I'll be honest; COVID-19 has not been good for me. Though my family and I have stayed healthy, and I was able to keep working throughout, my emotions have become more volatile, and my energy has decreased. A lot of it I attribute to having my normal methods of blowing off steam not available to me.
Prior to public spaces shutting down and non-essential business put on hold, I was playing basketball at least three times a week, playing volleyball once every few weeks, lifting, working to meet my physical goals. Since then, I haven't even been able to play a game of one on one. I miss the competition.
I'm discovering how much I drew from those multiple runs each week; the opportunity to compete physically and mentally, as well as measure my own progress and growth, were how I handled pressures from other parts of life. Just shooting baskets on my own, and even running through high-energy drills, doesn't provide the same outlet.
Maybe I'm not the only person to be going through this withdrawal from competitive activity. The NBA's experiment with HORSE was an attempt to fill that competitive void, but it was not an altogether fascinating attempt. Watching esports resume almost immediately has even made me think about getting back into online gaming to feel that competitive excitement again.
It's possible that this lockdown is revealing an unhealthy relationship with competing for me. I don't have any easy answers at this point from a personal standpoint or from a societal one. What I do realize is that a lot of my own coping relied on competing physically, and now I'm standing on one leg trying to regain my balance because some of my support has been kicked out from under me.
Again, no easy answers here. I don't have some resolution that I've found, or some key to unlock contentment when things I really enjoyed are suddenly gone. As I've written about before, I can control what I can control, and right now, it's just improving my strength and competing with my own benchmarks of strength and skill. It's not the same, and I can't wait to see other people on the court with me at some point.
Video lesson - Tempo
In the interest of continuing to grow and progress strength-wise, we'll discuss tempo during exercises today. For those who don't have a fully stocked home gym, you might be limited to a certain weight, and you may have blown way past that weight level in the 7+ weeks of lockdown.
Tempo just means that you are measuring a specific amount of time during your lift; most often, you are slowing down the lowering (eccentric) phase of your lift. Instead of completing the entire lift as quickly as possible to get it over with, you are deliberately increasing the time you are fighting against gravity to just drop the weight.
In the video above, I demonstrate a 4, 0, X, 0 tempo, which translates to 4-count lowering, 0 time spent at the lowest point, an explosive (as fast as you can) lifting motion, and 0 time spent before transitioning to the next rep. You can alter tempo as you like to meet different goals, but this tempo I'm demonstrating is recommended on Stack.com to build strength, even with less weight.
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