Forrest Gump said life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get.
The Grandma in Parenthood said life is like a roller coaster.
Ferris Buehler said life moves pretty fast and if you don’t stop and look around once in a while you could miss it.
Brian Faulkner said life is like a book. There are good chapters and bad chapters. When you read a bad chapter, you don’t stop reading the book. If you do, you’ll never get to find out what happens next.
I like all those, but I got another one for ya.
I also say that life is like going to the gym.
Let me explain.
We all go to the gym so we can improve. We want to be fitter, stronger, leaner, healthier, live longer, fit into better clothes.
The process is simple, not to be confused with easy. Find something heavy and lift it. Then move around a bit so you sweat and pant a little. See? Easy. The actions required to make the process come alive are more complicated. Let’s just use a simple example that nearly everyone can readily understand.
The arm curl.
While standing, hold a bar of any weight with palms forward and arms straight down in front of you. Keeping the elbows locked in place, bring the bar up toward your chest or chin. Then lower the bar. Tada, an arm curl. To lift the weight, the bicep at the front of the upper arm must contract – bringing the elbow into flexion. The more times you curl this weight, the sorer your arm will likely become. Unless, that is, you are holding a bar that weighs a mere 5 pounds, in which case you may be here a while to achieve the same burning, sore feeling.
So, let’s pretend that at whatever weight you’ve chosen, you can reasonably perform eight repetitions. But you’ve got a partner with you, and this person is goading you on to squeeze out another three reps. You were prepared to get eight reps in, but forced yourself to crank out a total of eleven reps. This makes your arms really sore.
The muscle responds to the nervous system impulse, and the added weight has now done some micro damage to the muscle fibers (and this is okay – it is expected and even desired). Being so smart, the body now figures that you might do this to it again. So it will repair the bicep muscle while you rest and sleep. It will repair it stronger so it will be capable of performing this test again more easily.
Incidentally, a muscle fiber (sarcomere) cannot contract partially. It is either on or off. When you lift a coffee cup, the entire muscle is not activated. A few fibers are brought into play because the body knows it doesn’t need every ounce of strength to lift a coffee cup. But when we lift a fifty-pound barbell to absolute failure (meaning we can’t lift the bar another time), the body recruits more and more fibers into the action, causing them to contract in unison, completing the task. As the body heals from this performance, it builds more muscle fibers and makes the current fibers slightly bigger. The nervous system also learns to not only recruit more fibers earlier in the exercise, but to send a stronger signal to the fibers so they are more quickly capable of this performance in the future. If we don’t “push it” in the gym with each exercise, we won’t grow because we haven’t asked the muscle to go beyond its preset conditions of work.
Let’s recap. We go to the gym with a predetermined goal. We want to lift a certain amount of weight a certain number of times. Mentally we have set our goal. If we meet that goal, we keep going until we cannot go any further. If we don’t meet that goal, it’s because we weren’t strong enough yet to meet that goal, but have exhausted ourselves (failure) before we could attain it. But either way, we have created conditions in the body to make ourselves stronger so we can meet and exceed that goal in the future. Over time, we can notice the improvements in our appearance, energy, focus, and abilities. Given enough time, others will notice as well.
Shouldn’t our lives be like this?
Shouldn’t we challenge ourselves so we must perform at peak performance and perhaps even fail, so we can be stronger the next time we face a similar challenge? Moreover, our daily lives are inundating us with daily challenges which push us to perform at our peak, if only for a little while. If we win, we can handle a stronger challenge next time or handle a similar challenge with greater ease. If we lose, we become stronger so we can handle that challenge again in the future, or can now handle even greater challenges. As we overcome more of our obstacles, we notice the changes in our resilience, our focus, our inner strength. Given enough time, others will notice as well.
Over the years of practically living in the gym, I’ve seen lots of people come and go. We are approaching that time of year where everyone gets a gym membership for that resolution and quickly realizes that the gym makes you sore. If you take on too much, you will be sore for a few days. This often drives people to quit. Other people will go through an entire workout and never really push themselves. They perform their exercises like they are shopping for shoes. They never really struggle, sweat, grind, or even change the expression on their faces. These people seem to never change. They look exactly the same ten to twenty years later.
If you want to see improvements in your fitness levels, you have to push yourself in the gym. If you want to see improvements in your life, you have to look at your life’s challenges as preparation for future trials. It may be tough for a moment, you may come away sore, you may not be able to take another similar challenge for a bit, but you will get stronger. Stronger on the inside.
Also, by going to the gym, you become accustomed to failure. You acquaint yourself with taking something on and needing help (can you spot me, bro?). But you get stronger each time. I purposefully fail on each exercise, because that’s where the growth happens. Nothing good happens in the comfort zone. The comfort zone is where dreams go to die.
Treat life this way. Get used to failing once in a while, so you can become stronger for the next challenge.
At the gym, someone may ask you how you got to be so strong. You can tell them you failed a lot to get here. When someone asks you how you got through that rough patch without crumbling, you can tell them you failed a lot to get here.
Go ahead, fail a little bit.
Get stronger, inside and out.
Weeg
Joe “Weeg” Weigant is a Board Certified Massage Therapist, Holistic Health Authority, Reiki Master Teacher, Herbalist, Metaphysician, and Empowerment Coach. He combines bodywork, energy work, and coaching to improve quality of life by healing from the outside in and from the inside out.
Weeg sells Nature’s Sunshine Products, Pure Herbs Ltd., doTERRA, and Juice Plus+. Weeg suggests lifestyle changes and provides herbal remedies to his clients so they may build new habits for long life and vibrant health. He teaches Karate and Tai Chi, Reiki Certification, as well as seminars and workshops in metaphysical and spiritual matters. Weeg is available for sessions at Tri State Holistic Wellness by appointment only.
Contact by text 812.568.5356, or Facebook Messenger to set an appointment.
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