Cultivating the Workout Mindset | How Kevin Levrone Gets in the Zone
Cultivating the Workout Mindset
How Kevin Levrone Gets in the Zone
Training isn't simply an act of physics, i.e. the specific weights in your hands, the arcs of curve and alignment, the calculus of reps and sets that conform to something correct and sacrosanct. A pro workout is so much more than paint by numbers.
Sure, you need compulsive neurosis, you need knowledge, you need details and you need physics. But to have a pro-workout, you need something else. A million other things, to be exact. I can't put all of them into words, but I'll try to give you a sense of what I mean with a few tips that stick out in my mind, a few things about a Maryland Muscle Machine Full-Blown Workout that you won't find in a book, from your local certified trainer or just your average how-to article. Whether they matter is debatable. Whether they mattered to me is not. Whether they matter to you is something you'll discover on your own.
BACK TO 2000
The year is 2000. Four months out from the Mr. Olympia stage where I would soon say, “This one’s for you, baby,” in what will go down, in my mind anyway, as my best uncrowned victory. Four months out I am not human when I set foot in a gym, any gym; a beast forged in Hell, and the iron shudders at my very presence. I had an 8-foot-tall imaginary force field that nobody could survive walking into. However, the force field wasn't to keep people out, it was to keep energy in, bundled and swirling around my body, to be channeled into every lift. If somebody were to breech this zone, my energy, MY power, would collapse and gush outward in great geysers, and I would no longer possess the power cosmic.
My training partner is there, but he's been schooled in the art of not being there, not breeching my zone. He's not permitted to look into my eyes. Eye contact is toxic, and pulls me out of the zone. As Friedrich Nietzsche says, “And if you gaze for long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” I'm doing what I can to make my abyss stay put, rather than disburse into channels of distraction.
But when you're not looking, my eyes burrow into the back of your skull. I am mentally sucking and absorbing your energy and life force from your being, devouring it to be refocused into MY lifts. Energy is finite and there's never enough to go around. If you're in my gym, be prepared to have your energy sucked out and recycled for my purposes.
The music in the room is my domain. I choose the songs, the playlist, the volume. I move to no man's playlist. Would a king march to just any coronation? Would a soldier die for just any anthem? Would a lion tear out the throat of his prey while supplanting his primal roar with the quack of a duck? If I'm in a shared gym and music is beyond my control, headphones may as well be oxygen, if the battle is for blood...which it was in 2000.
FACING THE WORKOUT
The antiseptic reek of isopropyl rubbing-alcohol permeates each lift. Applying this stuff to my face is a ritual, not a science. As a child, I watched my father apply it to his face before bedtime prayers. The smell reaches deep into the recesses of my being to bring primal confidence, power, safety. Though my father is long gone, there is something defiant, eternal, invincible, embedded in this caustic aroma, and this baptism allows me to do things to my muscle fibers unfit for sane discussion.
A dusty aura of chalk follows me through battle. It's every bit an act of war paint as it is an attempt at adhesive. The fight or flight response is an old friend, and I'm not about to take flight. We all feel like we're going into battle when we hit the gym, but those are just words. For me it was real. A kind of madness follows a champion.
You will never be a champion until you go too far and then go farther. You will never be champion until you are a monster, a poet, a soldier, a ghost. You will never live until you learn to die. And that's the goal in the end: to live, to really live, and to love, and to love yourself, and to have earned it.
Shout out to Scott Rayner: this one is for you, baby!