Are You Doing Stupid Stuff in the Gym?

Written on April 18, 2007 at 1:32 pm, by Eric Cressey

The Internet has been a tremendous resource for billions of people in a wide variety of realms, but as I’ve come to realize, it’s allowed the “curse of knowledge” to rear its ugly head far too easily in the resistance-training world.

I’m all for training smart, but the problem is that far too many people spend so much time on the “smart” part that they don’t actually remember how to train hard. So they wind up unknowingly abandoning simple principles that pack major results.

In his book, Overachievement: The New Model for Exceptional Performance, Dr. John Eliot debunks ten myths of high-performance as examples. Two of my favorites are “use your head” and “learn from your mistakes.” With respect to these “myths,” Eliot writes (respectively):

“Using your head is stupid. In high-stakes performance, the real genius is someone like Yogi Berra. On his way to ten World Series rings and a place in the baseball Hall of Fame, Yogi was thinking about nothing.”

“Legends never say they’re sorry. Having a long or frequent memory for mistakes and a short or infrequent memory for successes is a guaranteed way to develop fear of failure. High achievers dwell on what they do well and spend very little time evaluating themselves and their performances.”

With these two “myths” in mind, I want you to stop thinking, and start doing while following these five simple principles that have clearly been lost in many Internet warriors, thanks to the curse of knowledge.

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