Squat Every Day, page 20
If that describes you ― and I mean really, honestly describes you ― then you have no business using many of the ideas I’ve put forth. You can begin the process, make a habit of paying attention to how your sets feel and writing down RPEs so that you learn how you respond. You can practice “training calm” and learning to feel out the difference between an emotional lift and a casual effort.
But training every day, for the beginner, tends to be an exercise in ego rather than productive, progressive training. You probably won’t listen ― Younger Me wouldn’t have ― but I had to say it.
10
The Empty Life
“No thought, no reflection, no analysis, no cultivation, no intention; let it settle itself.”
―Tilopa
“If it works, it works, no matter what anybody says.”
―Franco Columbu
Are We There Yet?
Years ago, when I first set foot in a gym, the bodybuilders were my inspiration. The internet hadn’t really hit stride yet, so my sole exposure to weight-training came from fitness magazines, which were overflowing with professional bodybuilders. All the guys I knew were into bodybuilding, and all the alpha-dogs at the gym were bodybuilders. That’s what shaped my impressions.
When I say inspiration, I mean that I expected to look that way after some time lifting weights. Six months, maybe a year. Plug away, take these protein shakes and creatine, and you’ll be all freaky-muscled with veins and striations. By the reckoning of my 18 year old brain, it made perfect sense.
Needless to say, my expectations weren’t realistic. I was all of 125, maybe 130 pounds at that point, of average height, and for lack of better wording, “small-boned”.
I didn’t have any way to know better. All I knew was that lots of bodybuilders were there, muscular and veiny, and it only stood to reason that they’d once been here, where I was. My job was to bridge the distance by spending a lot of time in the gym and, as I’d later learn, the kitchen. Simple as that.
And really, it was. Only problem was, I’d set my sights on a mountain poking up over the horizon and convinced myself it was only an hour or two away.
I smile when I think back to those days, when all I had to do was bust ass on this split workout and then, one day, I’d wake up with the physique of a pro bodybuilder. I had no idea how much work, and how many sacrifices, go into a top-quality bodybuilder’s muscle and condition. Or the necessity of genes. Or the sheer inertia of experience and practice and background in shaping our adult bodies.
I expected a measly 24 weeks of hard work. I made the same mistake that both genders, at all stages of development and every goal in mind, make: I underestimated the journey and overestimated my own power to make it happen.
This mistake, which psychologists would call an example of the planning fallacy, is but one of the many forms of biased thinking we know as a positive illusion. Your brain is wired to think in a way that bends reality to your needs.
You will overestimate your chances. You will ignore the statistical likelihood of achieving what you say you will achieve. You will believe that you are the exception and the outlier. You will ignore the contribution of environment and circumstance ― otherwise known as “luck” ― and give undue credit to the role of your own unique talent in your success. You will base your expectations and beliefs on the world around you: who you hang out with, what you read, where you train.
Back in Chapter 3, I mentioned that our minds can be divided, roughly, into two modes of thought. There’s the rational System 2, conscious, reasoning, deliberative, and much like a tiny rider sitting atop a two-ton elephant. And there’s the emotional System 1, unconscious and intuitive and, while relatively simple, the dominant partner.
The elephant is a pattern-matcher. It connects and associate related objects and events. When I say “apple”, the words “fruit” and “red” come to mind easily. This is a remarkably effective approach for what unconscious mental drives are intended to do, which is mainly to make sure we can find food, mates, and danger in our surroundings.
There’s only one problem: the pattern-matcher doesn’t come with any kind of error-checking feature. To be accurate, any sensitive instrument has to distinguish between, say, the earthquake it was built to measure and footsteps of the technicians in the room. Purpose-built equipment accounts for this and tries to eliminate the noise of randomness; even if the insulation isn’t completely successful, simply realizing there’s noise at all is an advantage.
Our brain doesn’t do that, at least not without deliberate and costly effort. Until recently, with the invention of science and statistics, it had no reason to do so. Out in the wilds of nature, fast, intuitive, and anecdotal thinking is all you need. Consequently, we aren’t so hot at telling the difference between meaning (the earthquake) and meaningless noise (the researchers in the lab and the cars outside). We aren’t even good at realizing that we don’t realize it.
The elephant is concerned with what it can see and what it can turn into a story with obvious causes. Facts that we aren’t aware of, and facts that disagree with the story we have, are ignored or explained away. The elephant thinks quickly at the cost of accuracy, and, unless we specifically check ourselves ― expending energy and effort to think things through ― our rider will accept the elephant’s conclusions at face value. Being reasonable is costly, and as such most of us are more comfortable thinking emotionally, intuitively, and incorrectly.
Since our brains tend to believe any old conclusion that comes to mind, humans ― even intelligent, well-educated humans ― believe all kinds of kooky things. Once we’ve felt out our personal version of the truth, only then do the reasoning processes kick in and explain, in rational terms, why we made the decision.
Objective world or no, a whole lot of things we think and believe and take for granted are shaped by personal circumstance.
This book has, in its own way, been about what you believe as much as what you do. Whether you believe that you’re in charge and responsible for your results, or the product of favorable statistical outcomes. Whether you believe that overtraining is a crippling malady best avoided and thus justifying plenty of rest, or it’s just a transient sensation that goes away with practice. Whether you believe you can get stronger by thinking “practice” instead of “destroy”. Whether you focus on every last detail or just go get it done.
This final chapter addresses the worry that made me think twice about writing this book at all: that a good many people just wouldn’t get it.
Not the part about training often, or training “easy”, or even conditioning the body-as-a-whole. That’s all evident enough if you follow through my reasoning, I hope. What I mean is that, like young me from above, they just wouldn’t get it. They’d just want A Program To Go Do and miss out on what I’m trying to say.
My message is, in some respects, hard to put across. It’s about how you live, how you relate to the world and, ultimately, to yourself (which I mean literally: your self).
Enthusiasm is great, but there’s a particular head-space you need to exist within to get “good results”, and a lot of people aren’t there. One reason is that “good results” has no concrete definition. The other problem is that “good results” are often disconnected from the reality of the situation.
The accomplished athletes you read about generate your impression of what accomplished athletes do. The people you train with, the people you know, the things you read about ― these all become the ruler you use to measure everything else.
Statistically speaking, most of your results come from outcomes that you can’t control. Your genes and epigenome. Your family life and culture. Your personality and tendency to behave in certain ways. The deliberate steps you take to improve, in comparison, have a depressingly low correlation with absolute results. Nearly everything about your life besides your training program and your diet affects your results more than those two things.
About all you can do is show up and train. If everything else falls into place, you succeed. If not, you don’t.
But that’s not how we think. We think that our training and talent and work ethic make us great and strong. Admittedly that sounds much better than “I was born with the right genes and right life-circumstances and was afforded the right opportunities due to a sequence of chance events”, even though that statement is arguably much closer to the truth. Our brains like the illusion that we’re in control, so that’s what we believe. That’s the myth we tell ourselves and each other.
I realize the immediate and intuitive reaction to that idea is not pleasant. Chances are you got a little angry, felt a little twinge of helplessness, or dismissed the whole idea when you read that you aren’t responsible for your success. Maybe a little of all three.
After all, you work hard. You train your ass off and sacrifice all kinds of fun to hit the gym and stick to your diet. You feel great and look great and obviously this cannot be the right answer. And, if outcomes are mostly down to blind chance, and our beliefs about work ethic are just delusions, then why try at all? Just do whatever and you’ll get what’s coming.
That inevitability is exactly what I’ve spent this entire project trying to argue against. That sounds nonsensical after I’ve just said that, by and large, it is exactly that. And yet, while the belief that you’re capable and in control of your life may be unlikely, it’s also powerful and deeply ingrained within us. That belief runs so deep that you instinctively recoiled when you read the paragraph saying it wasn’t true.
Getting angry or depressed or arguing over genetics versus work ethic is beside the point and I don’t care to address it. In fact, I think setting up the argument on those terms is the entire problem.
Whether you’re a successful champion who believes that work means more than gifts, or the underweight beanpole who’s resigned to genetic fatalism, you’re both wrong by some degree. No champion is there solely because of his or her willpower or work ethic or determination. No “hardgainer” is there solely because of his or her genes.
To me the more interesting question is how we can reconcile both sides of this puzzle ― or better yet, how to redefine the whole problem so that it isn’t a problem at all. How can we accept biological inevitability, and yet take back a sense of control and purpose? How can we use randomness and our optimistic biases to our advantage, instead of falling victim to ego-stroking or bitterness when you realize that you probably won’t achieve certain goals?
That all comes down to how you define “results” and what you expect out of your efforts. Understand the mindset and you can make anything work.
Totems and Training Wheels: A Case For Optimism
Jamie Lewis, who we met back in the first chapter, trains without holding anything back. He’s in the gym most every day of the week, sometimes twice, lifting as heavy as he can stand. The work is brutal, but undeniably effective.
What sticks out to me isn’t Jamie’s training. He’s unorthodox, to be sure, and he’s got the results to back it up, but what really stands out is how he came to his workouts rather than what they are. He pulls no punches when it comes to criticizing the status quo, and takes a special joy in destroying commonly-held dogma about taking it easy.
A lot of readers would focus on the hard-nosed attitude and, as pale imitators, try to bring it to their own workouts. There’s no harm in bringing a devil-may-care attitude to your training, but that misses the point.
It’s not the flippancy or the “who cares?” attitude that brings results, rather than the mentality that leads to it: focusing on What Matters and ignoring everything else. You can be flippant about overtraining once you realize that it has no importance to your lifting.
That’s really what separates this crowd of results-getting strong people from the mass of would-bes in the gym. It’s not what you do or what you say, it’s why you’re doing those things at all.
Call it motivation. Call it enthusiasm or positive outlook. Call it belief if that’s what you prefer. These people all have their head in what they do, and never look back. They do more than just believe in their training. They throw themselves in and never let a doubt enter their minds.
No second-guessing, no jumping to next month’s new 16-week program.
These people didn’t get strong because they picked up a new badass workout. They did the badass workout because that’s what gets the job done, overtraining be damned.
Do our beliefs really affect our training like that? Might it be the other way around, that these people are enthusiastic and mentally zeroed-in because training goes good for them? Are they outliers after all, and the attitude only reflects their self-biased thinking?
Maybe. Probably. We can’t rule out the effects of genes and circumstance on final outcomes. But, given all we’ve seen so far on the tight relationship between our bodies and our psychological condition, I’m more inclined to treat the attitude as more cause than effect.
What you do with what you’ve got depends on you.
❧
Beliefs are powerful. So powerful that researchers involved in drug and medical trials will tell you that the placebo effect is their worst enemy. Even researchers can fall for it, which is why the double-blind experiment ― where neither subject nor experimenter know exactly who has what ― is a standard. The things we want to believe have a way of creeping into reality, making it hard to determine what’s a real effect of the pill you’ve been given and what’s the seemingly magical power of mind-body healing.
A placebo, a Latin word meaning “I will please”, is otherwise known as a sham medical intervention. Doctors tell their patients a little white lie, making the patient believe he’s being treated, and surprisingly enough, the fake treatment works as well as (or, often, better than) the real thing.
The classic example is the patient who desperately wants a pill, anything to help fix them up. The doctor grudgingly writes a prescription, and the patient goes on his way. A few weeks later, the patient comes back for a follow-up and he can’t hold back his excitement.
The pills worked like magic, says the patient. Nothing unusual there, except that magic medicine was a sugar pill.
The placebo effect happens when patients believe they’re undergoing a treatment meant to cure them. Even though the pills are just plain table sugar in a capsule, the patient gets better. This happens across a bewildering range of treatments and medical interventions, to the point that we cannot ignore it as a potent force in our state of well-being.
The placebo effect may frustrate clinical trials, but look at it from the patient’s point of view and it’s a kind of magic. Improve your health, and do so without drugs or surgery? It sounds like witchcraft.
This remains a poorly-understood process, but what we can take away is that the meaning ― the ritual, the ceremony, the cultural importance ― of any treatment we use is as important at the treatment itself.
Psychological outlook often matters in subtle ways. Robert Sapolsky mentions that feelings of control and predictability, along with social support, are the best ways to diminish an overactive stress-response in the chronically stressed, as one example. Other research shows that feeling motivated and in charge ― called self-efficacy ― with a positive outlook similarly affects your physical responses as well as your likelihood of sticking with a diet or exercise program.
If you’re lifting weights or training for a marathon or just trying to get through the work day, it’s important to believe you’re in control so that you’ll show up ― and while you’re at it, you decide to eat better since you’re training, after all. Whether you actually are in control is beside the point.
From the standpoint of science, determining whether a treatment actually works or is just a matter of statistical noise is paramount. You have to be cautious and skeptical, and that in turn means approaching results with a reserved bearing. We weight-training and casual-exercising folks, we’re concerned with results, and the strict correctness scientific specifics (beyond a point) isn’t our concern as long as the end results are there.
You could “be honest” and tell yourself that you’re not in control and at the whim of your genes, but to what purpose? You’ve adopted a mindset, one which may or may not be accurate, and have made that your reality.
The placebo effect doesn’t mean that any old thing will work, but it does mean that our beliefs, and the cultural rituals and totems that give them meaning, can enhance an already effective treatment.
If one thing’s clear, whatever the common features are among successful athletes, obsession with minutiae isn’t one of them. Does it really matter, from the standpoint of achievement and satisfaction, whether or not you’re doing things “wrong”? Is that really the yardstick we should use?
Certainly it’s sensible to take a critical look at your training and diet when you aren’t getting results. When a skinny kid tries to gain weight with six meals of chicken and broccoli, when an overweight person tries to run marathons to leanness, then it makes sense to question and take a more science-informed approach.
There are objective facts about the human body and how it responds to exercise and feeding. Once those bases are covered, however, I don’t think there’s much use from zooming in even further in hopes of finding extra layers of efficiency. The tangled networks of biochemistry have little to say about the outcomes of workout programs or diets. There’s too large a gap between the knowledge and its application.
Once the objective knowns are in place ― and there are surprisingly few of these ― there’s just too much noise for words like “right” or “wrong” to apply.
