Doing Hard Stuff

There are plenty of hard things we do out of necessity.  Making a living is hard.  Raising kids is hard.  Managing health care is excruciatingly hard.  And then there are hard things we do which fall into another category.  We choose them. That particular thing is a choice.

First, a plea.  Hear me out and trust me that I’ll take you somewhere. I wish I could tell you this in reverse order, giving you the end first, but I can’t.

Let’s just get this out of the way first:  I am an amateur in the area of weight training. I moved from being a life-long runner to weight training partly because I grew tired of my doctor advising that I find another form of activity.

I enjoyed distance running because I am not particularly skilled or competitive.  While running can involve both of those aspects, it doesn’t have to.  You can just decide how many days you want to run, decide on a distance for that run, and maybe choose a particular pace.

Enter weight training.  It’s a whole other beast. So many decisions… how many days to work out, which exercises to do, how many repetitions for each exercise, how much weight to use for those exercises, and when to increase weight. Then there’s proper technique for each of those exercises, as poor technique makes the lift less effective, or you end up injured.

While distance running can indeed be technical, weight training, at least the way I go about the two, is much more so. That was part of what attracted me to it the further I got.  That is what kept me in it when the results were less than ideal.

I started weight training from a terribly weak position. Part of that is my body type – ectomorph – which means I’m naturally tall and thin (at least thin in my younger days) and my body resists gaining muscle. The other part is something I learned from studying about weight training.  Your body adapts to what you ask it to do.  I had asked my body to run long distances since I was about 21 years of age.  The effect of that is your body figures out how to run in the most efficient way.  Subsequently, you drop muscle you don’t need for that activity.  Running was really the only type of training I did, apart from a little biking.  As I got older, I began to feel the effects of all those years of running.

I started weight training slowly, with just a few exercises, and added new ones over time.  I sought a lot of advice, and still do.  In no time at all, I began to bulk up.

Wrong.  I did not bulk up, even a tiny bit, even after two years. Two years into it, I realized that the word bulky would never be a word used to describe my physique.

I did, however, very slowly get stronger. I know that for a fact because I document my workouts on a spreadsheet, in an OCD type of way.  After all those years of using spreadsheets for various record keeping tasks, I found the perfect use for them.

So where does this fit into the idea of doing difficult things?  We’re getting there, and you don’t have to do resistance training to get it.

An interesting thing happens when you weight train, or really when you train in any physical way – you become hypersensitive to what your body is telling you.  You want to avoid injury. Early on I received warnings about being careful with specific areas, especially the shoulders.  I also entered into the process naturally cautious about my lower back, which had always been a source of soreness.

Weight training naturally produces some soreness which isn’t unusual or unhealthy.  Occasionally though, the discomfort can be related to damage that isn’t healthy.  The trick is to know when that is happening and know what to do when it does. 

A balance has to be struck. If you don’t push hard enough, there is no gain, no growth.  If you push too hard, there’s a risk of injury, and a regression of growth.

This brings me to the other aspect of weight training that I find so attractive.  I see it as a reflection of the challenges of life.

It took me a long time to wrap my head around the concept that challenges and difficult situations are good for us. As a child, I probably viewed those things as a nuisance to either avoid or to get through. I failed to understand their necessity, and their benefit. As I grew older, I slowly began to catch on.  Was I slower than normal?  I don’t know. 

Some difficulties come our way, beyond our control.  They end up being beneficial, but we would never volunteer to enter into them.

There are other difficult situations we enter into voluntarily.  We make the choice. Sometimes you see this behavior early on in a person's life. That wasn’t me.

When we make that decision to intentionally put ourselves in a difficult, stressful, challenging position, we set ourselves up for growth.  However, just like any physical training, we must strike a balance between the right amount of stress, and too much stress.

That balance is the trick.  Parents are often good at helping their children keep things in balance, but mistakes can be made in either direction.  Parents can be overprotective and prevent their children from being challenged.  On the other hand, they can be hesitant to protect their children from over committing.

Once we are out from under the wings of our parents, these decisions are left up to us.  We either determine to do it all on our own, or we draft others to continue to advise us to remain in balance. The concept of maturity and independence often inhibits that process.

And there’s the rub.  We eventually come to understand that a continual progression involves understanding the necessity of challenges to promote our own growth.  At the same time, we are taught that independence and maturity are qualities we should aspire to achieve. We attempt to combine the two ideas, and to decide for ourselves where that balance lies between enough challenge and too much challenge.

That struggle, in a physical way, is illustrated for me every day I weight train.  Whether I want to or not, I am constantly given feedback of where I stand, of how the training is affecting me.  Every day I must choose to make adjustments.

Since, as I said, I’m an amateur, it is easy for me to seek help when I need it. Yes, perhaps as I learn more, I may need less assistance, but if you do even a little amount of research about the sport, you understand that there is always someone who understands it better.

I think we are tempted to think that at some age, we understand most of what there is to understand.  That is the intuitive approach to the situation: given enough time, we will understand everything. That, without a doubt, sounds like a dangerous place to be.

Since, as I mentioned, I have a certain body type.  Along with that, I’m well into the age where our bodies don’t want to progress and become stronger.  The result is that I am a prime candidate for working hard and seeing very slow, often minimal, results. But that’s o.k., because to use an old cliché, it builds character. It’s hard.  Doing hard stuff builds character.  Wait, what?  Come on Brent, you’re talking about a physical activity.  It’s physical.

Humph.  I beg to differ. Hard stuff is hard stuff, period. Why do we encourage our kids to get involved in extracurricular activities in school?  What lasting impact do years of ballet lessons or little league or playing an instrument have?  They are transformative,  I say.  They teach kids to learn to do difficult things in life.  Should we stop doing those things as adults?  Heck no.

And call me an idiot, but I need to be reminded that much of what we do in life is not about seeing immediate results.  We do the thing because it’s our calling, it’s the right thing to do.  The results may not be for us to see. This is perhaps one of the greatest benefits I get from weight training – I am reminded every day that I live the way I do, I do the things I do, I hold the beliefs I do… because it’s the right thing to do… not because I’m rewarded by results. 

At what age do we stop doing difficult things?  At what age does learning from doing difficult things cease? 

Well, not at 63.

So my challenge to you is to do hard stuff.  It doesn’t have to be physical.  It just has to be a challenge. Do something different, something new, something outside of your comfort zone. And then, don’t stop because you don’t see the results you crave.  Continue because it’s right.