Reps No One Claps For

If you’re an athlete, you’re a machine when it comes to suffering. You’ll lace up for another brutal hill sprint with blood in your mouth and call it therapy. You’ll train until the floor starts breathing, just to get 100 more makes. Over the years you’ve made friends with the pain. You gave the pain a nickname, tucked it in at night, and called it growth. You know the body keeps the score, and you want to be on the scoreboard.

We all know the work is hard. It’s soul scraping, bone aching hard. Like getting punched in the liver by your own potential, repeatedly, all while smiling for the camera. It drains you of excuses, of illusions, of the cozy blanket you wrapped around your comfort zones. And you show up everyday for more.

But when it comes to the mental work… we run from it like something is chasing us. We treat introspection like a stranger at the door and we’re diving behind the couch, mid-bite of dinner, in hopes that they don’t know we’re home. Not because it’s a threat to us, but because it knows us better than anyone in our life. And if we’re going to be honest with ourselves we are terrified of being seen without the highlight reels, without the stats, without the grind to hide behind. But maybe it’s not there to haunt us. Perhaps it’s there to help us put something to rest.

Most athletes think that more physical reps will fix their headspace issues, but here's the rub: You can’t foam roll your trauma. More reps in the empty gym won’t fix the negative self talk that cranks to full volume after you miss your first three shots. You can't outrun your shadow with faster footwork. There’s no Goggins playlist for facing your inner critic in a dark room at 2 a.m. whispering doubts into your sleep cycle.

Doing the mental work looks different. Mental reps look like silence. Stillness. Questions you’re too afraid to ask because the answer scares you more than the question itself.

Doing the internal work is where most turn and run as fast as they can. Not because you’re soft, but because you’re human. You sprint from stillness like it’s a storm, not realizing that sometimes the calm is the only place you can actually hear yourself.

Theres a good chance that all this running has been your way of surviving. And slowing down is how you finally learn to connect with yourself.

The truth is, your mind doesn’t want a fight. It wants a friend. It wants to be understood. It wants to be seen and hear. And when you stop running, when you stay long enough to listen, you start to realize this inner work isn’t the enemy. It’s the doorway.

Those who choose to step across the threshold aren’t just athletes, they’re alchemists turning doubt into self belief, fear into focus and worry into presence.

So yeah, the mental reps are hard. But if the body is the blade, the mind is the hand that wields it. And what's the point of sharpening steel if your grip is too weak to guide it?