There’s a fitness phrase that I don’t like much, but I haven’t come up with a better one: work to failure. It is when we do an exercise until we can’t possibly do another rep with proper form. (Some people keep going anyway, with improper form, but that’s just a quick way to get injured.)
It’s an approach that we use when we want to determine our single rep max (the most weight we can lift only one time) or what we end up doing when we guess wrong about what weight to use for three sets of an exercise. We get helpful information from it about our current capabilities. What I don’t like is the name.
When we work out, we are automatically doing something that is a success. We are taking care of our bodies and training our muscles to be strong and our bones to be dense and our brains to work better. But I think we’re all at least a little susceptible to the word failure.
The reframing comes in when we can’t do that last rep. We can’t do that last rep right now. Even unstoppable forces like we are encounter times when the immovable object wins, but then we rest and grow and the immovable object has to shift after all.
Up from here.
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