I don’t like pain and I certainly don’t like failure. Neither are comfortable and neither make me feel good. In fact, the latter if we are not mindful, can often become a self-fulfilling prophecy. When we identify our points of failure, we see very clearly our limitations. And when we see these limitations, our minds remind of us of our “capacity”, and we have a hard time pushing beyond these limits as a result.
As is evident from a number of the posts on this blog, I see fitness as an important aspect of living excellently and value the pursuit of physical fitness. There is definitely a physical component to exercise that makes you a more capable person. But there is also a mental resilience that is produce when you push yourself up to and past your comfort zone and into the realm of failure. I definitely experienced this phenomenon early on when I started lifting seriously about 5 years ago.
Strength training had always been a desire, but I never found a strategy and implementation that could stick with. With the help of Mark Ripptoe’s book Starting Strength and a cheap rack, barbell, and plates in my basement, I began my strength training journey with squats, push-press, deadlifts, and bench press. Like every typical beginner, I started focusing on my form, and then began adding weight. I was easily able to increase the amount of weight on the bar which led me to set big goals. However, along the way, the amount of weight began to approach the limits that I was able to lift at that point in time.
One day during squats, with the bar, heavy on my back I went down for a squat but didn’t come back up. I found my failure point. And that goal that I was seeking just got a little farther away. Unfortunately, that failure planted a flag in my mind. That was the point and the weight that I knew I couldn’t accomplish a rep. The next time I got underneath the bar there was a nagging little voice in the back of my head that said, “You can’t do this. Remember, what happened last time?“
I began to notice a negative mental cascade. My brain began telling my body its limits. My body responded by obeying. And pretty soon lighter weights that I was previously squatting seemingly got heavier, and I began to fail those reps too. That set off a period of time in my lifting where I didn’t accomplish much. My progress began to flatten. In fact, as I looked at myself, I didn’t really begin to see a ton of progress at all. Don’t get me wrong, I was getting down in the gym. I was lifting weights; I was working; I was sweating. But all that effort wasn’t necessarily creating meaningful results, in either the amount that I could lift or in the way, I looked as a result of lifting.
I began playing around with programming playing with 3x5 and 5x5 workouts. For a time, I tried the 5-3-1 technique and was able to push past the initial limit, albeit with one or two rep sets. But I still was not able to see sustainable progress as I was trying to increase my squat weight.
A friend of mine recommended to me that I try high volume sets. Up until this point, I was focusing on 5 rep sets. I was initially resistant to the idea of high-volume sets. To me, they just sounded agonizingly painful. But eventually I gave in. I swallowed my pride. I dropped the weight, and I started working 10 rep sets.
Slowly, the weight began increasing. I began to approach my previous limit and eventually matched it but this time with 10 reps. Then I passed it! The result? I added 50 pounds to my 1 rep max that I previously failed. And the weight that I was previously lifting for 5 reps, I was now easily repping x 10 and pushing my five max 50 pounds higher than before.
I was recently watching a video of a personal trainer talking about how to produce gains in the gym. He was making the point that if you want to get that pump, if you want to increase the amount that you can lift or grow the size of your arms, you need to push your reps into the range beyond pain and to failure. As I reflected back on my own lifting, I began to realize that often times I stopped just short of the pain point, largely because that’s the point when lifting becomes uncomfortable. But what I had failed to realize is that period of time between pain and failure is where the growth happens. In fact, stopping before the pain makes all the previous work a waste of time. I had been leaving a lot of time and sweat and tears on the gym floor that didn’t result in any growth because I didn’t push past pain to the point of failure. This was a big mindset shift for me in the gym. Where I previously saw failure as a marker of my limitation, now I see it as a beacon guiding me to further growth.
If we think about it, this same mindset can be applied to other areas of our life as we pursue this idea of excellence. Growth doesn’t come when we do things that are easy. It comes when we pursue something that is hard - not up to the point of pain, but beyond the point of pain as we approach the point of failure.
So, here’s my reminder to myself and to you. As you go through life embrace your failures. The fact that you failed means that you have a goal; that you are not aimlessly wandering. View failure as a marker of your current progress towards your goals. And when life gets hard, lean into the pain. This is the stimulus for growth.
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