PR. These don't get measured in pounds or seconds. They get measured in moments where your body just does the thing you asked it to do. If you have a list of things in your life that used to be hard and aren't anymore, that's progress. That's the whole point of functional fitness. Category five, we've got mindset PRs, maybe the most overlooked. Showing up on a bad day, walking in when you didn't want to, or when you were tired, or when you'd already convinced yourself in the car that you'd skip and you came in anyway, asking a coach for a scale because today your body needed it, even though last week you went RX, that takes more strength than going RX ever did. Walking into a class scared because the workout looks hard or the movement is new, and staying anyways. Trying something you used to avoid, putting your hand up and asking a question in front of the class. These are the PRs that change the rest because the person who can keep showing up on the hard days is the person who eventually hits the loud barbell on Instagram, PR, five years from now. Mindset is the foundation. Nothing else gets built without it. So here's where I want to land on this. The 1% better philosophy that I've adopted my own training on lives in these five categories, not really in the heavy days. Heavy days are the spike. The 1% better lives in the skill you're slowly building, the conditioning that's quietly improving, the week that you almost skipped but didn't, the hike you crushed without thinking about it, or the class you walked into scared. A PR is happening to you almost every week if you're paying attention. The barbell's one slice of one of these categories. There are dozens of others. If you only count the barbell, you're gonna feel like you're failing most of the time, because heavy PRs are rare by design. That's what makes them special. But the other PRs, they're everywhere. You just have to know what you're looking at. One quick thing before I let you go. If this show has helped you, made you think, or got you a little fired up to train this week, I'd love your support. You can back the podcast for as little as $3 a month, and every supporter gets entered into our monthly raffle. This month's drawing is May 2nd, and the prize is a full seat to our next Ultimate Bootcamp Challenge, a real seat and a real event on me. Just for being part of what we're building here. The links in the show notes, three bucks a month, monthly raffle helps keep this thing going. Thank you for everyone who's already chipped in. So it's time for our unstoppable challenge. Here's what I'd love for you to do this week. Before you walk into the gym, wherever you train, pick one PR from outside the barbell and pay attention to it. Just one. Track it, notice it, and then tell your coach. Or tell me, send me a message. I want to hear them. And that's it. We'll see you next week. Until then, be well, be unstoppable.