- 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.
