Every so often I hear that pop-quiz question: “If you could go back in time and talk to your younger self, what would you tell him or her?” The implication, of course, is that we could walk back into the past and convey the immense wisdom that we’ve accumulated, to teach our past selves to avoid all the mistakes we made, maybe steer them on to a better path.
That question makes me laugh, because I remember what it was like to be in Younger Me’s state of mind. Having anyone, even a time-traveling Future Me, turn up and tell me this or that wouldn’t change a thing about what I felt. I’d have taken my own future advice in the same way I did the advice any know-it-all adult back then.
Some things can’t be learned by telling. Some things require a total change of perspective, so completely rewire and reframe your thoughts, that they can only happen with direct experience ― or hindsight. Raw information doesn’t mean a thing without the right perspective. Information can be taught. Perspective must come from experience.
For the more cynical take, we can’t learn except for screwing up.
Still, the question is interesting enough to answer, even if only the slightly weaker format: “what do you think your younger self would most benefit from knowing?”
I can answer that one easily enough. Patience.
Nature provides the ultimate examples of patience in action. Sandstone formations blasted by wind and water, stalactites in caves, even the eons-long processes of plate tectonics are all examples of minuscule effects combined with tremendous spans of time.
The smoothest pebble took hundreds of years of buffeting by water and jostling by other stones to rough out all the hard edges and sand it down to a fine finish. Adaptations to training aren’t much different, though thankfully they operate on a scale friendlier to the human lifespan.
The most useful advice I’d want my younger self to follow: relax, slow down, and let things take shape on their own accord. There’s little use in forcing things out, and then stressing out when they don’t work out as you planned. Set ambitious goals, yes, but don’t let them own you.
We all want results now. We expect to be muscled like an ox and shredded like parmesan cheese in six months. We put 30 hard-won pounds on our deadlift and, right over there, we see the next milestone: 50 more pounds! And, as we’re basking in the glow of success, we expect it to fall even faster.
Building a physique takes time. Hitting a triple body weight squat takes dedication and a lot of hard work. These things don’t just happen because you’ve decided to give weight training a shot. You don’t reach that kind of strength because you’re hardcore and never quit for anything. You don’t get there with good intentions and motivational quotes.
Treat training the way the sculptor treats a statue. One chip at a time. One chip is nothing. Put 10,000 chips on the floor and you’ve made a difference.
Patience.
Back in the first chapter, I mentioned that the graph of progress over time won’t be linear. You can’t expect to simply add five pounds every workout forever. The graph shapes up like a sine wave, or probably more true to life, the saw-tooth pattern of the Longtails strategy ― lots of steady going broken up by sharp spikes and abrupt dives.
We’re all susceptible to situational blindness. All we see is the immediate landscape around us. Those last few weeks when you hit a new PR and training has been just so amazing it just has to last forever. That bad day where 80% felt like a ton of slag, and come to think of it aren’t you just weak and hopeless?
We aren’t good at thinking beyond our immediate context. The progress-chart for your entire career may reach spectacular heights, but at any given moment it’s difficult to step out of the frame and see from that perspective. All we see is the new PR or the really crappy day.
We always regress to the mean. Our goal with training is to make sure that the mean trends upwards. The spikes and valleys come with the landscape, and our job is to work with them.
Beginners are, paradoxically, the least likely to need any extraordinary training methods and the most likely to want them. Beginners, by definition, have experienced little to none of the adaptations you’d expect after years, or even several consistent months, of lifting weights.
What I don’t want to see is under-muscled people with three months of training behind them trying to copy the daily max strategy and claiming I said it was a good idea. I have two good reasons for saying this.
As I wrote in the first chapter, strength is built on a foundation of muscle. “Neural” training works by squeezing all the potential out of what muscle is there. If you’re 6’4 and weigh 180 pounds, or 5’9 and 150 (as a male), I’m sorry to say that you don’t have much of an engine to work with. Yes, there are weight classes in strength sports, and yes you can always find some outlier that seems to counter this argument, but if you really were the next Naim you would already know it.
You cannot tease out an impressive strength level from an under-muscled ectomorphic frame. You need muscle. Worry about body weight ratios once you’ve added some size.
This is not what beginners want to hear, I realize. Young men are particularly susceptible to this thinking, but an increasing number of women are also falling into this trap (which is good on one level, as it means more women lifting weights, but we still need to balance the enthusiasm with pragmatism if for no other reason than I’d like those women to keep lifting instead of becoming disgruntled and discouraged).
My ideas on daily training are not going to match up to the starry-eyed dreams of the fresh and enthusiastic. I’m pushing for a casual, relaxed approach to strength, and if you’re not on board with me, you will run yourself into the ground.
There’s an inertia to training that can only come from time spent lifting. What I didn’t understand as a beginner is that tissues can adapt quickly, but there’s also a lot of lag-time, and the delay increases as you improve. Stability-seeking mechanisms switch on and push back against your muscle-building and fat-losing efforts. These set ranges for muscle mass and body fat put the handbrake on, though they never truly stop your progress. All that time you train, you’re making improvement at each step of the process.
It may not feel like it. You won’t always see changes happening fast enough for that self-portrait satisfaction that we all want. You may not add 50 pounds to your squat and deadlift every year. No matter how awesome you feel after hitting a new PR, you probably won’t see another 100 pounds on your squat with just six more months of training.
Enthusiasm is great. You need goals and the drive to reach them. Just don’t get so caught up in the hype that you unravel when it doesn’t happen, turning into one of those panicky program-hoppers who won’t stick to a plan more than a week.
No matter how crappy you feel, whether or not you get the quick emotional reinforcement of new PR lifts, you haven’t stopped gaining. Put in five years, ten years, twenty, you’ll accrue more potential for muscle, stronger joints, a whole assortment of physiological adaptations that your lesser-trained self simply won’t have. Changes in the way your genes express themselves. Changes wired right into your brain and in the structure of your muscle fibers. These processes all take time, and no motivational slogans, no amount of hard work, no drugs, can replace that investment of consistency.
A background of training is an advantage that I could never have imagined as a beginner, and that most people will never train long enough or hard enough to understand. They’ll give up before the process really starts.
That’s reason number two. Beginner, female or male, you do not have the background to accurately judge this. You aren’t tuned in to your body, and even if you are, you’re more likely to ignore it and train by your ego. If you can’t train patiently, really spend time introspecting and learning when it’s go-time, and when it’s time to go home, then you are going to fail if you try to lift every day. You will overestimate what you can do, push too hard, and burn yourself out. You haven’t learned how to train, and no amount of good intentions will overcome that.
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.