The only way to make a muscle stronger is to stress it and then let it recover. “In the land of the quick fix it may seem radical,” writes George Leonard, a pioneer of the human potential movement in the 1960s, “but to learn anything significant, to make any lasting change in yourself, you must be willing to spend most of your time on the plateau, to keep practicing even when it seems you are getting nowhere.”īut here’s a paradox: Pound too hard or too often, and you’ll run into problems. This is an important outcome, with consequences extending far beyond the gym. Weight lifting teaches you to embrace them, or at the very least accept them. Whether you like it or not, there will be plateaus, which in my experience tend to occur right before a breakthrough. Weight lifting, like so much in life, demands showing up day in and day out, taking small and incremental steps that, compounded over time, lead to big gains. If you try to rush the process or force heroic efforts, you invariably wind up getting hurt. This doesn’t mean that progress happens fast or is always linear. A kind of straightforwardness and self-reliance that gives rise to an immense satisfaction, a satiating feeling that makes it easier to fall asleep at night because you know you did something real, something concrete, in the world. But over time, it becomes clear that what you get out of yourself is proportionate to the effort you put in. Some days it goes well, other days it doesn’t.
In the weight room, however, it’s just you and the bar. In many sports, outcomes are affected by things like weather, equipment, officiating or the performance of teammates. In his book “ Shop Class as Soulcraft, ” the philosopher Matthew Crawford writes that “despite the proliferation of contrived metrics,” so many activities in the modern world suffer from “a lack of objective standards.” In the workplace, for example, a job well done is almost always contingent on external factors like office politics, the opinions of your supervisors or the mood of your clients. Weight lifting offers participants a chance to pursue clear and measurable goals with outcomes that can be traced directly back to oneself. It may help ease or prevent depression and anxiety, and promote mental sharpness. Weight training can help us to maintain muscle mass and strength as we age, as well as better mobility and metabolic and cardiovascular health. The physical and mental health benefits of weight lifting are well documented. “What’s any of it for?” he exclaimed, alluding to the two hours I spend repetitively moving iron every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning. Once, while my workout partners and I were carrying, as we say, at our local YMCA, an older gentleman enthusiastically asked, “What’s it for?” I was quick to explain that farmer’s carries work your grip, core, arms, legs and even cardiovascular system - an utterly elegant full-body exercise. You hold a heavy weight - for me, around 95 pounds - in each hand and attempt to walk with a solid, upright posture for between 30 and 60 seconds. One of my favorite movements at the gym is called a farmer’s carry.
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