A Brick Laid Is a Brick Laid
I talked with Lorraine Painchoud, who co-owns Swanson Mountain Fitness up in British Columbia, and the line that stuck with me long after we stopped recording was the simplest thing she said all hour.
A brick laid is a brick laid.
She said it about the sessions she used to dread. The ones where she didn't hit her reps, didn't make her time, walked out feeling like she'd wasted the morning. There were days early on she actually cried about it. And then somewhere along the way she stopped grading those sessions on whether they were good. She started counting them on whether they happened. Show up, do the work, lay the brick. The wall doesn't care if today's brick was your prettiest one.
I have coached this idea for years without ever having a clean way to say it. Lorraine handed me one.
The math we get wrong
Here is the lie most lifters tell themselves: only the good days count. The personal record counts. The session where everything clicked counts. The grind where you missed your numbers and felt like garbage? That one gets erased. Crossed off the ledger. Filed under "failure."
That math is broken, and it's expensive.
Because in any real training block, the great days are RARE. You get a handful of them. If those are the only days you let yourself bank, you are throwing away eighty percent of your work and then wondering why you don't feel like you're getting anywhere. You ARE getting somewhere. You just refuse to count the steps.
The body doesn't share your opinion about which sessions mattered. The adaptation comes from the accumulation, not from the highlights. The set you barely survived built work capacity. The session you "failed" still loaded the tissue, still rehearsed the pattern, still taught your nervous system how to suffer a little longer than it wanted to. You felt like you struck out. Your body laid a brick.
A bad session is a different kind of useful
Lorraine said the rough sessions are the ones that make you stronger as a lifter, because those are the ones you learn from. I'd go further. A bad day under the bell is the only place you actually practice the part of the sport nobody trains on purpose: staying in it when it isn't going your way.
The good days don't test you. Everything's working, so there's nothing to find out. It's the ugly session, the one where minute five feels like minute nine, where you get the answer to the only question that matters on the platform: what do you do when it gets hard and you're still on the clock?
You finish the brick. That's the whole answer. You finish it ugly and you set it down and you go home.
And there's a quieter benefit. When you stop treating bad days as catastrophes, they stop owning you. Lorraine put it perfectly: now when she has a rough session, instead of spiraling she thinks, okay, good, that's out of my system, on to the next one. The bad day used to be evidence she wasn't good enough. Now it's just one more brick, already behind her, already counting.
How to actually use this
This isn't a feelings exercise. It's a scoreboard change. Try this:
Stop scoring sessions on quality. Score them on completion. Did you show up and do the work you'd planned, or a fair version of it given the day? Yes? Brick laid. Mark it and move on. You don't get bonus points for a beautiful session and you don't get penalized for an ugly one. Done is done.
Keep a record you can actually see. Lorraine builds a wall in her head; plenty of people need it on paper. A training log, a calendar with an X on every day you trained, a tally in a notebook. The point is to make the accumulation VISIBLE, so on the days you feel like you're going nowhere you can look back and count the bricks. They're all still there. That's the proof your feelings will try to deny.
Separate the bad session from the bad story. The session was hard. Fine. The story you bolt onto it, "I'm not cut out for this, I'm falling behind, why do I bother," that's the part that does the damage, and it's optional. Drop the story. Keep the brick.
Then go lay the next one.
Why this is the whole game
People think the secret to getting strong is some perfect program or some rare gift. It's not. It's that you kept laying bricks on the days you didn't feel like it, and you didn't tear down half the wall every time a brick came out crooked.
How do you build a wall? One brick at a time. The good ones, the bad ones, the ones you laid when you were tired and unmotivated and certain it didn't matter. They all count. They were always going to count.
You don't have to win today. You just have to lay the brick.
Listen to the full interview here.
If you've been waiting to feel ready, or strong enough, or like you'd be any good at this before you start, stop waiting. Come lay your first brick with us. I've never turned anyone away over what they could or couldn't do on day one, and I've never turned anyone away over money either. Reach out here and let's build something.
Vokse eller dø. — Coach Jordan