If you're involved in a strength sport for long, chances are good that you'll make mistakes. An extra attempt that injures you, a poorly written or executed program, messing up your peaking structure, failing to mentally prepare for competition day — there are a lot of things that you, like everyone else, will do wrong. This means you can be sure that someone like Clint, who has been lifting and training for close to 25 years and involved in sports for 35 years, has made a lot of mistakes.
In today's video, Clint talks about mistakes. He answers a question from an elitefts reader named Justin: "Clint, what was your biggest mistake that you made in the sport of strongman?"
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To answer this question, Clint goes back to the beginning. Clint talks about his athletic history, detailing his natural abilities in basically any athletic event; no matter the sport, he would at least be able to run, to sprint, to jump, to flip, and he would have the ability to be developed into an impressive athlete.
These natural abilities carried Clint a long way in every sport he competed in — strongman included. For a long time, his training focus wasn't even strength; it was becoming more athletic on the strongman implements. But once he left the amateur ranks and become a professional competitor, Clint needed more than his athleticism. To be truly competitive at the professional level, even in the third tier, he had to get stronger. A lot stronger. If he could continue to be able to move faster than almost anyone else on the field, but build a better base of strength, he would be a very difficult strongman to beat. Being the competitor he is, Clint immediately set out to do so.
But by this point, Clint was getting older, which meant an inevitable reduction in athleticism. And this is where Clint's answer comes in. If he has one regret, one mistake bigger than all the other's he has made in strongman, it is this: "I gave too much attention and I relied too much on my strength, and I didn't give near enough attention to my weakness."
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