What Weightlifting Has Taught Me About Life

1. You can't be impatient to progress
When lifting weights, being impatient to progress - adding more weight on the bar than you're able to do - will get you injured. You need to understand that there's a natural rate at which you progress and not look for shortcuts or try to extend further than your ability, just because you're unhappy with where you are right now. There's a path to the top of the mountain, but you can't jump up in one leap. All you can do is pick the most efficient path and start walking (/progressively overload).

2. You need to form good habits
Going to the gym requires work. Sometimes you don't feel like it. A successful person is someone who gets the job done, whether they feel like it or not. Habits can help immensely in this.

3. Our bodies need down-time
We can't push ourselves all the time. In life, there are often two sides to the same coin. We're in a constant cycle of atrophy and hypertrophy (muscle breakdown and muscle building). Consumption and production. Maintainence and improvement activity. Work and rest. Just like how we can't re-grow muscle-fibres if we don't rest, we need to find a way to balance both sides of the coin. To deny one side would be to hinder growth.

4. Sometimes progress is painful
That last rep is the worst. But it's that one last effort that helps grow your muscles the most. Growth can be painful. Not everyone wants to put the work in. You've got to understand what it means to be successful, and whether you really want it enough. Some people will realise that they don't.

5. Doing the same grind can lead to great things
Sometimes we don't need to go through an amazing process to get an amazing result. Sometimes it just require hard work, persistence, and the dull, daily grind. Although, if we get bored of that... we can always make it into a montage (Rocky style).

6. Doing one weight once is not the same as doing half the weight twice
As you increase the weights, they don't increase linearly in difficulty. As it is with a lot of things in life, too. If we double the complexity of what we want to achieve, the difficultly of it can get a lot larger than double. Understanding non-linear task progression is important if we don't want to get tripped up by setting unachievable targets.