Organizing your training by motivation and emotional output requires knowing when to let go and unleash the beast, when to keep a safe distance from gym-intensity, and it requires, most of all, that you practice these skills.
We need to challenge ourselves, but in measured drips of effort, not the crippling, soul-emptying exhaustion that defines most “go hard or go home” theories of exercise.
We need focused, directed application of nervous energy, directed right into the bar or the tire or the stone.
We need to learn the opposite: how to leave that psychic energy in reserve when we aren’t using it, an elusive condition otherwise known as relaxation.
We’re grading our mental efforts, using our mental energy appropriately and in the right circumstances. We grow larger reserves of willpower, become more resistant to fatigue, and better at switching on and releasing that energy exactly when we need it and nowhere else.
N ot Less. Appropriate. Knowing when to go all-in, when to be easy, and teaching ourselves how to do this with the right programming.
Ivan Abadjiev, recognizing this, says to go for it. Don’t worry about the emotional wind-up or feelings of exhaustion. By his thinking, lifters will eventually adapt to routine max attempts, and the neuro-endocrine systems fortify themselves. With repeated exposure to the stresses of heavy weights, lifters become better able to handle those stresses.
Abadjiev suggests that these lifters aren’t simply boosting their arousal levels, but are actually becoming better at throttling back down to normal. It’s the calming and soothing response of the parasympathetic nerves that they develop and learn to control.
Lifters with better autonomic control are only putting their mental energy into the actual working sets, switching it on exactly when they need it and no longer. Like Sapolsky’s zebra fleeing the lion, the stress-response acts as intended. Face the threat, then relax.
That’s what we want. We want to conserve nerve force, as Boeckmann wrote, to keep our cool in training and learn how to mete out our energy only when it’s most needed.
What happens after you spend a few weeks squatting every day? The stress-response kicks in when you’re actually lifting the weight but, crucially, you aren’t spending hours jittery and nervous before it happens ― and when the lifting’s done, everything winds down back to normal.
The stress is intense but brief, just how it’s supposed to be.
Feelings of control and predictability make the difficult ― like jumping out of an airplane ― into the normal. You spend a few weeks riding the adrenaline and on the edge of collapse, and then it becomes normal.
No big deal.
V.S. Ramachandran speaks of the “James Bond reflex”, in which the emotions are inhibited but the actions are not.53 This is what we call a dissociative state, in which you lose yourself in the moment and your emotions separate from the experience. This is the kind of thing that soldiers, police, and martini-sipping secret agents receive training for.
Diminishing the automatic emotional response is, in effect, improving your recovery powers (I’ll say more on this in Chapter 10).
I can’t overstate how huge this is. You can train as often as you want as long as the motivated workouts are managed. Here, motivated workout covers any artificially-inflated performance. Using pre-workout stimulants. Psyching up to hit a training max. Entering a competition. Anything you do that elevates your performance above your normal calm baseline.
Managed can mean that your psyched-up workouts and maximal attempts are infrequent. Maybe you take one or two workouts each week ― or each month ― and use them for P R attempts. Let a little adrenaline go, rest a little longer than usual, and see if you can’t add 5 or 10kg to your best poundage, or squeeze out an extra rep or three on your best set at 85%.
Managed could mean that you don’t have any plan, but you take legit P R attempts any time you feel up to it. And in exchange for a few weeks of hard efforts, you leave every third or fourth week for psychological recovery ― you still train, but without any emotional wind-up.
Managed could mean powering your way through and forcing your body to adapt to regular max attempts.
Whatever you do, the important part is that you have a strategy acknowledging your mental preparation.
Whether Abadjiev’s explanation meets the strictest standards of scientific correctness, I can’t say for sure. I’m not particularly concerned with those technicalities, as I think he’s on to something in principle irrespective of the precise science. Abadjiev points out an often-neglected aspect of adaptation, illustrating that our bodies are far more robust than we give them credit for, and that our training can benefit from that resilience.
This opens an exciting possibility. We can make lifting a maximum weight a normal event in our daily routine, as uneventful as reading the paper with your morning coffee.
Make it normal and the stress-response can be trained just like any muscle.
Why not? After all, we’ve seen that feeling bad is only weakly coupled to performing badly. How you feel really is a lie.
There are limits, of course there are. Following this line of thinking will not be easy and is not for everyone.
You suffer. But you adapt.
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In as much as we can identify “a thing” responsible for overtraining at all, the brain is it. C N S fatigue, that modern-day bogeyman waiting to destroy anyone who works hard, is a function of altered brain activity. Your brain-state changes in order to cope with a perceived stress, and that creates a cascade of physical symptoms that include feelings of fatigue and reduced motivation, altered hormone profile, and, when taken to extremes, decreased performance. Whether caused by accumulated tissue trauma or lots of excessive emotional arousal, there’s not too much difference in the outcome.
Muscle recovery, hormones and immune signals, even C N S output, that’s all beside the point. Those processes are all aspects of an incredibly complex system trying to keep itself (that is, you) alive.
In the last few chapters, we’ve seen how intricate, interrelated, and almost miraculous that relationship between mind and body truly is, not to mention how poorly we understand the threads connecting squishy flesh to the not-physical world behind our eyes.
Psychology matters. Where you sit relative to the avoidant introvert or sensation-seeking extrovert, or between the neurotic high-reactor or sedate normal-reactor, impacts your life. Your intuitions, your gut feelings, your instinctive reactions, that all influences your physical state. Your mind lays the foundation for subsequent physical responses.
The link between mental well-being and physical health is becoming clearer by the year. While there’s as yet little to no research into the effects on exercise and physical training, we’re talking about many of the same biological systems and behaviors. The same “stuff” that keeps you healthy and vital also happens to be the same “stuff”
responsive to and cultivated by exercise.
It’s obvious that some people are “just like that” when it comes to temperament and personality (although whether that’s truly inherited or a product of environment is up for debate).
What isn’t so clear is which ― or how much ― of those tendencies are fixed, and what can be cultivated with effort. Plasticity means that nothing need be set in stone and many traits we’ve taken for granted as fixed actually can be changed with the right set of circumstances. If you train hard and often, will your mind and body trend towards a more stress-tolerant, fatigue-resistant mode?
I think so.
Training often conditions you to train often. We can train our whole psycho-biological system to handle brief, intense, and frequent stress events, to take the edge off and remove their destructive power.
We just have to make the effort to do it.
There’s something to be said for treating physical training as mental exercise.
Training has a belief-dependent quality which matters perhaps more than any of the
physical explanations. If you don’t believe that your goal is achievable or your program is going to get you there, then your entire condition ― psychological and physiological ― will respond as if that were true. That goes for medical interventions and I’d be highly surprised to find it has no impact on athletic performance.
Part of making daily training, any training, work is the belief. Your mind follows your thoughts. If you don’t believe that you can toughen up, push through dark days of sore muscles, and come out the other side as a more robust and fatigue-hardened lifter, then it won’t happen. You’ll give up and go complain about how overtrained your C N S got.
You’ve got to practice the mental along with the physical.
What you do is what you become. If you don’t practice it, you’ll never get good at it.