Train Artfully: Extra is more than inefficiency

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Optimization is trending. In the name of efficiency, the unnecessary is pruned, leaving only what is needed. Later, when the tree has died, the unskilled arborist learns their mistakes.

The same happens in the gym. When the fruit is poor results, suboptimal training is the assumed problem. Doing too much, producing excessive fatigue, inhibiting growth. The assumed solution: Removing needless exercises, reps, and load.

Doing less.

Like the aspiring and eager green thumb trimming their project to improve production, lifters today are cutting back. The trends of low frequency and low volume, of preventing fatigue, of minimizing time spent in the gym, of not learning compound lifts – all spokes of the same wheel.

Each discarding a piece of the art that is training by shifting the goal from objective results to a subjective sense of efficiency. All to claim optimal supremacy. Then excusing what little is achieved by what little was expended.

Sure, I’m not big or strong, but my program is optimal.

Despite claims of scientific rigor, those chasing easy prune their tree too often to see it bloom. When they fail to fruit, it was not for a lack of knowledge – for they knew where to cut, but a lack of application – a fear of grafting, adding – doing more. Though quantifiable, lifting – like many things in life, produces best when not limited to mere data. How fruitless ones are seeded.

Can music be reduced to numbers? Yes. Time and frequency interpreted by ones and zeros into noise. Sounds enjoyable, but only if played right – and for the right audience. Data becomes art when it is manipulated, played with, experienced in the flesh. Felt bodily, not only in the mind.

Cold understanding makes lifeless forms. Doing less forsakes extravagance. Limiting training to an experiment, making it pass or fail. Including extravagance imparts profound creativity to the process. While that process can be understood scientifically, experiencing it cannot.

Making art requires artistic license. The permission to do more in the face of lab coats urging less, pretending it to be distillation. The process of achieving purity – the trick duping many into sterilized training.

Because the lifter is also the joy-seeking audience, willfully include what reason defames as needless because such efforts seed future delight. Offer extra as a sacrifice not because of knowledge, but because of hope. Do so despite the protests of the inner auditor, blinded by efficiency – and so correct by its own limitations. Justifying itself after the fact, even when nothing fruits.

But I did everything according to plan.

When the plan requires little of you masquerading as optimization, novelty presented as information, less the chameleon of more (efficient), expect a corpse after removing what imparts life to art (you).

M.C. Escher, Encounter. May 1944, Lithograph.