This is an installment of excellent fita column about exercise.
The first time I tried to do a back squat with an empty barbell on my back, I failed spectacularly. I was attending an introductory CrossFit class and was already intimidated by the noise of weights crashing around me and the groans of exercise.
When it was my turn to try the move, I stepped up, took a deep breath, and began to bend my knees. But when I lowered my hips into the squat, I realized I was leaning too far forward. The bar rolled slightly towards the back of my neck and I panicked, putting my weight on my toes and letting go of my grip on the bar. Suddenly, I fell to my knees and the barbell fell to the floor and slowly rolled down. I felt heat rise to my cheeks.
Is this what everyone’s first class will look like?,I thought. Or maybe I’m just not cut out for this kind of fitness? When I started thinking about quitting my weightlifting efforts altogether, my instructor pointed out something like this: Although I didn’t succeed in lifting, I did succeed in failing correctly. Instead of trying to save the lift with poor form (which could have been stressful on my lower back if the bar had been heavier), I decided to safely lower the lift. By accepting failure during lifts, I was able to avoid injury. It meant I could start thinking about what went wrong and plan the changes I needed to make for success next time.
I eventually learned that strength training was never about success. For me, it’s about accepting, expecting, and ultimately learning to love failure.Resilience developed through such failures and the understanding that failure does not change anything. you Failure permeates the rest of your life and affects how you take risks and bounce back at work, school, and social settings.
Before I started lifting, I was a long-distance runner and it was easy for me to avoid most mistakes in my workouts. When running long distances, I knew that barring any major disaster, I would be able to finish the distance, if at all. It was much later than I had planned. Lifting was not like that. When training for strength, he would often load overhead barbells with weights that he could handle for big lifts like presses, squats, and deadlifts in just two or three repetitions.One day I literally lifted ‘to failure’, at that moment my muscles I had a great time I couldn’t finish the set because of the effort. I was regularly pushing myself to the absolute limits of my physical strength, and sometimes, no matter how much weight I wanted to move, I just couldn’t move it at all. So I had to become very comfortable with uncertainty and treat those failures as challenges rather than catastrophes.
“Failure is the most common thing in lifting,” says Priscilla Del Moral, a personal trainer and co-owner of JDI Barbell in New York City. “The turning point for me was realizing that this was just an everyday thing.”
For many of us, “failure has been tied to our identity” since childhood, says psychologist, author, and mental health activist Jenny Wang. “When a child is stumbling and a parent immediately rushes in and tries to fix the problem, we are actually saying that there is something wrong with the stumbling block. There’s something wrong with you.” We grow up believing that failure is scary and that we should avoid it.
Fear of failure can have real consequences. for some, it can lead Increased anxiety and depression. However, how to deal with failure It’s a good symbolic expression Your level of resilience, or ability to adapt to setbacks. Resilience has been shown to have far-reaching cognitive and psychological effects. reaction to stress Toward improving the work environment Quality of life With age. And how do we strengthen resilience? By accepting failure.
It’s been two years since I started my lifting journey. strongman training (Best known for its late-night reruns on ESPN, this sport involves big men lifting, carrying, pushing, and throwing very heavy and strange objects, such as rocks, logs, and beer barrels.) ). Despite the name, I’ve learned that strong women dominate in this sport as well. (Lucy Underdown holds This is the current women’s world record for deadlifting an incredible 700 pounds. ) Most competitions also have a beginners division.
From the moment I started Strongman, circus dumbbells (which are about three times the length and width of regular dumbbells) were my nemesis. I’ve tried pushing this onto my head probably hundreds of times and consistently failed. For a long time, I avoided events that included circus dumbbells, since there are five events in strongman competitions, and competitors are expected to at least attempt all of them. I didn’t want to fail in front of a lot of people. But once I realized that I was excluded from most of the contests I wanted to enter, I decided to lean into it.
I started training the support muscles that needed to be strengthened enough to press the dumbbells. I watched videos of failed attempts and analyzed where I should move my legs and hands. Almost a decade after my first failed attempt, now 40 years old, I walked up to the judge at the competition and stared at his 55-pound dumbbells at his feet. The first time I tried to push the dumbbells, my nerves took over and I fell back into old habits, leaning away from the dumbbells instead of getting under them. I lost my contact person. (“Failure” in this context primarily refers to not falling on your head, which I managed to avoid.) On the second try, I shook off my frustration. I brushed myself off, put my feet in a better position, and lifted the dumbbells. My shoulder, and—finally!—nailed it.
Even when I’m at the gym, I still sometimes miss the elevator. But now I realize that with each of those failures, I learned a little bit about myself, how persistently I push my limits, and what I need to do to succeed. Masu. This is something I’ve used outside of the gym, from repurposing rejected article pitches to trying to crack the magic phrase to get a 3-year-old to agree to eat something green. It’s something that exists.
Eric Potelat, performance and sports psychologist and author of this book learned excellencehas worked with thousands of professional athletes and shares similar sentiments. He suggested that what separates good athletes from truly great athletes is how they bounce back when something goes wrong. “They have one thing in common,” he says. “The best people see their failures as mere statistics.”
At the age of 41, seven years after competing in his first strongman competition, he was finally able to compete at the national level. And I ended up in last place. At the start of my lifting career, that result would have flattened me. However, this time, I took some time to think about what that failure meant. I can now clearly see my limits. I had a goal post and it was up to me to run towards it knowing how many times I would fall on my face along the way.
Lifting has taught me to welcome the opportunity to fail so I can determine the best path to success. This article is a prime example. To write this, I spent a lot of time staring at a blank document and a blinking cursor, hoping the words would appear on the page. I started writing the first draft expecting it to be a mess (and it was). I also realized that, just like with lifting, you have to start somewhere because once you put your words down on paper, you know where to go next. Several times I confidently added a new paragraph, only to realize that it didn’t fit. So I put that aside and tried something new.Knowing what doesn’t work helped me figure out what could go wrong will do.
