Nathaniel J. Baskin
The last three or four reps is what makes the muscle grow. This area of pain divides the champion from someone else who is not a champion. That's what most people lack, having the guts to go on and just say they'll go through the pain no matter what happens.
~ Arnold Schwarzenegger
Like going to the gym for strength straining, mastering a new skill of any kind requires consistent repetition, strong goals, and a patient and persistent mindset. Whether you’re seeking to develop your writing abilities, conquer a sport, or pick up a new musical instrument, the willingness to push through discomfort and challenge your limits is crucial to success. How can we generalize the weightlifter’s approach?
When it comes to lifting weights, it’s essential to do your reps and sets. A rep, or repetition, constitutes one execution of an exercise, whereas a set is a group of reps. What do reps and sets look like for other activities? If you’re a musician, the intuition of reps and sets could be applied to practicing your scales over and over again. If you’re studying physics, doing your reps and sets could involve solving collections of practice problems. Or if you’re committed to learning a new language, you could expand your vocabulary by using flashcards as reps, and categorizing them into sets.
The key to success in any pursuit is to identify the individual “reps” that, when practiced repeatedly, etch the skill into your wiring like grooves on a vinyl record. As Schwarzenegger describes in the above quote, the ideal number of reps within a set should push you just past the edge of your existing capacity. Practiced consistently, you can escalate the “weight” of your exercises to strengthen whatever muscle you choose to build.
Once we’ve divided our activities into reps and sets, it’s important to set goals that challenge us to make measurable gains. At its essence, proper goal-setting is a physics problem; when we wish to go the distance, we first have to know where we’re starting, and then we have to figure out how fast we can move forward.
The variables involved in setting our starting point include the weight per rep (ie how challenging a single rep is), the number of reps per set, and the number of sets. One helpful concept in weightlifting is the one rep max, which is the maximum amount of weight you can lift for a single rep. What does this mean for the other kinds of activities we’ve described? For music, this could be the most difficult song you’re capable of playing. For physics, this could be the most challenging problem you can solve. And for learning a new language, this could be the most difficult reading level you can reach. When it comes to picking the amount of weight per rep, it’s most useful to pick some fraction of our one rep max. Every person and every activity is different, so at the end of the day pick amounts that challenge you but that you can still perform consistently.
Once we’ve found an ideal starting point, we next need to know how much and how quickly we can increase our weight. This is exactly where a tangible log comes in handy. Whatever your pursuit is, be sure to keep track of your progress! When we have all the information we need, we can extrapolate into the future, and confidently set achievable goals that motivate us toward greatness.
With any challenge, progress can often be painfully slow and incremental. For this reason, it’s important to maintain a patient and persistent mindset. Just as a weightlifter trusts in their process to achieve great results over time, it’s critical in any pursuit to maintain consistency of practice for its own sake.
Patience is the acceptance that impatience is just as slow. While we’d all like to believe that willpower alone can conquer all of our problems, the fact of the matter is that there are always factors beyond our control that limit our pace. Sometimes, we can be doing everything within our capacity, and still not notice immediate results. When we encounter roadblocks, the patient approach is to work with the situation as it is, not as we wish it to be.
Persistence is the willingness to persevere in our practice, even when we fall short of our expectations. In any journey, obstacles are inevitable. What separates those who succeed from those who fail is the ability to look past short-term setbacks in favor of long-term growth through continued effort.
At the end of the day, building lasting strength in any endeavor requires long term commitment toward building positive habits. The path to growth is often quite simple, but not necessarily easy. Embracing repetition, setting strong goals, practicing patience, and focused persistence are proven to go a long way for many people. At the same time, it’s important to remember that every journey is unique. What works for someone else, or even what’s worked for you in the past, may not work for you today. When exercises fail to yield results after consistent effort, don’t be afraid to pivot and refresh your approach. Just keep going.