Why Remembering Your Beginnings Is Important

Strategically, not just nostalgically

What got you from 90 to 95 isn’t necessarily what got you from 0-50

I saw a great post today on twitter from Chris Williamson, who said as follows:

There’s a trend of people who’ve “made it,” explaining how work-life balance is actually what’s most important and how you can’t be powered by resentment or a sense of insufficiency or a chip on your shoulder.

It’s a failure on the part of the guru to understand that the tools you need to get from 0-50 are not the same to get from 90-95.

It’s also a basic failure of memory. When you look at what got them to where they are, it’s precisely the traits they’re now castigating.

Almost everyone has more pain and resentment and fear in the beginning. Which is why they use it. Once you’ve achieved enough success and validation from the world to not be fuelled by that anymore, that’s great. But that doesn’t mean that people who are just starting out can achieve the success you now have by using strategies which you only accessed after becoming successful.

It could almost be seen as a kind of Luxury Belief Of Success. “Defund The Police” was pushed heavily by people who live in communities that didn’t need a massive police presence. “You need holistic balanced drive” is pushed by people who already benefitted from their resentment-fuelled obsession for half a decade.

The best question to ask is not, “How does my favourite guru say people should behave to achieve success?” Instead ask, “What did my favourite guru actually do when they were at my stage?”

Relationship to lifting

The reason this resonated so much with me is because I’ve seen the same exact thing countless times with people who’ve been successful in lifting. They often went from weak or middling to reasonably strong, using very simple methods like a linear progression. Once they got reasonably strong, more complexity was needed to get them to the next level.

This makes sense, as the stronger and more advanced you get in your training, the more both complexity and personalization usually need to increase. The unadapted body will improve in response to almost any stimulus, so even though some beginner programs are better than others, the basic stuff in almost any form works well for novices.

As time goes on and the easy gains and physical adaptations have been made, then to achieve even more success, the program needs to go from simple to more complex, general to more specific, and basic to more personalized to continue progressing.

And that’s where advanced lifters, many of whom become coaches, can easily trip up. Recency bias, bad memory, and a lack of paying close attention make it easy to forget what got them from 135 to 405, or 185 to 500. They pay so much attention to what got them from 600 to 700, or even from 800 to 900, that they forget how effective simple training can be for people who haven’t yet made that journey.

A corroborating anecdote

I’m friends with someone who competed at a high level in powerlifting for a number of years, competing in and sometimes making the podium at both national and international level meets for a solid 5-6 year period. However I didn’t ask permission to tell this story, so it’ll be anonymous. But this was told to me directly by this person, who I’ve been friends with for over a decade. We’ll call her Sarah.

At a national meet one year, a bunch of lifters and coaches associated with a well known powerlifting brand got together for a meal and invited Sarah to join them. This brand has coached and produced a lot of high level lifters and is well regarded in the lifting world at large. I like some of their material myself. But as Sarah tells it, they spent a large portion of the meal deriding and mocking programs like the linear progression as overly simplistic, and expressing incredulity that anyone could progress doing merely one set of five reps of the deadlift, once per week. Sarah, who had used that program herself and also coached many other people on it by that point, chose not to make a big fuss of things, being the only one at the table with a contrary opinion. But was uncomfortable sitting there as a bunch of smart and well regarded lifters and coaches mocked a program that she knew by firsthand experience, worked very well for the people for whom it was actually designed: novices.

Forgetting where they came from

What happened there looks to be the same phenomenon that Chris described above. People who’d already made it were focusing so much on what got them from 90 to 95, that they forgot what they did to get from 0-50. To the point that they mocked and derided it. They may not have done the formal or exact version of the linear progression that I laid out at the link above, but they almost certainly did some form of trying to lift a little more weight every time or every week, for a while. Almost everyone does when they start, provided they haven’t been talked out of it by a Very Smart Evidence Based Coach.

Yet years later, when they’ve gone from being strong for a regular person with a 400 or 500 squat, to strong even at the national or international powerlifting level with a 700 or 800 squat, they forget what got them to that first level. Maybe they even actively disdain it now, because they (correctly) know that such a program would be absurdly ineffective for them to do now, and wouldn’t work at all.

But of course, that type of program is exactly what a novice needs. One can quibble about some details, but the basic framework and structure works amazingly well. I’ve personally used it successfully with so many hundreds of people, and know secondhand of thousands of other success stories, with almost zero exceptions, that it would take a huge mountain of strong evidence to change my mind at this point.

Choosing the right program or coach for you

This gets down to the practical. If you’re a regular person just starting out, or been training a year or two on your own and you’re stuck in a rut, you’re a lot better off choosing a coach or program who works with/is designed for people like that. This will look a lot different than a program designed for a guy who deadlifts 850 and is trying to get to 900. And that’s ok. We don’t deride the programming that works for the 850 guy because it’s so much more complex and personalized. We just recognize that this same program is unlikely to work well for the guy at 365 who wants to get to 405. If only the people at 850 and who coach lifters at 850, would do the same for those of us who primarily work with regular people.

This is basic self awareness. In an ideal world, everyone would have it. In the real world, choosing a program created by someone with self awareness, or hiring a coach who has it, is more likely to work out for you in the long run.