Learn from My Mistakes

After strength training for 23 years, I can say I’ve made a lot of mistakes when it comes to lifting weights. I would be hopeful to say I won’t repeat any of them in the future or make new mistakes, but history has a way of repeating itself. The mistakes I’ve made had lead to frustrations, decreased performance, and injuries. These have all been a learning lesson that I know helps provide a better training experience for the people we work with. If the saying “if you’re not making mistakes then you’re not making progress” is right, then by now I should have a ton of progress. I was very lucky to have coaches who provided structure and feedback on my training and they also would let me venture off enough to sometimes make a mistake. Maybe it was to drive their point home or maybe because they knew that failure was a great way for me to learn. This is unique because some coaches feel the need to have full control and micro manage every aspect of someone’s plan. Most of my coaches were like bumper rails at the bowling alley. They never let me go off path, but they generally knew how something would play out before I did. This is a collection of training ideas to help you make more progress and avoid the frustrations I dealt with at different times. If you feel like you’re exceptional and these don’t apply to your training, that’s fair but years of research would say you’re not the exception. 

Learn to train hard, then learn to pull back

I was a big fan of High Intensity training methods that were lower in training volume, but taken to beyond failure. This generally meant as many reps as you could do on your own, then one to two forced reps, followed by a longer eccentric motion to finish the exercise. I will say this method was helpful in teaching me how to raise my intensity during a lift, but training to constant failure is hard to recover from and can lead to injury. In training, there are usually three groups of people. The first group never trains hard enough to break a sweat. They’ll never get the results they want even though they show up three days a week forever. The second group trains super intense and is usually laying on the ground after a hard set. This can be helpful at times, but exhausting long term. The last group are the consistent warriors who appear to be calm and low intensity, but they’re adding 1-2 reps on an exercise each week or bumping the weight up 5lbs. There are lessons from each of these groups, but the third group has figured out how to auto regulate intensity and load within each workout. If you’re someone who needs to up the intensity then learn that skill, but once acquired then you should work to utilize it effectively and not live in it. 

Out train your Nutrition

Nutrition is your home base for recovery and performance. If you want to train hard, your nutrition effort should match the gym effort. Nutrition will make or break all recovery for muscles, speed, power, and cognitive function. When you train hard and then wash down your efforts with fries and a milkshake, it forces your body to work harder to recover from the workout and the food. This nutrition compromise also leads to poorer sleep which has a whole host of issues associated with it. If you spend three hours a week in the gym, try spending three hours a week dedicated to things like meal planning, shopping list, meal prep, and so forth. This gives you a plan of attack with your nutrition. Making small positive changes here works just like the weight room. 

Special Exercises aren’t the Holy Grail

When we started talking about special exercises everyone forget about General Physical Preparedness (fitness). Special exercises are variations of main exercises designed to help you break through a sticking point. The problem is this lead people to thinking they had one specific weak point in their system and they neglected the rest of the system. When my bench press stalled out at 600lbs for a year my wife pointed out that with my increased body weight I had lost the ability to do push ups and pull ups like I used to. Frustrated, I went back to focusing on those movements for six months and my bench press shot up another fifty pounds. Build your foundation and always add to it, never neglect what got you there. 

Chase one Rabbit

Have you ever heard someone say they wanted to lose twenty pounds, add twenty pounds on their bench press, and get ready for a half marathon? These are different rabbits to chase. When we spread out focus on different goals, we get frustrated with the results. In using our example, one of the best things you can do to increase your bench press is to increase body weight, not decrease body weight. We do these things all the time when the truth is, we do much better when we focus in on one thing. The good news is we usually end up with some positive effects towards side goals. An example would be you want to exercise more so you’re in a better mood. Exercising regularly leads you to eating more healthy meals, improving the quality of your nutrition and sleep quality which leads to improved body composition which boosts your confidence. This is an added benefit to the behavior changes you’ve made. 

Stop moving the goal post

Would you believe that most people are unsatisfied once they hit their goals? This is known as the arrival fallacy. Sometimes we think achieving a certain goal will bring us happiness and fulfillment. When we reach our goal, the brain’s reward system has a drop in dopamine. This can also happen because we’re focused on outcome based goals instead of the journey. When I ask most athletes what they enjoyed about their sports career when they’re done, it’s rarely the individual achievements. It’s usually about the people they were with and what they learned from challenging times. Moving the goal post constantly is a sure fire way to never be happy with the work you’ve put in toward your goals. Take some time to appreciate progress and also be reflective of the journey you’ve been on. 

Mistakes in our learning can propel us forward if we slow down enough to examine our journey. In modern society, we tend to focus on things we haven’t achieved in the future while focusing on our individual weaknesses. Let’s begin to refocus how we view our own health, fitness, and recovery. When you do this, if you can acknowledge some of the mistakes that keep popping up, but can’t determine how to address them, a professional coach can help. A coach is able to see the path without biases. Let us know how we can help you avoid our mistakes. 

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