The necessity of peaking
this is when you should take downtime
At the age of 14, I started training for the Olympics.
My sport was weightlifting. It was my deepest passion, and I saw nothing beyond it.
I would skip my high school classes and train during the day, I would go to practice for three hours every evening, and I would study YouTube videos of the greats until my eyes stung with insomnia each night.
Weightlifting was everything and then suddenly, it was nothing.
Starting at age 14, I joined my local weightlifting club.
Our training was probably a little bit different than you think. At 5 o’clock every evening, we’d meet in a spartan metal shed. A gym with nothing more than wooden floors and barbells. No machines. No curls. No bench press. It was the exact opposite of an Equinox.
A dirty, rusty old shed, that radiated heat in the 100 degree Florida summers. I spent over 8,500 hours in the gym during my lifting career. It was hell, but it was home.
Killing yourself for three hours a day
Our training consisted of nothing less than trying to kill ourselves for three hours a day, six days a week. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t break into the gym on that seventh day and secretly train behind my coaches back.
I was addicted to growth1.
Getting stronger, is actually really simple when you know what you’re doing.
All it takes is overloading your body, with a little bit more than it can take. People needlessly overcomplicate this process. They’ll worry about how many reps, how many sets, which exercises are the best, how many days a week they should train, but all of that misses the point entirely.
Just work hard. Work until it sucks and you want to stop, and then do one more.
This method of overload elicits our bodies natural adaptation response. In the hours and days after training, your body will begin to patch up the minor damage you’ve inflicted. As a result, your muscles, tendons and even bones, will begin to strengthen.
The rhythms of growth
Our training had a rhythm to it. We’d destroy ourselves for eight weeks straight, and on the ninth week, everything would change.
We’d back our training way down. Lifting at only 10% of what we used to be doing. Some days we’d simply come in and use no weight at all. Literally going through the motions.
These days were agony.
I was an ambitious, and overzealous 14 year old boy, with ungodly amounts of testosterone surging through my veins. Each day that I wasn’t pushing my limits, in my mind, was just another day wasted.
But my coach assured me that training rhythms were important. In fact, this backing down period was the most important of it all.
Why?
Because this was the phase where we solidified our gains. Where we dialed in our technique, and where we saved ourselves for the trials to come. There was, after all, a higher purpose to all of this.
Why do we train?
Each training program was specifically designed for one thing.
A peak. A single day, where we would smash our previous records. A day where we’d hit a new all time best.
Sometimes we would peak for the national championship, other times a state weightlifting meet, and still others a lowly local affair. Nevertheless, there was always a singular date on the horizon. A competition where we would put our new abilities to the test.
There was a problem though.
I hated peaking. I hated backing down on my training. I hated squatting less than my maximum. I hated taking days off.
So I didn’t.
While my teammates were cleaning up their technique, foam rolling their sore muscles, and rehabilitating, I was still lifting big weights.
And it felt good.
The guts to back down.
In my senior year I was, without a doubt, the strongest person at my school2. I could easily clean and jerk 315 pounds, and frequently out-lifted the adult members of my team.
But after years of ignoring my coaches, my career was living on borrowed time. One fateful day, the reaper came knocking.
I was so enthralled with the possibility of unlimited growth, and so fixated on my goal of Olympic podiums, that I jeopardized everything. I never backed my training down, and as a result, I suffered a serious back injury that took me out of the sport for good.
I ended my weightlifting career light-years from my desired destination, simply because I never consolidated my strength.
I never had the guts to optimize.
Adaptation is sexy.
It’s sexy because it’s tangible, and we love the tangible.
We love being able to see, feel, and touch our improvements. Adaptation is watching your Bulbasaur, turn into a Ivysaur, turn into a Venusaur. It’s cool, it’s visible, and it’s something worth bragging about.
In its most simple form, adaptation is the response to an outside force pushing us to become more than we currently are. If you’ve ever been an athlete or a student, or if you’ve ever changed over the course of your life, you know what this feels like.
It feels like shit.
Adaptation, by necessity, must suck.
There’s a cancerous misconception that’s spread through pop-science regarding the ways in which we learn.
You may be familiar with the concept of Learning Styles. Well I’m here to tell you, they’re bullshit.
If you’re unfamiliar, the idea is that we all have a preferred way to learn something new. A pathway that’s easiest for us to take in new information, synthesize it, and internalize it. Some preferences include visual learning, auditory learning, and kinesthetic (hands-on) learning, among others.
But that’s not actually how learning works3.
The fundamental flaw in the Learning Styles theory is that, we need to be seeking the easiest way to consume information. Instead, what we should be doing is seeking the most effective way. The way that forces us to adapt, and grow, and recall.
Ironically, this means that the most effective way is usually the most effortful.
Think about reading a book vs. listening to an audiobook.
Listening to an audiobook is a passive experience. It’s something we can do while washing the dishes, or walking the dog, or even at the gym. Reading, however, is an active experience. You can’t really do anything else with your nose in a book.
Our effortful, active, and undivided attention towards reading means that we remember more, for longer4.
This is adaptation at work.
Your personal sanctuary
Optimization is the exact opposite.
It’s not sexy, nor is it highly visible. It feels like you’re doing a whole lot of nothing, and that’s mostly because you are.
Optimization is a conscious shift from seeking effortful experiences to the cultivation of a personal sanctuary. An environment for us to heal, consolidate our skills, and prepare for the grand task ahead.
This is a very different type of preparation, but preparation nonetheless.
What I failed to see as a naive and ambitious 14 year old, was that down-time is not dead-time. It’s simply a storage of latent potential, waiting to be used.
A life without rhythms and peaks
Optimization and Adaptation always work in concert. The same way that April showers bring May flowers. When we’re not actively growing, we’re storing potential energy for the future.
The problem is, as we age we lose these natural seasons, and we stop training for peak experiences. Therefore, we never consolidate, we never optimize, we simply keep pushing forward.
But the bill will always come due.
Whether it be through burning out at work, or by getting laid off, or the slow decline in performance that often accompanies endless adaptation. We no longer choose the moments in which we should optimize, instead we let pain decide for us.
The revival of maximum efforts
As we age, we start to believe that there is no point of pushing our abilities to their maximum. We’re resigned to the fact that our best years are behind us.
We’ll never be as good at calculus as we were in college. We’ll never run as fast as we did in high school. Our peaks will never be as high and therefore, peaks in and of themselves are no longer a worthy pursuit.
While the examples may ring true, the conclusion misses the mark entirely.
Peak experiences act as the punctuation marks to the chapters of our lives. They give us a reason to work hard, as well as a reason to take it easy. While we may never reach the same heights as we did when we were younger, the very act of reaching gives our lives a necessary rhythm.
Many of us have adopted the mantra that burnout is bad and we should temper our ambitious spirt with reflection and downtime. But few of us can clearly articulate why.
The purpose of backing down isn’t to avoid burnout, but rather to prepare for a peak experience. It’s so that, with our energies restored, we can go harder or higher than before.
This is something I was far too immature to accept at 14 years old. I had an Olympian for a coach, the highest source of credibility in the sport, and even his pleas to stop couldn’t puncture the veil of my delusion. I had to feel it firsthand.
Pain stopped me, but it doesn’t have to stop you.
Only after years of reflection could I articulate this lesson. The greatest athletes are not those who have mastered adaptation, rather, it’s the athletes that adhere to the rhythms that peak experiences provide.
By seeking out ambitious peaks, with finite dates, we can recreate the rhythms of growth. We can more accurately gauge when it’s time to push, and when it’s time to retreat, and we can do so as masters of our own condition.
—Zac
PS. If you’ve made it all the way down here and don’t feel that you’ve just wasted five minutes, consider hitting the like button on this essay.
It helps others find it. And it makes me happy.
I was kicked off the team several times in my career, but the only time I remember to this day was for breaking and entering into the gym. It didn’t help that my coach was also a cop.
Not pound for pound. One of my teammates, and great friend to this day, would take that title. I could lift bigger numbers than him, because I was older and heavier, but only by a smidge.
Came here for the weightlifting-as-life metaphors (I just starting lifting last year, and now I Totally Get It!!), stayed for the fabulous Pokémon references.
In all seriousness, though: a very thought-provoking piece!