"How can lifting a bar with weights be interesting?"

An old friend of mine recently saw a video of me training and the following dialogue took place:

- I am scared by what I see…
  Now seriously… how can lifting a bar with weights be interesting???
- It is not interesting to you, but for me and many others it can mean a whole lot.
- Ok, I get that… so what do you find in it?

And this got me thinking…

Athletes engaging in strength training to improve their performance and increase their chances at competitive success is easily understandable. But this isn’t about them. I’m not a professional or competitive athlete. And while I do have “personal training goals”, which could be simply summed up by “getting stronger and healthier”, I also lift simply because I genuinely enjoy it. “Lifting a bar with weights” is a means to an end but it is also an end in itself. Why? And how can that be explained to a person who has never experienced what “lifting a bar with weights really feels like”?


Strength training vs. lifting weights at the gym

The first thing that needs to be clarified is the difference between lifting weights at the gym and actual “strength training”.

Lifting weights at the gym, as most people understand it, typically means running through a list of exercises for 3 sets of 8-12 reps each, training different body parts on each visit (“chest and triceps”, “back and biceps”, and so on), mindlessly counting through the reps and sets. Many of the prescribed exercises are performed on fixed path machines: “fixed path” means you push or pull the handle and the machine follows a fixed path, so you don’t even have to pay attention to how exactly you are moving; you just put some effort against the machine and count down the reps. This type of training is highly repetitive, requires little brain activity (other than putting some muscular effort and counting from 1 to 10) and most people “endure” it, rather than enjoy it, in order to get to their desired results. The desired results mostly have to do with looking better (whether that is more muscular or leaner or more “defined” or more “toned”).

Strength training involves a very different mindset. The goal is very specific: get stronger at the basic movements through which your body applies force. “Looking good” is not the goal of strength training (although it can be a welcomed side effect). You no longer train “body parts”; now you train movements. The basic movement of extending your lower limbs (concurrent hip and knee extension) is usually trained by squat variations. The basic movement of extending your upper limbs is trained by upper body press variations (horizontal, like the bench press, vertical, like the overhead press, etc.). The basic movement of picking up a heavy object is trained by exercises that involve lifting an object off the floor, like deadlifts and cleans. Performing a deadlift stresses the quads, the hamstrings and glutes, the abs, obliques and spinal erectors, the lower/medium/upper traps, rhomboids, rear delts and shoulder rotator cuff, and the muscles of the grip, but all that doesn’t matter because strength training is about training the movement, not the isolated muscles. You don’t deadlift to target the quads, hamstrings, glutes, abs, obliques, erectors, traps, etc., you deadlift to get stronger at picking things up. The main strength exercises are performed with free weights and involve “compound movements” (i.e. movements that involve many different muscle groups acting along many different joints). That being the case, there is the need for constant attention to proper exercise execution. Lifting technique is necessary for effectiveness and safety of strength training, and training becomes more of a sport that involves learning how to use your body to move heavy weights, rather than an activity that involves simply counting reps while “feeling the burn” at your target muscle.

So now that lifting weights at the gym and actual strength training are differentiated, it’s time to delve deeper into what is so special about strength training that can make it interesting. Besides, even if the goals are performance-based (become stronger) rather than aesthetic (look better), and even if it is more demanding in terms of proper technique and overall body awareness, you are still just “lifting a bar with weights”.


The mental aspect of strength training

Strength training is more than just proper technical execution of major compound movements of your body using free weights. First and foremost, strength training is about mental effort.

From a physiological perspective, increasing your body’s force production is dependant on two major components: changes in the muscle architecture and changes in the nervous system. In simplified terms, muscle architecture has to do with the total amount and quality of your muscle mass (mainly muscle cross-sectional area, and fast-twitch and slow-twitch fiber cross-sectional areas) and it changes with proper exercise and proper food. The nervous system affects strength by controlling how/how much of your muscle mass contracts to produce force, and it can adapt in various ways (greater motor unit recruitment, improved intra- and inter-muscular coordination, greater neuron firing rates, etc.) to allow for your body’s musculoskeletal mechanism to produce more force. Simply put, your brain (primarily the motor cortex) decides on patterns of neural activation and produces the corresponding synchronized neural (electrical) impulses, each neural impulse travels through your spinal cord and subsequently through a neuron axon that exits the spinal cord and reaches a specific group of muscle fibers of a specific muscle of your body, and, once there, the neural impulse “activates” them (i.e. it initiates a cascade that results in contraction of those specific fibers). So basically: the brain produces a set of impulses, each impulse travels all the way to a specific muscle and causes specific fibers of that muscle to contract. What that set of impulses looks like (the pattern, the frequencies, etc.) affects how “strongly” the muscle contracts and, thus, how much force it produces.

Now that the physiology is out of the way, here comes the important part: the brain activity, the one that creates the muscle contraction and its intensity and therefore strongly affects how much strength is produced, is created and affected by “you”. Your determination and your strength of will can create “stronger” impulses and, subsequently, stronger muscle contractions. And just like learning a new skill, this is something you “learn”. With strength training you teach yourself how to create stronger muscle contractions and how to produce more force, in a similar way that, through practice, you learn the coordination and dexterity required to play a musical instrument. The difference between learning the skill of producing strength and learning the skill of how to play the piano is the type of mental effort required. In strength training, you need to willingly push your entire body to produce as much force as it possibly can. And once you are producing that force, you need to push it to produce more.

Strength training can indeed be described as “lifting a bar with weights”. But the mental effort behind that is what strength training is about. Strength training requires you to dig deep inside you. Find the things that motivate you and draw from them. Find the things that scare you and face them. Connect with your animal nature. Get in battle frenzy. Fight for every inch of ground you gain, tooth and nail. Ignore the instincts that tell you to stop. Ignore the instincts that tell you to save something for the way back. Feel the adrenaline rush through your body as you are facing the weight that would crush your former self. Struggle with every spec of your being to lift more than you could lift yesterday. To be something more than you were yesterday.

You don’t always win. Sometimes you face defeat. Sometimes you put everything you have into it and more, and you still fail. You still get crushed by the “bar with weights”. And it can get scary. And it's not even the fear of injury; it is the fear of failure. And you learn to deal with it. You have to. You learn to accept that you don’t always win, but that it’s always up to you to not give up. And when you do win, the bar with weights grants you with immediate trustworthy feedback. The bar with weights provides you with a quantifiable number and you know that “the iron never lies to you”. It doesn’t matter to the rest of the world, but inside you you know that, in some small, unimportant, trivial way, you have improved yourself. That is part of the beauty of the bar with weights.

That is why lifting a bar with weights is interesting to me. It gives me the chance to go all out. To put everything I have in one moment. To try with all my will. Win or lose, that is more than counting reps. That is more than looking good in front of the mirror. There is more to “lifting a bar with weights” than meets the eye. When you are lifting a bar with weights, your mind is the battleground.




Epilogue: “Find something you genuinely love and strive to become excellent at it”

I can’t remember where I heard this quote, but I can clearly remember how it resonated with me. Striving to become excellent at something is always a process by which you get to know yourself better. I don’t think it really matters what you are striving to become excellent at, just that you do. It could be a martial art, it could be a musical instrument, it could be a scientific discipline… or it could just be lifting a bar with weights. In every case, the goal is self-improvement. You get to test your abilities, come face-to-face with your talents and your inadequacies, and work towards overcoming the obstacles between you and a better version of yourself. Becoming excellent at anything requires long-term commitment, it requires genuine effort and it sometimes requires being brutally honest with yourself. It is a process that builds character and it is a process that, along with improving your target skill, can help develop your entire personality. Lifting a bar with weights might just be one of the most direct routes there.