When the Workout Becomes the Warmup

I finally got the chance to rewatch Free Solo this weekend. If you haven’t seen it, it’s an incredible documentary on renowned climber Alex Honnold conquering El Capitan in Yosemite National Park without any ropes.

It’s still jaw-dropping.

But what stood out for me this time wasn’t the climb itself.

It was the preparation. Every tiny move, rehearsed hundreds of times. Every foot placement, every grip, mapped out and committed to memory.

Something that would be unthinkable for most people became, for him, almost routine.

That’s what mastery looks like. The extreme becomes manageable. The hard becomes automatic.

And it’s not just climbers. We’ve all met people who seem to make the hard look easy.

• The analyst who sees the story in a myriad of numbers in seconds.
• The coach who senses where a client is stuck before they’ve finished their sentence.
• The consultant who can spot the real issue in a sea of surface-level problems.

But it doesn’t happen by accident. It’s built through purposeful practice, relevant feedback and time to reflect.

It’s easy to focus on the outcome, but progress comes from the
process. Specifically:

Practice – Repetition with intent. Not just doing, but deliberately building fluency in the fundamentals. The best don’t skip the basics, they sharpen them.

Feedback – Not just validation or correction, but insight. The kind that helps someone see what they couldn’t before. Timely. Specific. Actionable.

Reflection – The space to pause, process and adjust. To notice patterns, consolidate learning and plan the next step forward.

These are the conditions that turn effort into ease. They don’t just improve performance.

They shift identity, from learner to practitioner, then from practitioner to expert.

So ask yourself:

• What do you now do with ease that used to feel like hard work?
• Where has your own baseline quietly shifted?
• How did that shift happen?
• And how are you ensuring a similar shift happens for your clients too?

Because the real value isn’t in what your clients can do today. It’s in what they’ll treat as a warmup six months from now.

Andy Jack

Andy loves helping subject experts, authors, speakers, coaches and key persons of influence to monetise their expertise with online learning. When not on his laptop, he'll usually be found up a mountain!