3 – 28 – 18 The Five Rules of Weightlifting - and Life (5 minutes)

The following are some rules I've found work for me. They're drawn from my personal experience, primarily in the context of weight training.
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1. The present and past are set in stone, but you’ve got a remarkable amount of control over the future.
2. If you’re delusional you’re going to hurt yourself.
3. Sometimes you need help, sometimes you’d die without it.
4. The way you improve your life is through effort.
5. Consistency over intensity, discipline over desire.
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1. The present and past are set in stone, but you’ve got a remarkable amount of control over the future.

As a general rule I don’t think about things that have already happened (except in the context of reflection), why would I? All students know about the people who have twenty-minute conversations about an exam immediately after they leave the lecture hall. Those people irritate me.

I think it’s a pretty intuitive notion that you shouldn’t worry about things that you can’t control. And what can you control? Well you certainly can’t control the past, it’s already gone. You could say you can control the present, but I don’t think that’s quite right. Most things we do that have any meaning have some level of premeditation. I can’t make a pass if I don’t see the guy first, I can’t start writing before I decide to start writing.

It’s really obvious if you think about it in physical terms. You’ve got absolutely no control over where you are or what direction and how fast you’re traveling in the present, it’s always a direct consequence of something that came before. So if you want to be going fast in the future, you’ve got to start working your legs right now.

2. If you’re delusional you’re going to hurt yourself.

This follows from the first one in the recognition that the present is set in stone. Whatever is, is, no matter how you feel about it. If you think you can bench 350 when you can only bench 300, you’re going to hurt yourself.

This idea isn’t about not challenging yourself, that would only be the case if you had perfect self-knowledge. Part of the value of challenging yourself is the self-discovery it enables as you discover what you actually can and cannot do rather than just guessing. An example. An Olympic powerlifter has a pretty precise idea of how strong they are, a couch potato has no clue.

But you need to recognize reality and not inflate your ego or abilities with puffed-up images of yourself, because it’s going to bite you in the backside.

3. Sometimes you need help, sometimes you’d die without it.

What do you do when you’re under 350 pounds on a bench press and you can only bench 315?

Well I see two choices. You die, which is a pretty terrible choice. Or you have a spotter and it’s not even a big deal.

Take that out into other aspects of your life. If you’re worried you could really embarrass yourself with this new pitch you’re thinking of making to your boss, run it by your trusted friend first. There are some ways you can challenge yourself by yourself. But if you really want to push yourself to the limit, you’re going to be pushing so far that you’re not going to be able to rescue yourself if things go poorly.

4. The way you improve your life is through effort.

This realization is the best thing I got from my experience lifting weights in high school. Up until then I had a very talent-based mindset. I was good at the piano because I had “an artistic, expressive mind,” I was good in school because I was “so darn smart.”

But you’re not strong unless you make yourself strong, and the process is pretty damn obvious. If you don’t try hard you don’t progress. A lot of other venues can trick us in that regard. You think you’re progressing in school because you got a good grade, or in your personality because people like you, or in your musical endeavors because you’re getting gigs and compliments. But none of those things actually mean you’re putting in the requisite effort to improve.

If you don’t stress your muscles enough, they will not grow. That’s a physical, verifiable fact. There’s that old fitness adage, “you’re only cheating yourself.” Well it’s true! You simply can’t get something out without putting it in first and it’s so obvious in athletics that everyone with half a mind can see it!

But if you can take that idea and apply it to other aspects of your life you will absolutely blow people away. If every time math gets hard you say, “wow I’m really trying pretty hard, I’m getting smarter” not only will you do better in that class but you’ll do better in every class. Because that sentence, that implied causation, that your efforts can make you smarter (something some people still don’t believe in but that’s fine by me because they’ll only stay as smart as they currently are) is an extremely empowering and exhilarating concept.

I was having a thought last night during Adoration, “why do I work so hard?” My favorite reason I came up with is that that’s what I was made to do. You are an effort-producing machine. If every day of your life you can wake up and just do your best, you’ll find it difficult to feel unhappy and unfulfilled. You’ve got to be honest about what your best is though, because most people don’t go far enough.

5. Consistency over intensity, discipline over desire.

If you practice piano an hour a day for three weeks, you’ll get quite a bit better at playing the piano. If you practice piano 21 hours in two days, you will probably get a tiny bit better and also not want to play the piano again for at least a week. I know some professionals practice that much regularly but those people are crazy; I’m talking about us mere mortals.

The same goes even more so in weightlifting. There’s very little value in one eight-hour session compared to eight one-hour sessions spread over two weeks.

So seek consistency. And in the interest of that don’t feel embarrassed to start small. I start tiny with everything I do. I wanted to pray more, so I committed to just listening to a prayer podcast through Pray as You Go as I walked to my first class every weekday, ten minute commitment five times a week. I even failed at that! But I kept trying, eventually it was routine, eventually I wanted to pray, which was pretty strange for me at the time.

You’ll see all those Instagram motivational quotes with all the hoopla about being a hustler and “going hard” and every other kind of nonsense. Just figure out what you want to do and chart a path to it. When you’re about to start, find something that’s way easier than what you think you can manage and just freakin do it, day after day.

This segues well into discipline over desire. It doesn’t matter how much you want it if you can’t control yourself enough to do the requisite tasks to get it done. Desire is going to give you that intensity, when you see people working so hard at the gym that they’re crying, they really want what they’re going after. They want it more than anything, and I don’t think that desire is insincere.

On the other hand, you’ll have people that seem to be having a pleasant time in whatever they’re doing, still working hard, but not breaking themselves. And because they have that discipline they’ll achieve things they don’t even particularly care about; but could be the life’s mission of somebody in the first group.

I think that combination of desire and intensity definitely had some place back when we hunted for food and fought wars hand-to-hand, to be able to expend yourself completely in the short term is a useful skill in those situations. I won’t dog it too much, I’m trying to develop more intensity right now in rugby so it’s a plainly useful skill to have.

But I think, mostly as a result of the extremely stable society we live (if you don’t agree with me you need to study your history better) those traits of consistency and discipline have become far more important in determining outcomes. Most of our value to society is in the skills we’ve developed, and most skill building is a slow, kind of boring process. So strap in and get ready for a not-so-wild ride.