Simply Stronger, II: Getting Your Head Right

At least 90% of successful improvement of any kind has to do with “where” your head is. I’m sure there are plenty of mental health professionals who would vomit after hearing my simpleton description, but anecdotally and from experience, I know this much to be true: psychological context means (almost) everything. Usually, the process happens in a predictable pattern. A person perceives their life to be off-track in some way, and they decide it is bad enough to invest in changes, with their time and money and emotional capital (they’re ready to trust someone or something new). They make some changes, or do some new things, or learn some new skills, and their world expands.  Possibilities blossom (“Maybe I could do a handstand someday!”), but so does doubt (“Whoa, I am more off-track than I thought!”).  Motivation is fed, yes, but usually that pool of investment is debited, too.  A good teacher/coach encourages consistent practice, outlining a manageable path toward mastery, but pretty soon their new, larger and more exciting world-view starts to be normal--and now that person can only see how off-track they are compared to that.  In the best case, the cycle repeats, and in the worst case desire to improve gradually erodes.  But neither is satisfying according to the original getting-back-on-track goals.

There are some important issues at work here.  First, at every moment except for that initial trusting one, people are concerned with how off-track they are. That is expected--even admirable (wanting to be better definitely beats the alternatives), but it is a decidedly negative way to see the world: you are NOT something. Ouch.

Second, the solution to the problem is assumed to be outside of yourself. Again, while the premise is good (“I am going to be open to new things!”) it is also has some seriously negative potential (“I--with the tools I have--am not enough”).

Finally, while the process seems circular (it returns to where it started), it actually is a collapsing spiral. With each trip around, your world-view gets larger but your sense of self-efficacy rots. Instead of living and working with new skills, you are bombarded with all the things that you can’t do.

While most of the fitness industry is consumed with feeding this cycle (mostly for selfish reasons--that’s what the next post is about), each of us as individuals have the power to break free! And we must. Big surprise, but I think it has everything to do with being committed to getting and being stronger. Here’s why:

1. There are few goals more straightforward than just plain getting stronger, which is one of way of saying that working on it makes your mind quiet.  Strength is easily measured objectively, and progress is easily tracked.  This is hugely important for people on the not-good-enough (not-so-)merry-go-round.  Also, the concrete nature of the results only reflect the concrete nature of the activity itself.  When one trains for strength, they are committing to focused improvement on a few tasks--at the exclusion of others.  If those few tasks are holistic and global and widely-vetted by the experts (squatting, deadlifting, pressing, etc.), you can be secure in knowing that you are doing well by your body without worrying that you are creating gaps in your well-being.

I you can set aside, for a moment, how effective or not-effective such an approach might be physically (that’s what Part I was about...), looking at your training life this way allows you to be at ease with the big picture. No longer does one feel like they have to constantly be looking over their shoulder to see how on-track they are, and they can spend that brainpower on doing things right in the moment. There will always be distractions, but a good coach, a few like-minded friends and a little will-power makes all the difference. With your long-term mind relaxed, getting down to the physical work of squatting and hinge-ing and the rest is pretty cut-and-dried--the “easy” part.

2. The process of simple, straight-forward strength training fits with other paths toward mastery. Think of the concert pianist, practicing hundreds of thousands of hours over their lifetime; the NFL quarterback, taking thousands of snaps/reads in practice and hundreds more in games; the chef cooking a piece of salmon to perfect done-ness, the 8,000th time. Each one of these folks has impressive skills, but that skill is vastly overshadowed by how impressive their work ethic is.

Strength is one of these skills like any other, even if for most of us it is only a means to an end (better movement, better achievement in sport, or better body aesthetics).  And like any skill, long-term commitment and consistency are the main determiner of real success. But since strength is really about creating more mechanical tension, the physiological component is more obvious, in a way. It feels more like building a wall out of bricks than practicing figure drawing. The concreteness of the pursuit, the solidity of changing your muscles and bones helps us make sense of the time it takes to move forward; the patience required seems to flow more easily, too, so long as strength remains the goal.

And once that patience becomes a habit, you have found the real prize. Whether you want to keep working on physical goals or realign your focus, the skill of self-improvement is now yours, and working on strength got you there.

3. The most important bit, though, is still coming: strength shakes up the whole paradigm of trashy self-confidence. Let’s look at body-image as an example:

There a millions of ways to reframe the issue, to shift your perspective so that what you look like somehow means something more tolerable. Then there are a million ways to slash-and-burn, to cut weight or “get ripped,” but that’s worse: when the curtain comes down, all you’ve done is feed the monster exactly what it wanted all along--you’ve given in.

But working on what you can do undercuts the whole fear-breeding operation. Rather than pretending the elephant isn’t in the room, working on something as basic as strength is like politely asking the elephant to get out of the way so that you’ll have room to deadlift, please. Little steps toward being stronger feed a fire in each of us, small at first but growing with each day and month of staying on track. Pretty soon, “you” are a sack of skills and abilities, and your body reflects that. When you look in the mirror, or find yourself surrounded by talented people, your fire of capability warms you; the rest is just noise.

There’s a lot to unpack here, and I bet most of you have thought about a lot of these things--because you’re human. What are your thoughts?

Simply Stronger I: The "Easy" Part

One of the exciting parts of moving back in proximity with my family is that I get to be in charge of their training lives, and help them get into better shape.  While they are all 'active' folks, none of them lift regularly, and most of them never have.  For me, the idea of a bunch of untrained and willing individuals is delicious--so much potential! But thinking of working with each of them has made percolate on an old theme for me: people would solve most of their problems if they just focused on getting stronger.  This deserves a little breaking-down, as does any blanket statement that purports to tell people what they "should" do.

So first, let's define people in this case as un- trained or lightly trained.  The same general argument applies to highly trained populations too, but for additional and different reasons than I'd like to discuss today.  Second, by solve...their problems I mean both that many of the problems (sources of pain) in their physical lives would be mitigated and that they would move closer to their goals.  Then, by focusing I mean that their training would be committed to getting stronger and their mind-set would be tuned toward that concrete goal.  Finally, when I talk about getting stronger I mean doing exercises that are directed at making your whole body more effective in resisting weights that are heavy for a given person.  I am talking about squatting, hinge-ing (deadlifts, swings), pressing, pulling and rolling.

This is a big topic that gives me the heebie-jeebies to even think about attacking.  But it's also hugely important, and one that informs and shapes everything that I do, most simply because when you are stronger, life is easier.  For the sake of thoroughness (and readability), I want to break this into three distinct posts.  Today, I will talk about some of the physical reasons that a strength-focused program makes sense for people new to training.  Next, I will talk about why this approach is important for the psychological health of new lifters.  Finally, I want to dig into how such a program faces so much competition from the current fitness industry, and why new lifters (and truly, most of the rest of us) are best served by just keeping our eyes on getting "simply stronger."  I'll throw in a sample program at that point, too.

***

Almost everyone that I work with says during our initial conversation that they'd like to "tone up."  People love this little nugget for the same reason that fitness-industry folks hate it--it is broad enough to include a whole variety of body-fat, muscle tone, muscle size, and strength goals while still sounding small enough to not commit the person too much in any direction.  It is decidedly not a specific and directed goal, but for people who have never picked up a bar, let alone in a controlled way, THAT IS OK!  Why?

It's ok because when it comes to improving, our bodies respond to stress that is outside our comfort zone.  For untrained folks, that comfort zone is pretty small and just about anything will get you there; our first goal should be to just learn how to work hard, a goal that the basic lifts (squat, hinge, etc.) are uniquely designed to accomplish.  And anyone who has ever strength-trained in a real way knows what I'm talking about.  After a few short sets, sweat is pouring, we are gasping for breath, and generally we feel like wrung-out washcloths.  Maybe more importantly, all the big muscles in the center of our bodies feel hot and engaged because they have been called out!  They are being asked (finally!) to do something that is more difficult than can be accomplished by the usual cast of overused muscles that get us through the daily grind; it is decidedly outside our comfort zone.

That feeling of strain, of reaching beyond your current abilities, is a powerful and potentially dangerous thing, which is exactly why it's worthwhile to get some coaching when you are at this first stage.  But living in that space outside of your current comfort zone is the only way to make changes to your current "normal".  Calories are burned, metabolism is sped up, muscles are directed to change their composition, hormones and their receptors are turned up or down, and a thousand other little physiological tweaks take place.  How these different aspects are specifically effected have everything to do with what you do outside that comfort zone, but just working hard ends up being your best tool.  (I think we all intuit this on some level, which is usually why working out seems not so fun, but that's for the next post).

And while doing any one thing will make you better at that specific thing, doing strength will make you better at everything, especially early in your training life.  But while most of those popular programs that you've seen on late-night TV (and that usually involve 3 "easy" payments...) are really good at making you work hard, they put little to no thought toward the sides of training that gradually make movement easier and less painful.  This is the next way that strength as a training focus wins out.

As those big, central muscles start to wake up in response to these new, high-intensity demands problems of of movement start to dissolve.  Issues caused by the imbalance of muscles, like certain pain in your back, hips, knees, neck, and shoulders, often start to ease in reaction to completing movements that reflect efficient patterns well-suited to the human body (squatting, hinge-ing, etc.).  Unlike other movements that are directed toward mere task-completion, these movements are also consumed with completing those tasks well, and in a way that is best suited to your body.  The take-away is that working on these movements in a methodical, intense way yields changes exactly where your body needs them.  That new, targeted work in corners of your body that were weak, unbeknownst to you, suddenly rebalances the status-quo.  Yes, pain sometimes disappears, but many, many other parts start working better, too: flexibility and posture, for example, invariably improve.

And looking ahead, as you get more conditioned to stresses (i.e. stronger), familiarity with those basic, whole body lifts will continue to serve you better than any of the millions of tweaks that the fitness-industry tries to sell you.  As I said before, these lifts have been selected for over the millennia because of their unique efficiency at accomplishing work.  They allow you to do more with what you've got, which gets right back to why we train for strength in the first place: it makes everything else easier.

When you are faced with the plateaus that are inevitable for all of us, keeping your eyes on just getting stronger simplifies the process.  We need not talk about looking all the way to final conclusions (are you powerlifting?! olympic lifting?! doing gymnastics?!); no, just focusing on moving more weight will get us most of the way toward where we want to be.  And while there will be a need to start looking at different variables and alternative methods (I'm mostly talking about programming here), those changes unfold organically, as you need them and not a moment before.

I call all of this, the physical aspect, the "easy" part of getting Simply Stronger because it involves the things that stay put, like muscles and bones, and do what we direct them to do (for the most part).  All the ways that the mind can get in the way, and screw with our perception of improvement will be the subject of Part II.  Stay tuned.

Please, I welcome comments from all you: did I make your day? piss you off? make you curious?  Let me know.

Now, with a nod toward my buddy Mike, go lift some heavy shit!

don't look now, but this one's about me.

Since the About Me portion of this blog has been empty for a while now, I thought it was time to fill it up.  Trying to write about something big and amorphous always sucks, but this was my initial stab: ***

My name is Will Belew. I am interested in living up-to-my-elbows, in letting the dirt of what I do get between my fingers and under my nails, and in keeping my daily practices honest to the bigger arcs of my life. I think creativity is just curiosity applied with care and intent, and I think all the other pursuits of life are layered on top of that creative function. I think the internet-era and all its trappings have made us wake up to the changeability of anything, for better and for worse.

I was trained as a classical musician, which is to say I learned to survive with the daily look-in-the-mirror that anyone with a regular practice knows, and that practice is today still my most significant rudder. About two years ago, I turned my scope toward the fitness industry, intrigued by how my life-long curiosity with physical improvement might be studiously optimized and professionally applied. Once fully immersed in the strange but wonderful world of barbells and sweat and Lululemon, I realized that lessons from the conservatory practice room applied just as fittingly with physical culture. I realized that the two worlds overlapped in some of their most central aspects, namely in how they both rely on the power of the coach, how they both demand personal integrity, and how they are both hell-bent on improvement. This blog is about that confluence.

First, to coach or be coached is an amazing way to interact. It is something that I hope everyone has a chance to experience, often. Most musicians don’t even realize how powerful a force their teacher is or was until much later, and most people who personal train are really just looking for that relationship to shape their progressive experience. I love thinking about how we might coach better, how we might be coached more effectively, and how compassionate coaching is one of our most human functions.

Second, for all the noise that today’s media environment allows, there is still an appreciation of quality, especially in the music and fitness industries (and elsewhere, too, I’m sure). Without discounting the importance of professionalism or networking (blogging...), by far the most important determiner of success in these two fields is how well you do what you say you’re going to do. And while I love that appreciation of both pursuits happens most substantially inside the listener or coachee/athlete (did you like that musical moment? did that way of moving feel easier?), there is a certain strictness that defines quality. At the end of the day, there are no smoke and mirrors to muddy the view of improvement: are you stronger? does your sound ring, and is it in time and in tune? Yes or no.

Finally, all the people really invested in these careers care about little more than how well they do what they do. Surely much of this is professionally motivated (paying rent is always fun), and probably most of it is motivated by that existential fear of inadequacy that lurks deep. But, really who cares? Being relentless about being excellent sure beats most alternatives, so long as it is compassionately applied. That final caveat about compassion is incredibly important though, and shapes the kind of excellence that you achieve in beneficial ways, I think.

All of this strikes me as exciting, and rich with lessons to be mined; that process of exploration and discussion is the meat of this blog. But no meal is complete without a kick-ass side-dish, which in this context are all the practical ways that the lessons learned play out in daily life: for every post about quality I hope there is one about your GI-tract.

Sit back, look around, and tell me what you think!