Squat Every Day, page 9
Drawing on your rational powers actually causes physical changes very similar to the sympathetic stress-response. Self-regulation and autonomic control operate through similar parts of the brain, and researchers can actually measure mental effort and the exhaustion of willpower using a measure called heart rate variability (HRV).42
This is the one-two punch: exhaust yourself mentally from any kind of concentration or intense mental effort and you’re going to be at the mercy of any emotional desire that comes along. That might be ice cream and cookies, or it might be the desire to skip your workout, to skimp on cardio tonight, or to give up during that 1RM attempt. And on top of that, you aggravate the disrupted state-of-being caused by the stress-response.
Perceived Recovery
We can see now that central fatigue isn’t quite what we’ve been led to think. There is a process of “getting tired” happening, and it is as much psychological as it is physical (’psychological as physical’), but it isn’t quite that ambiguous killer-of-gains that “takes longer to recover” than muscles.
CNS fatigue is nothing more ― or less ― than “getting tired” during training. It’s a kind of tired that you can overcome with enough motivation, mind you, and that can be important to understand in itself. The difference between a PR time and second place, between hitting that PR lift and missing it halfway, or making your last two sets or going home tired can, literally, lie inside your own mental estimations and your desire to get it done.
It also means that you push past your current limits, and will probably suffer the consequences tomorrow when you wake up feeling like a mess.
This has an interesting consequence. While there aren’t any “recovery hitpoints”, what we see here is that fatigue (or “overtraining” if you prefer) has at least as much of a mental dimension as a strictly physical one. This might be confusing since I’ve said they’re the same thing ― and they are ― but this is an important difference.
An unmotivated or cognitively-exhausted person will be “fatigued” just as sure as a person who just finished a marathon. It’s the psychological perception that dictates this, generating the feelings. Regardless of what causes it, the sensation of fatigue and estimate of difficulty is, indeed, in our heads.
Let me be clear here: the distinction I’m drawing between “mental” and “physical” is not intended to invoke any sort of New Age woo-woo or to draw any sharp lines between mind and body. I’m not suggesting that there is any kind of spirit or soul or ectoplasm clinging to our brains.
What I’m suggesting is that the psychological aspect of fatigue is how we experience the changes in brain activity which are, in turn, caused by fatigue in our muscles. This is the subjective aspect of an objective process.
We might be better served to think of recovery as perceived recovery ― that is, the experience of feeling recovered ― rather than using “real” physical recovery of muscles and nerves and whatever else as the metric. We can’t do anything about the physical condition, but I don’t believe that’s the critical problem in the first place. The feeling of not-recovered reflects an underlying stress placed on your body, but that condition need not be a genuine physical limitation.
It might be that you feel bad for reasons that have nothing to do with your ability to train ― and details that you might not consider important can impact your performance. Your ability to train hard while dieting, for instance, might be compromised if carb and calorie intake is low. Without glucose to fuel your brain, you might find that it’s harder to generate and maintain effort, independent of any issues in your muscles.
Intense concentration and focus, or mentally-demanding stress at home or at work, might sap your self-regulatory powers, and this too would qualify as “neural fatigue”. You’re tired and not hitting all cylinders even though you didn’t “do” anything.
Ego depletion sounds like an argument for training however feels right to you. When your training doesn’t feel like a chore ― whether that’s HIT-style high-intensity or the bodybuilder’s volume or something else ― you’re more likely to repeat it. On the other hand, when your training beats you up and makes you feel bad, when you hate it and have to really force yourself to go, you’re setting yourself up for issues.
“Do what you like” does make sense, and is probably a good strategy at least some of the time. The pitfall should be clear, however: doing what you like isn’t always a recipe for ideal results. If it just happens that you like doing 50 sets of arms every day or running 20 miles a day, that doesn’t help you if you’ve got it in your head to compete in powerlifting.
We need a compromise between our willpower and goal-oriented processes. Otherwise we’re just training haphazardly, chasing feelings with no regard for outcomes. That’s what most of the gym-going populace already does, and it doesn’t work out so well for them.
Regardless of our natural tendencies, we can probably train and condition our psychological responsiveness to some degree. Even though behavioral leanings have a genetic component, there’s truth in the statement “you do what you become”.
Baumeister has since discovered that willpower can indeed be trained with practice. By regularly flexing your self-control circuits, you can strengthen them much as a muscle gets stronger with practice. The more you exert your will and train your attentional focus, the better you get at staying focused and in control. Better yet, the simple act of following an exercise program is one of the methods shown to improve your self-control resources. Other methods, which I’ll talk about later, include meditation and mindfulness training.
I think that “self-training” is a crucial skill. Just as our muscles can tolerate a lot of things if we take the time to build up to them, so can our minds. A good many folks will give up the instant things get difficult on a psychological level, or throw up their hands and go “overtraining!” at the first signs of a sore muscle. Worse, they’ll invoke science as a rationale. This is not simply a defeatist view, but one that depends on a particular set of ideas about the mind that, as I’ve hopefully demonstrated, just aren’t right.
A bolstered sense of self-control, though, means that you’re better able to last through a challenging workout and better equipped to come back the next day. The psychological dimension of recovery means that a stronger mind can, literally, out-will a physically-stressed body.
Can we train ourselves to freaky levels of strength by training willpower and mental focus alongside weight training, learning to “overcome fatigue” regardless of our “genetic” tendencies?
I offer a conditional “yes”.
I don’t believe that anyone without the right biology will, as an adult, be able to train for world-class performances in any sport of choice. You can’t take a burly 25 year old or an underweight 35 year old and make a top marathoner or a record-setting powerlifter, and if it does happen you’re looking at genes.
However, the question of elite performance is a separate issue. We want to know if we can train to do the best we can do given what we’ve got.
I do think that you can set massive gains relative to where you started, and that part of doing so is learning to treat exercise as mental, as well as physical, training.
Just showing up every day and moving around a reasonably heavy weight could count as training these psychological elements. I found an effect much like this, in that lifting became very automatic rather than a Big Event to get excited over. You might even find that your desire to train reflects the gym you train in, the people you train around, even the programs you use and books you read about training. Our minds are remarkably sensitive to circumstances like this, which in itself offers some intriguing performance-enhancing possibilities.
While our brains may come with presets that skew our behavior one way or another, we need not be slaves to them. The mind reflects brain function, and brain function reflects the state of your body. We can train all of these.
❧
I want to close this chapter with a cautionary note.
I know some of you will read this and instantly start thinking of ways to cheat your brain with nutritional strategies and supplements and drugs. Allow me to reiterate that the neurology is a very poorly-understood area with lots of interlocking pieces that continue to defy explanation by the best minds on the planet.
Much like I think trying to cure “high cortisol” with pills is a waste of time and money, I don’t think you’re going to cheat central fatigue. If you’re having these thoughts, I wish you luck in trying to apply performance-enhancement thinking to the problem.
It’s important to understand why we feel fatigued during training and why we feel awful between sessions, but as with so many topics in this book I don’t intend this explanation as a way to change things.
What we have now is a handle on neural aspects of fatigue, which is really just how you perceive physical exhaustion dependent on how much mental effort you’ve recently spent, and more importantly, what “overtraining” really is. Training alters the workings of the brain, and training agitates specific immune-system and neurological symptoms, which translate into feelings of tiredness during training.
Biology likes safety margins, the kind that engineers build into bridges. You always want to keep a buffer between working conditions and theoretical maximum tolerances lest you risk a catastrophic failure.
The safety margin is there for a reason. And yet there’s a conflict of interest with exercise, in which the entire purpose is to push, and hopefully expand, those physical limits.
The survival systems in your body are dumb. They can’t distinguish between a deliberate exercise program and physical labor that might kill you. Your body treats conditions as they come without concern for the intent behind them.
The question is, how much of the fatigue response is over-cautious helicopter parenting on behalf of your brain, and how much is a legitimate need to rest? How much of this phenomenon is a safety margin at all, rather than low pain tolerance?
These questions don’t, as yet, have concrete answers.
I don’t contest that there must be some limit to training. There are only so many hours in the day, and most of us don’t want to train for 20+ hours a week even if we have that kind of spare time.
There are also instances when lots of training is counterproductive. Some people already do push these limits in pursuit of pain or euphoria, when they’d be better suited with a more conservative but smarter approach to training. Overtraining is real, if you’re one of these self-motivated types who can’t sit still, and the last thing I want is to give the impression that I’m justifying that kind of reckless non-programming or being in the gym just so you can tell yourself that you’re one of the real hardcore.
But I do question the over-reaction that pervades the mainstream. I do think that most of us never approach the real physical limits, and in being so conservative we leave a lot of unused potential on the table.
I question the consensus opinion that lifting weights, hard and heavy, six or seven or ten hours a week is unsustainable. While 20 hours of training might throw off your work-life balance, it’s hard to see how training once a day, or even twice a day if you have the time, will send you off into an endless spiral of overtrained exhaustion.
The feelings are just that: feelings. Your nervous system is built from the ground up to respond to the sensory information flowing in from your body. Sensory input is sometimes right, as when you step on a nail or burn your hand, and sometimes it misleads us.
My contention is that, while it’s easy to rely on our intuitions about “feeling bad” as a marker of exercise performance (whether that’s avoidance of overtraining or the the pain-fetishism of mainstream exercise), we’re not always best served by doing that.
You want to pay attention, but sometimes ignoring it might be for the best. Of course, how well you handle that might have a lot to do with how you ― and your brain ― respond to exercise.
4
Hardgainers & Responders
“Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.”
–Mahatma Gandhi
Crime & Punishment
Criminologists, as the name hints, study crime. They want to understand why people misbehave. Since the beginnings of the field in the mid-16th century, criminologists have developed a range of theories to explain social deviance: actions that violate the rules and norms of society.
The earliest criminological theories treated human beings as reasoning actors free to choose, and with those powers of reason people would carefully weigh the costs and benefits of their choices. To theorists of the classical school, punishment ― especially quick, certain, and appropriate punishment ― serves as a deterrent to criminal behavior, as these rational actors will always factor the consequences into their choices.
Classical thinkers later gave way to the emerging school of behavioral positivism. Figures like Emile Durkheim and Robert Merton attempted to explain crime as a response to social inequalities and injustices. Circumstances, they argued, played as much of a role in crime and deviance as anything.
Others believed that physical traits could predict criminal behavior. According to Cesare Lombroso, a pioneer of biological positivism, criminals were evolutionary throwbacks, distinguishable from right and proper citizens by the abnormal shape of their skulls. The general premise ― that behavior could be linked to biological factors ― isn’t fundamentally wrong, even if the forebears of the idea were driven by the kooky racism of their age.
The paradigm shift brought about by modern neuroscience places the positivist view on much firmer ground. Now, instead of the crude measures of skull shapes and thick brows, we can draw on knowledge of the brain’s deep structure and observe how brain function correlates with behavior.
Still, the old beliefs persist. If you want to succeed in life, you simply apply yourself, work hard, and never flinch. Your success in anything, career, diet, athletics, comes down to how much you want it and how much you’re willing to work. As we’ve seen, current trends in neuroscience and psychology call these assumptions into question at their very core. We haven’t eradicated free will just yet, but there is a growing mountain of evidence suggesting that human behavior is strongly influenced by deeper biological drives in subtle but powerful ways.
We’ve already seen how Antonio Damasio’s patients can’t make decisions without their emotional inputs, how the brain can fool us into thinking we’re tired when we aren’t. We are body-centric thinkers, and the state of our bodies can have a powerful influence on our allegedly reasonable selves.
In the early 20th century, British psychologist Hans Eysenck wrote that extraverted personalities and neurotic behaviors, traits both linked to arousal in certain parts of the brain, could lead to criminal behavior. Eysenck’s arousal theory was expanded into the arousal-seeking theory of behavior by Donald Lindsley in 1952. Criminals, being more likely to feel unsatisfied by a normal, wholesome life, go out looking for action to sate their cravings, which Martin Zuckerman calls sensation-seeking behavior: “a trait defined by the seeking of varied, novel, complex, and intense sensations and experiences, and the willingness to take physical, social, legal, and financial risks for the sake of such experience.”
We’ve seen how fatigue can be likened to an emotion, and how it can percolate into conscious awareness and convince us of things that aren’t quite true. In this chapter, I want to take the premise of body-centric thinking in a slightly different direction.
The search for sensation and stimulus is a powerful driver of behavior in birds, reptiles, and mammals, humans included. These drives originate in the deep brain structures of the limbic system which, as we saw in the last chapter, are closely connected with our senses. Things we encounter in the environment, and things we feel on the inside, filter into the brain through these networks and, consciously or otherwise, generate emotions and feelings.
To what degree, and in what direction, these motivations influence us can vary widely from person to person. We’re all familiar with calm, quiet types, and loud, out-going types (and a range of personalities in between) even if we’ve never put too much thought into it. These temperaments (or “affective styles” in the lingo) suggest that we can become pegged to certain habits of thinking and acting, and these may be biological in origin.
The Reactive Mind
As far as out-going stimulus-seeking behavior goes, I’m about as far as you can get from the personalities envisioned by Eysenck and Lindsley. I don’t feel comfortable around crowds, especially unfamiliar faces. My idea of a good time is sitting in a quiet room with a book, or working on a project that has me plugged in to a keyboard. “Noisy” environments, places with lots of things going, lots of activity and lots of new faces, tire me out and quickly become overwhelming. Compared to the stereotypical stimulus-seeker, I’m a total buzzkill (unless you add beer to the equation).
While lots of hypotheses have been put forward to account for why stimulus-seekers are different from more reserved personalities, the one I’m most attracted to strongly resembles positivist ideas. While I want to walk carefully in laying out the relationship between mental characteristics and biology, I think there’s a strong case that the positivists were aimed in the right direction. Namely, I think that biology ― specifically, brain structure and function ― is a key influence on our behavior.
On one level that is obvious. Of course our brains determine how we think and behave ― it’s the brain. But we can also make the more subtle case that the different traits that make up our personalities and temperaments are, at least in some sense, wired in to us.
