To Beat Defeat You Have to Know When Not to Repeat: Avoiding Setbacks in Life
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You know the saying that those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat its mistakes. The funny thing
is that even though we all know our personal histories in exquisite detail, we're remarkably prone to repeat
the same mistakes over and over again. Let's take a look at this process, see how it robs you of the training
results you want and, most important of all, lay out a program that will break this cycle and put you back on
the road to big gains.
One of the easiest ways to understand how this behavioral pattern sabotages our best efforts is to notice how
it works in personal relationships. Have you ever known someone you liked at some levels hut who always ended
up ticking you off? It might have been in a personal or a professional relationship, but the pattern is the
same. What often happens is that even after repeated blowups, usually over the same type of thing, instead of
realizing that the relationship just isn't working and that you should withdraw from it, you keep going back
to it. "Maybe it will be different this time," you say. After 23 eruptions you'd think you'd be a little smarter
about what was coming down the road, but you're not, so you repeat for defeat again.
The same thing happens in training. Take an exercise that has a lot going for it, the bench press. Who doesn't
love to bench? You can move big weights, it hits some of the most impressive muscles in the upper body, and you
do it lying down. What could be better? The problem is that maybe you've found in the past that in addition to
all those benefits, benching also has a big personal cost to you-you always end up with shoulder problems. If
you'd learned from past experience, you'd know by now that benching and your shoulders just don't get along.
Still, you keep coming back to bench presses-each time hoping that things will be different, but each time they
turn out the same. You start your cycle with light weights, and everything seems fine. You're enjoying all the
benefits of the movement, so, naturally, you not only stick with it but boost your ef forts greater intensity,
higher volume. One morning you wake up and there's a twinge of pain in your shoulder, and even though you know,
or should know, just what's going on, you play a familiar game. "It will go away," you say to yourself, so you
keep benching. The pain keeps getting worse, but you tell yourself, 'I'll work through it." Being a determined
sort of person, even though your shoulder is getting pretty bad by now, you keep pushing up your training weights
and you're sporting some impressive new muscle for your efforts. When you can no longer rotate your arm enough
to put on a shirt without excruciating pain or when you notice subcutaneous streaks of blood in your shoulder,
the light finally goes on and you quit benching-until the next time.
There are solid, if not good, reasons why we tend to keep banging our heads against these walls. For starters,
whether it's a person or an exercise, the problem situation always has some good in it. This is what entices us
in the first place and keeps us coming back for more. Second, even though we're talking about situations that
always end with an explosion, that result isn't instantaneous, and we can't always predict exactly when it will
occur. This adds to the seductiveness of the situation because it builds our hopes that this time things will be
different, which they never are. Since our efforts are getting reinforced along the way, it becomes extremely
hard to break the pattern. Don't underestimate the power of this type of learning: Classical psychological
research has demonstrated time and again how brutally difficult it is to break response patterns that are
reinforced in unpredictable ways.
"Okay," you say, "so what do I do to get out of this jam?"
First, you have to recognize and accept the problem. That means nothing more than understanding, for example,
that you just can't get along with so-and-so or that benches trash your shoulders. Second, you need to come to
grips with what's attracting you to the problem situation in the first place and what the danger signs are of it
not working. In the bench press example, the appeal is in the big weights, the muscle you build and the fact that
you can do the movement while flat on your back. The downside is the shoulder pain you invariably develop. The
third step is to figure out a way to hang onto the pluses while avoiding the minuses.
Continuing with the bench press example, you might find that you can do dumbbell bench presses and hold onto all
the good things associated with benching while avoiding the bad things. This is a pretty perfect situation because
the substitution requires hardly any adjustment on your part-it would be like ending a difficult personal
relationship and immediately having someone fall into your lap who had all the qualities you liked in your ex and
none of the drawbacks. It's nice if that happens, but don't count on it.
More than likely, there will be tradeoffs involved, so it may take a little more initiative and resolve to deal
with the problem situation. You may find that if you switch to parallel bar dips, you can hold onto the first
two benefits (big weights and nice muscle) but have to give up the third (being able to lie down while doing
the movement). While that wouldn't seem to be such a remarkable adjustment to make, especially considering all
of the benefits it will provide, even that level of adjustment seems to overwhelm some people and they fall back
on their old ways. Maybe this time my shoulder will hold up under the benches." But, of course, it never does.
The next time you're frustrated by a problem situation, in your training or your life in general, ask yourself
whether it's something that has happened before. If the answer is yes, maybe it's time to do something else: To
beat defeat, you have to know when not to repeat.
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