The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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There are alternative views.
If you aim to be an elite athlete, that makes sense. If you aim to be a reasonably healthy person with good fitness, this will get you in trouble. If you are not enjoying something, you are spending your willpower every time you do it. And however determined you are, the willpower is a limited resource. For which a lot of things are competing every day. If you do not enjoy it, you will start finding excuses not to do it. You will start unconsciously arranging things so that you would do less of it. And you will feel shitty about it, because you would know the excuses are bullshit, but you will still do it because that's the nature of human brain. And feeling shitty about it would drive you to do even less of it, maybe get rid of it altogether - with a very good and strong reason of course! - so that you stop feeling shitty. That's not a good way to do things. I mean, you can power through it - but statistically, the majority of chances are you won't. I am a big proponent of "do what works for you, and fuck any third-party opinions", but my experience tells me things I don't enjoy doing are much less sustainable than things I do enjoy doing. Even if it means I'd sacrifice some reps and some lbs for it - it's better to have some consistent reps than end up with no reps at all because you grew depressed by the whole thing.
This concept isn't holding up well to replication btw
Not that anyone really knows the answer, but studies (Carol Dweck?) have shown you can be psy-op'd or placebo'd into having more after it's been "depleted"
Personally, I think willpower and energy/tiredness are inversely correlated. Your willpower is worse at the end of the day because your brain is fatigued.
It certainly holds well enough for me.
Well, yes, but it's also true for many other things. Like, if you run until you exhausted and absolutely can't run anymore, if you get promised $1M or get attacked by a bear, you probably suddenly find it in yourself to run a little more. That doesn't mean however running doesn't get you tired, just that there are levels of tiredness.
I'm not claiming deep understanding of how exactly willpower works, I certainly don't have it. Just for me things that require a lot of it tend to be harder to maintain over the long time, and that seems to hold for other people too. If I hate something (exercise, diet, activity) I can push through it for a while, but the longer it goes, the more chance I'd find a way to stop doing it. On the other hand, if I feel good about doing it (note that doesn't mean it's easy - e.g. lifting or other exercise can be very tough and frustrating when doing it, or there were examples about martial arts - certainly when you're trying to get a complex technique or sparring with a tough opponent, you may experience a lot of frustration, but the whole package should still feel like you want to do it), I likely will keep doing it.
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I think so too. Nocebo effects are powerful. If you believe your willpower will go down the drain after a short time, your mind will make that your reality.
Kinda like how people can be tricked into less agency and more passivity by reading all about how "there is no free will; everything is pre-determined". Well, if that were the case, why are you more of a layabout after having learned about the (likely flawed) concept...?
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Fun is one thing, being stoked is another. See also type 1 2 and 3 fun.
I don't want to get into an argument with an absent third party about what he enjoys. But...he's obviously lying if he says he doesn't enjoy lifting weights. He might have found some way to influencer his way to some money out of lifting now, but he did a whole lot of lifting before ever reaching a point where he could make a dime, and even now it is probably just a hobby. If he didn't enjoy doing it at some level, he wouldn't do it. If he wasn't stoked about it, about reaching his lifting goals, he wouldn't do it. I've read his posts before, he often works out multiple times a day, and he's not a real competitor in any serious lifting series. He's doing this because he loves it, because he is stoked about it. He just likes bitching about how much he hates squats because he finds that kind of negativity to be more serious or whatever.
I'm stoked about jiu jitsu. That doesn't mean I'm constantly smiling doing jiu jitsu, or that it is always fun. There's a lot of times I'm not having fun. Six months ago it was even less fun. But I'm interested in reaching my goals, so that even when I'm cooked and my muscles are exhausted and I'm pinned under some gorilla who is trying to smother me, I'm still stoked to keep showing up, every day that I can, so that I can get better. The stoke is what gets me through the unpleasantness. If I just did unpleasant things for no reason, I'd be a literal masochist.
So like, yeah, I can picture a hypothetical person who just fucks around doing the "fun parts" without ever doing the unpleasant training parts. That's good advice for people like that.
But I know a lot of people who just don't work out at all. Those who keep starting a program they don't like working toward a goal they don't really care about, and give up after a few weeks every time. Those people need to try other advice than "do what sucks."
I'm pretty sure he doesn't make a penny from this.
I think he likes achieving his goals, but he doesn't like the process at all. I don't see why that should be impossible.
I don't really think it's possible to "enjoy" doing a program like deep water, even if you enjoy achieving your goals.
I didn't think so, but I haven't been reading lifting blogs for a while, so I didn't want to make an assumption.
That's pretty much what I'm getting at when I talk about being "stoked" on something. Being interested in it and finding meaning in it.
I would guess that the majority of people who have done deep water enjoyed lifting at some level, because almost none of them got anything useful out of it.
Maybe they were all cumming day and night
Unfortunately, when it comes to high rep squats, the COOM feeling from the pump is overwhelmed by the sensation of having been hit by a truck.
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Ohh, that's why the people in the gym make those noises...
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