Life Tasks & Rules, Full & Partial Reps in the Gym, & Choosing The Right Diet
Article Round-Up: 11.6.22
Enjoy this week’s curated list of articles, podcasts, and more from the web.
Featured Thoughts:
“Having the Courage to be Happy Requires Having the Courage to be Disliked”
Takeaway: This article looks at the work of psychologist Alfred Adler, who believed in, “looking at a person through the lens of their family system, friendships, roles in society and culture. To understand a human being involved taking into account the internal and external worlds together.”
Adlerian psychology is the psychology of growth, where people strive to overcome difficulties and actually change their lives.
Adler believed each person had three life tasks: work, friendship, and love. When these three areas were fulfilled, people found joy and meaning in their life. Adler argued that people were too easy to confuse other people’s life tasks with their own.
This “confusing of life tasks” looks like caring too much what others think of you. The remedy, Adler argued, is to have the courage to be disliked.
Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations. — Alfred Adler
This above quote may sound familiar. If you’ve followed my work for any length of time you may have seen me write about mindsets, internal beliefs, and how we interpret the world. Our mindset interprets the stimuli we experience in the world to give these situations meaning. Inevitably, there is a social component to this—the desire to belong.
The desire to belong to the group is so innately strong that we will act against our best interests in order to be accepted.
To combat this, Adler suggest asking yourself, “Who’s task is this?”
Are you performing a task because you see value in it or enjoy it, or are you participating out of a fear of rejection and acceptance? Are you acting in accordance with finding fulfillment in your tasks of work, friendship and love?
Read the article for a more thorough look at this concept. There are some monumental insights here.
More Life Rules:
(You know I’m a sucker for reading what other people think are important enough to include in their life’s manifesto.)
“100 Tips For Living A Better Life”
Takeaway: Here are some of my favorites:
Exercise is the most important lifestyle intervention you can do. Even the bare minimum (15 minutes a week) has a huge impact. Start small.
How you spend every day is how you spend your life.
If something surprises you again and again, stop being surprised.
Deficiencies do not make you special. The older you get, the more your inability to cook will be a red flag for people.
Things that aren’t your fault can still be your responsibility.
Don’t punish people for trying. You teach them to not try with you. Punishing includes whining that it took them so long, that they did it badly, or that others have done it better.
Deep Dive:
“Longer and Stronger: How Range Of Motion And Muscle Lengths Affect Muscle Growth And Strength Gains”
Takeaway: This article is very dense and thorough. If you like to nerd out on “sciency” stuff you’ll enjoy it. If not, Enjoy my summary below.
Full range of motion (fROM) in weight lifting has long been thought to lead to greater increases in both muscle strength and size when compared to partial range of motions (pROM).
There’s an ongoing joke in the fitness space about “half-reppers,” “quarter-reppers,” or any other name they may be given. (FYI I’m not a fan of this sort of poking fun for the simple fact that you may never know someone’s intentions for a specific movement, movement restrictions, etc.)
This recent meta-analysis further reinforced this belief with more data. (For those not freshly out of a stats course, a meta-analysis takes a bunch of independent studies done on a single topic and compares all the data to see if they all point to the same conclusion.)
Some of the findings were pretty intuitive: fROM was shown to produce more strength at fROM, while also improving strength levels at pROM. This makes sense, since you’ll have to go through the partial range of motion in order to achieve a full range of motion.
pROM, on the other hand, did increase strength levels at fROM, but much less significantly than when training with fROM. Again, makes sense. pROM doesn’t actually take you through the full range, so it only slightly increase strength here.
There’s more nuance here, so I encourage you to dive into the article more fully. However, one of the main themes supported is the principle of specificity in training. this principle states that the specifics of whatever you train is what gets improved. Bicep curls won’t give you stronger legs, they’ll give you stronger biceps. fROM will make you stronger at fROM, while pROM makes you stronger at pROM.
You might ask yourself, “is there any benefit at all to a partial range of motion?”
That answer could also be an entire book on its own. Suffice it to say this: yes, there are some useful applications of pROM training, such as: injury or movement restrictions, sport specific training, as well as using this type of training as part of a well-rounded, normal training plan.
“Are You Missing This Key Piece of The Weight Loss Puzzle?”
Takeaway: The right nutrition approach for you is the one that creates a calorie deficit and can be followed consistently. Read the full article to figure out how to evaluate if your diet is the right one for your goals.