Five Star Strong looks at the broader spectrum of the fitness and physical culture. A gym or road race can bring together members who may have nothing in common except for their love of achieving physical self-actualization. For those people, the goal is simple but the method on how to get there is a long journey that one must be ready to take on with full force.

Principle #1: Confidence

In order to go full force, a person needs confidence. Confidence isn’t made and it certainly can’t be bought. Confidence is an internal issue that a person must master within himself if he wants to achieve greatness. Look at professional athletes like Kobe Bryant or Floyd Mayweather. Both have caught flack from society because of their often perceived smug attitude and arrogance. However, arrogance can be amplified confidence, and both men ooze it. They both dominate their respective sports, and whether the fans like it or not, they are the real deal.

Confidence, or lack thereof, can make or break a person. Someone may have all the physical tools to be great at his sport, but if he is unsure about himself, he will get nowhere. How many times have you seen 300-lb kids who could be Division 1 linemen just throw it all away because they don’t believe in themselves or they don’t think they’re “good enough?”

Confidence can be hindered by negative thoughts. Being around negative people and focusing on negative things in your life won’t get you anywhere. Negative people are envious of successful people and you must do everything in your power to remove all contact with people like this. They will drag you down and your chances of meeting your goals will diminish.

Always carry yourself with confidence because you never know who you may come across in your life. That firm, sincere handshake at a lunch meeting may be the icing on the cake to getting you a job promotion. Try to think of all the positives in your life and be thankful for them. Learn to incorporate these positive happenings in your everyday life through writing, meditating, and thinking. Let these positive thoughts be the driving force of your consciousness and learn to become a better person.

Principle #2: Desire

If you watch any successful person, it’s rare to find someone who isn’t driven. Unless the person has insanely good genetics, he can’t afford to be lackadaisical. All successful people have desire.

For anyone to accomplish something they want, they must have the desire necessary to put in the work to become successful. It doesn’t matter if it’s cake decorating, weight lifting, or bear wrestling. If you want to be the best, you have to desire to be the best.

It has been said that someone who has honed his craft exceptionally will have put in over 10,000 hours specifically to that skill or trade. Take for instance weight lifting. If you train for one hour a day four days a week and read about training for maybe four hours a week, it would take you 25 years to reach this level. Unless you want to remain mediocre, you will cut this time down significantly and put in more time acquiring the skills necessary to become strong. A person’s desire keeps the fire burning. That fire ignited when he found his love for his craft.

People can become demotivated over time due to injuries, illness, or plateauing. The people who are bound to be more successful are those who lick their wounds and keep pushing because they desire. Give your all into whatever it is you want to do. You must want to be the best in order to do the work necessary to become the best. If you shoot for the moon and miss, you will still be among the stars. If it means sacrificing weekends filled with beer drinking and instead focusing on cardio, water, and good nutritional habits, it’s your duty to fulfill these needs. Organize your goals so the ones you have the most desire for are the ones that garner most of your energy. Satisfaction is the death of desire.

Principle #3: Preparation

You have the confidence, and you desire to be the best at your sport. Where do you go from here? You need a plan. You need preparation. Like the old saying goes, “if you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail.” It couldn’t have been said any better.

Whatever task you may have ahead of you, it’s best to go in with some sort of idea of what you’re doing. You can always change your ideas as time passes, but you should have a solid idea around your goals. For example, if your goal is to run a 60-minute 15K race in two months and you can barely run a 10-minute mile, you’re destined to fail because you haven’t prepared yourself adequately to achieve that goal. It’s more reasonable to put your goal at 85–90 minutes and then base your training around that goal. You can start off doing two-mile splits with a goal time of 20 minutes and then increase the distance or intensity from there.

Many people have great ideas, but they don’t know how to implement them. Don’t be afraid to go to people who are more knowledgeable than you in a particular area and heed their advice. Your plan will be better and your ability to put your plan to action will be better as well.

Have short-term goals and long-term goals and prepare around each accordingly. Your short-term goals will help you stay focused in the months or sometimes years leading up to your long-term goals. Your motivation will stay steady as long as you have a plan laid out to follow.

Put together a plan and stick to it!

Principle #4: Persistence

Everything has fallen into place. You’re off to a great start with gains, your motivation is through the roof, and you believe in yourself. In time though, your gains will slow, your motivation will fluctuate, and you will sometimes find training to be a burden. To push through the tough times, you need persistence.

Oftentimes when we reach a road block, we tend to make things out to be worse than they really are. We invoke strong emotions of failure and doubt, and it seems like things aren’t looking up.

Everyone goes through tough times. It’s just human nature. The person who will succeed is the one who can lick his wounds, learn from his mistakes, and move on. As Paul Heyman, the former owner of the original Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW), once said, “You can’t achieve success without the risk of failure.” The people who are willing to put it all in when most people fold are the ones who separate the champions from the common folk.

When you put your problems into perspective, especially with training, they’re often a small bump in the grand scheme of things. You have to always remember that it could be a lot worse. Reading about a stroke victim with a paralyzed right arm and limited use of his right leg giving it 110 percent to walk ten steps puts your “overtraining” problems in check.

Realize how lucky you are to be able to wake up every morning and have a job, train, eat the foods you want, and live the life you imagined. You must face any tough times you encounter and conquer them.

You have to eliminate excuses from your life. You can’t live your life putting blame on other people or other things for your failures. You need to accept responsibility for your actions and move forward the best you can. The best in the world won’t accept failure as an option. However, there isn’t any shame in failing—only in failing to try. You learn more from failing, but you don’t accept it as an option. You use it as a growing experience. The best in the world will fight for that one last yard whereas normal people will be satisfied with how far they’ve come.

Principle # 5: Modesty

We have come to the end. So you have it all. You have the confidence and desire, you were prepared, and you persisted. You’ve done the leg work it took to reach your goals. How do you handle your success?

Keep your head out of the clouds and be modest. Modesty often isn’t seen as a major principle in fitness or sports. It’s one that I live by personally, so for me, it’s just as important as the other four. You need to keep yourself in check or you run the risk of disrespecting your fellow athletes or competitor

A person lacking modesty is a person who may not be realistic. You can be good in your local softball league, but your paltry three home runs in a season might be chump change to a bomber’s thirty home runs in a year. You need to put things in perspective. People who talk themselves up are looking for some sort of reassurance that is sorely missing in their lives. They want to have recognition but can’t garner it themselves. So they must act with macho bravado in order to come across as successful.

Be proud of your accomplishments, but there isn’t any reason to rub them in other people’s faces. You will come off as nothing more than an obnoxious ass and no one will wish you well.

If you’re truly great at something, you won’t need to tell people. People will tell you.