Why You Should “Strength” Train.
This week, I’m going to hit the high note right at the beginning of this essay. So if you don’t feel like reading it all, your key takeaway is as follows:
Life is heavy and unforgiving. Your training should reflect that.
We’re living in an unprecedented time that has more and more followers looking for fitness advice online. Consequently, we reward and gravitate towards what looks the best, with seemingly no regard or appreciation for the practice.
Days feel long, but the months are going fast. Yet somehow, it feels like we’ve gotten nowhere (literally and figuratively).
I’m becoming more and more cynical about social media and what I’m experiencing and observing to be its adverse effect on initiative, confidence, and the resilient spirit. Summarized by what appears to be a loss of appetite for anything perceived as resistance.
Instead, we spend countless hours collecting conflicting information from perceived experts online, all while delaying the inevitable consequence of making a choice; easing our minds with the notion that this decision to pursue a better version of ourselves can be put off until some arbitrary time in the future. After-all, we have so much more time now, right?
The ultimate irony is that if we don’t consciously choose, time will choose for us. Time is the only perfectly balanced and unshakeable piece of your life. Time is secure. Time is invariable. Unceasing. Final.
We have all learned this lesson on different paths, yet arrived at the same destination.
Life is heavy and unforgiving.
I smile a little bit every time one of my clients picks up a weight, furrows their brow, and with a look of concern says,“this is heavy.”
Then 1 of 2 things happens. They’re humbled. Or, they’re about to be.
It saddens me that weightlifting metaphors usually get chalked up to “bro-science” or “meathead musings.” Objectively speaking, barbells and plates are two of few items that share the constant and changelessness nature of time itself.
The mental resistance you face each day — whether it’s anxiety, fear, or general apathy towards the world and your place in it — can all be made lighter by physically overcoming the resistance of something heavy.
Lastly, heavy is relative. What’s heavy for me, may feel light for you, and vice versa. The load is not the objective. Rather, it’s the ability to overcome. Overcoming is a learned practice.
Train heavy. Train to overcome. Get what you came for.
