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.