The Limit
My Philosophy To Approaching The Pains of Fitness, Failure, and Rethinking What “Failure” Really Is
Nobody Likes Failing… At First.
A Brief Introduction.
I wasn’t an athlete in school, I wasn’t popular at all, and honestly I’m pretty sure I was blatantly disliked. Starting freshman year of high school I was a loner that could work magic with a pencil and a pad of paper, and I was an “okay” student. I was quiet, and a hermit. After a few years of internal struggle, and some pretty difficult realizations I came to the conclusion that I did not like who I was.
Let me rephrase that — I hated myself.
I specifically remember the evening that I came to this conclusion. I was sitting in my room at my parents’ house, I was 17 years old and I said to myself out-loud, “I hate who I am.” I went over the reasons why with myself in my room; I was a tall and lanky kid, I wasn’t athletic, I wasn’t ‘popular’, I didn’t have friends, and every instance that I attempted to join conversations with people I was generally laughed at our chased out of the conversation circle. That year I approached my dad to help me get started working out.
Fast forward 12 years and after a long and WILD ride, here I am with a BA in Exercise & Movement Sciences and finishing up my 6 year contract with the National Guard.
I chose to share this brief summary just to show that my backstory isn’t perfect, I’m quite confident that nobody’s is. Whether you’re Tyler & Cameron Winklevoss or Chamath Palihapitiya or the local drunk — everyone goes through strife, what sets everyone apart is how they react.
NOW, to the point of this writing. I’m sure there will be plenty more to follow after this first iteration.
Lifestyle Changes Don’t Happen All At Once
Disclaimer: I started working out for one reason. I wanted to get “bigger.” It was with the goal of simply looking stronger, we all start somewhere. While being stronger has been great my initial goal was to simply stave off the comments, remarks and otherwise oppressive onslaught of judgments against my character. I was tired of being judged as meek because I was skinny. When you’re as skinny as I was not only do the guys bully you, but so do the women. Oh man the bullying from the women was so potent, and it was usually followed by a poisonous laughter.
I didn’t decide to go to college for my major until I had spent many years working out, pushing myself alone, and essentially failing at my goal. Starting off, I only lifted upper body. The mistake of many. I wanted to look like Superman! Broad shoulders, barrel-chest, huuuuuuge arms. I mean what young man doesn’t?! Well I was so motivated that I ended up looking silly and lopsided — chest was disproportionately bigger than the rest of my body while my legs being long and skinny. It wasn’t until a few years in that I started listening to my father — legs are the most important.
My dad was a power-lifter for fun back in his day, he has a few trophies for the competitions that he won in his youth. That’s why I approached him, and I definitely should have just continued listening to his advice.
One of the many mistakes that I made on this path was that I thought that just lifting for strength would get me bigger, right? WRONG.
The path to acquiring fitness/health/aesthetics via working out is a very, VERY complex system if you wish to truly achieve your goals. Let me run through some basics….
Technique Over All Others
It’s a broken record at this point. If you’ve been speaking with a friend or personal trainer you’re likely tired of hearing it.
Form is, I would argue, the most important aspect of fitness.
You can’t hope to do something well (more importantly, safely) if you don’t perform the task properly. Now, you can get away with not doing things well or perfectly for a time. But you essentially gamble with laws of probability, chance and Murphy’s Law. How many times have you tried to take a short-cut at work or in a game and it didn’t play out in your favor? It likely caused you to have to do an equal amount of work as the proper solution, OR even more likely you had to apply even more effort because you caused another issue by trying to cheat around the work necessary for the PRIMARY issue. Effectively doubling your work and shooting yourself in the knee cap.
You can lift without proper form and build muscle and gain some ground, yes.
But, if you invest the time it’s actually a compounding effect.
Proper Form causes these systems to happen:
Allows you to activate all of the necessary musculature
Activating the muscles properly allows you to grow and build where you want
Proper form will allow you to target the desired muscles, maximize their activation thus maximizing their time under tension, which maximizes hypertrophy, leading to muscle growth stimulation
Activating the proper systems allows your body structure to strengthen properly as well (there’s a lot of engineering aspects that explain why the body is designed the way it is, I suggest you look into how the structure of the Spine works)
Strengthening the systems properly allows you to become healthier and the body stronger
The body getting stronger also helps ensure that you are less prone to injury
ENGINEERING THE SPINE - Creation Engineering Concepts
THE CREATION IS ENGINEERED - NOT EVOLVED! In the article here that I wrote previously, I commented on the marvelous…www.creationengineeringconcepts.org
Check out the above website if you would like a glimpse at why form is can have such a strong impact on spine health and why it is so important. Acquire the knowledge to perform movements properly, protect your spine.
Building the systems of the body properly can lead to; a stronger body, a healthier life, and the capability to become continually more healthy. Allow your body to perform its jobs properly and you can enjoy a healthier life physically and mentally.
Learn the proper form. Learn to do the work correctly first.
Top-Down Problem Solving
Probably the biggest staple in fitness & bodybuilding, problem solving, critical thinking, business, science, budgeting, the list goes on and on….
Tackle the big system first.
In the body that means legs.
So many people dislike legs, it requires a lot of work and it’s generally the most painful. For two reasons:
The largest muscle group in the human body means it has the most muscle tissue, ergo — requiring the most energy. It’s exhausting.
Being the largest muscle group also means it has the most pain receptors, meaning it’s gonna feel like a disproportionate level of pain
Fitness will rewire your mentality. Right now most of you avoid projects like the above mentioned for the stated reasons — it has a high effort demand & it hurts. But, that’s how life works folks. Life is full of constant and consistent obstacles that you are challenged with overcoming. Through working-out, we rewire the mind to look at adversity differently.
The Limit is a moment that every lifter/entrepreneur/scientist searches for.
Allow me to explain.
I’m training you, and the first day of training we approach a squat rack. It’s large, metal, everything on it is heavy and it’s generally intimidating. Why is it intimidating? Usually because it’s heavy, you expect it to be painful, and you generally don’t know what you’re doing and you are afraid of looking silly in public.
The initial approach is going to be largely verbal coaching.
Everyone started in the same spot — we all had to start off not knowing how (LITERALLY EVERYONE), that’s kinda the whole concept “learning.” Right? You can’t start off anything never done before with an innate knowledge of the activity.
Science is actually learning that there’s a ‘matter of fact’ to this dealing with DNA-learning and instincts. But, I digress.
Every person in the gym is in there to improve themselves, and every single workout day is a learning moment. Whether you learn your limit, or learn just how much more weight you can move than you thought. There’s technically a biological aspect to this but I’ll try to touch on that later.
The pain felt in working out is direct feedback on information that your body is relaying, you just need to know what this feedback means
The pain is also a representation of what your body is used to, and your body responding to the new stimuli. The body is an interesting system. While it’s designed to move and grow, it’s also designed to avoid pain and prevent damage. There’s different kinds of pain and without experiencing the differences all pain gets lopped into one bucket.
At first you won’t be able to do much, we all start there. But we’ll establish a baseline and rewire your mind, and before you know it you’ll be pushing limits you never would have imagined.
You squat with zero weight, and practice learning how proper form feels. How it feels to have the proper straightening of the back, how it feels in your legs and hips to squat down while maintaining your straight back. And how it feels to apply that force through your hips and legs, down to your heels and into the floor to move your body vertically up. Baseline Established.
You move on to squatting the bar, over and over. Making sure you fully absorb the sensation of the movement, even holding the bottom of the move, as well as taking time to move through it slowly — a progressive completion of the squat. Everything you’re doing is to feel the different sensations you decode as “pain.” Don’t worry, the next 48 hours you’ll decode plenty of pain as well.
However there’s a common misconception, that the burning sensation of working out is the build up of lactic acid in the muscle. This is not true. That burning sensation is of a more alchemical nature. Lactic Acid is part of working out yes but it does not cause the burning. This acid is what is preventing your muscles from being able to contract as fully as the prior movements and sets. That burning, however, is caused by a build-up of hydrogen ions in the muscle environment, and these hydrogen ions are causing the environment to decrease in pH, which is an increase in acidity. That burning is because your muscles are becoming bathed in acid (in basic terms). This acid will get flushed out through natural processes, and can be helped along with continued movement BUT requires proper hydration to help remove this waste in a timely manner.
After a few weeks of basic training, you experience the Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS) and your hunger is insatiable. The DOMS develops because the process of working out causes microscopic tears in the sarcomere of the muscle fibers, these tears are what get repaired. But they also stimulate further muscle growth — signalling to the body that more strength is needed. Providing the body with food is a necessity for healthy fitness and growth. You can’t rebuild without the materials to do the repairs. And the higher quality (healthier) the materials you provide the body with: the better, the faster, and the stronger your body rebuilds.
I am not a nutritionist or a dietitian, and my metabolism is naturally on overdrive. I am not a good resource for that information.
Learning the difference between pain of use and pain of injury is of great benefit; it can’t be understood until it is experienced. Knowing the difference between your body being damaged and simply just being used to its limit is absolutely crucial.
Reaching this step means you graduate to the next level of mentality. You have now experienced the difference in pains. Pain of Use vs Pain of Damage. Now you’re also getting your mind opened up to a new approach to pain, which is necessary because the next step is a kind of pain that is of its own classification. One that stands alone in its experience, and utterly essential to pushing yourself to doing things that you did not believe you could accomplish.
The Limit
Nobody likes failing.
So you’ve squatted the barbell with success and also successfully grasp the difference in Pains. It’s time to add weight. You’re going to progressively add more weight as you realize you are capable of performing the movement with the added resistance. Eventually you’ll hit a limit, a wall that you can’t pass.
The Limit is a moment that every lifter/entrepreneur/scientist searches for.
Why?
We don’t get better at anything by doing what we know we can, we get better through effort and trial & error. We get better by trying, struggling, and pushing our limits. We get better when we fail. Because what happens when we fail, and the result is something we really want? We recover ourselves, analyze how/what/where/why we failed. We observe what was done and what we can do differently to attempt to overcome this minor hiccup. And we TRY AGAIN. It’s the most basic fundamental to life; try, fail and try again. It’s the whole philosophy to life, try and try again until you succeed — or fail, give-up and whither away.
The scientist doesn’t develop a new vaccine by trying, failing and then walking away — throwing a fit because their attempt to find something new failed! If you’re going to push limits and try “new” you’re going to fail more often than you succeed.
That’s one absolute lesson that our school systems fail at on a Biblical level. But that’s a topic for a different day.
We’re all born with the innate ability to push our limits, the only thing that sets us apart from each other is how we approach them.
So when you get in that squat rack, you put your weight on and you move it. You find your Limit. And when you do find it, you approach it with all of the knowledge you’ve acquired prior; proper form, sensation of the movement, and you perform. When that limit gets reached and it fights to push you down, you push right back. You make The Limit struggle to force you down just as much as you struggle to overcome it.
You fail. Your spotter/safety-bar catches you. You rack the weight and get frustrated or feel weak because you failed to move the weight 100% of the motion.
But you didn’t actually “fail.” Not in the slightest.
As you struggled against The Limit your body and mind were learning.
The muscle tissue was straining and breaking against the force causing muscle growth to be stimulated. As a result preparing you to perform again, and preparing your body to overcome The Limit.
The mind was experiencing how this effort felt, and recording what the sensations were like as you strained against The Limit. Applying a new limit of its own to what the mind deems as maximum effort, moving the standard for your pain threshold higher so you are better prepared to perform under that newly experienced level of adversity.
Further, there is a point where the mind & body actually mingle in the learning aspect. There’s a process in working out that happens without your control, but is a direct result of your application of effort. It’s what allows you to, not only utilize your body’s muscles, but learn how to use more of that muscle tissue. When you make a conscious effort to utilize your body, and you’re making that conscious effort move your body with your mind, a very cool process happens… the mind actually begins to reach for more control via the body. The neurons and motor-neurons that are responsible for your capability to make willful movement begin to reach out and make more connections, allowing you to make a mind-body connection with your musculature. Giving you the capability to effect your desires on the muscles of your body in a way that you were previously incapable of. This process also helps feed into the elasticity of your body’s nervous system cells allowing them to stay healthy and make new connections. The greater the number the connections our mind-body system can make, the more potent our mind-CNS system becomes.
Not to mention… I believe there’s an argument to be made that the more active connections a brain can make, the more capable said brain is of learning new concepts and learning in general. The mind and brain are the only pairing that benefit from mental workouts and physical workouts. Working the mind and keeping it pliable via active learning and puzzles while also strengthening the brain’s connectivity and reinforcing its plasticity (via neurogenesis) by working out and increasing connection volume. (Don’t quote me on the prior, that’s just an inference of my own opinions based off of my personal observations coupled with what I’ve learned over the years.)
Fun fact; working out and using the body causes the release of endorphins, dopamine and serotonin. Endorphins cause a sensation of euphoria, dopamine causes the feeling of enjoyment and success, and serotonin helps regulate stress and anxiety. ALL causing us to feel good. And guess what? The higher The Limit you push, the stronger the release. All of these info-points are also touched on in the video provided below.
What you had deemed as “failure” before, was actually acquisition. You acquired ammunition to use against The Limit for the next advancement. Every time you push The Limit your arsenal gets stronger, and more potent. Your body gets physically stronger, and your mind gets mentally stronger as well as more elastic. You begin to learn what real struggle is, both dealing with the pain reception as well as the mentality that it takes to charge headlong into a difficult situation. This is where the true workout comes out.
Through lifting, you learn to want pain. You want to push The Limit and feel the pain of success as well as the pain of failure because both result in your victory. Whether you achieve the goal you want or you grow stronger, either way you come out on top.
And guess what? All of this working out and pushing limits means your body needs more fuel, and that fuel goes back to rebuilding your body to be stronger. Guess what? A strong and healthy body looks good, even better naked. Plus you’re being encouraged to eat? I love to eat! Can anyone point out the negatives here?!
We didn’t even touch on how exercise influences insulin tolerance, osteoporosis, or cancer cell inhibition.
What This Did To My Life
I was in a dark spot years ago. My days were super-charged with anger and a burning motivation to show the world I was worth something. But, working out gave me a goal to focus and fixate on. By having a hobby to work on and consistently develop founded in fitness, that involved constant failure, I grew and matured. All of that energy directed at the world got expended when I pushed my own limits, and I grew calmer. And in pushing my own limits, I not only got humbled but I also grew more confident in myself as I slowly chipped away The Limit every day and every week.
I learned all of this on my own through pushing limits on my own and through my studies. As I connected the dots, that were being read in between the lines of my textbooks, and the dots that lead from the studies to the life experiences. I learned to enjoy pain and struggle. The harder the problem, the more enjoyment I got out of trying to conquer it. As I learned how to more effectively build myself, I also learned how to more effectively study and learn.
As soon as I started approaching life’s challenges differently, my mind rewired to become a prime problem solver; like a workout, the problems with the greatest effect get tackled first. Then you can work down the line to these systemic, referring problems. I elaborate on these “systemic problems” that cause referring problems in my article “America 3.0” which can be found here.
I wholeheartedly hope that these thoughts help you look at adversity differently, and that you can learn to stop shying away from pain and difficulty.
Again it’s been a 12 year journey, and it’s been crazy. I also have some sharing to do on how fitness and lifting pointed me toward investing and wealth acquisition. Please keep an eye out in the future for that piece!
Nobody likes failing, but maybe… just maybe… now you won’t be so hard on yourself for it.
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References:
DNA-learning:
Blumberg, Mark S. “Development Evolving: the Origins and Meanings of Instinct.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews. Cognitive Science, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Jan. 2017, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5182125/.
Piganeau, G., and A. Eyre-Walker. “Estimating the Distribution of Fitness Effects from DNA Sequence Data: Implications for the Molecular Clock.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 100, no. 18, 2003, pp. 10335–10340., doi:10.1073/pnas.1833064100.
Muscle-Growth
Proske, U, and D L Morgan. “Muscle Damage from Eccentric Exercise: Mechanism, Mechanical Signs, Adaptation and Clinical Applications.” The Journal of Physiology, Blackwell Science Inc, 1 Dec. 2001, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2278966/.