Have you ever seen the memes that are like, “Me when I’m not immediately good at something new”? It’s such a common human experience. You expect to try out golfing and immediately be Tiger Woods (maybe minus the sex scandals and DUIs), or you head into a yoga class and are disappointed you’re not doing handstands on your second day. At Power Plant Gym, we see a lot of folks who think they should be really good at the basic lifts right away, and get frustrated when it’s actually kind of difficult.
By now, a lot of folks have heard the “10,000 hours” rule, and I hate it because the number comes from study on violinists, and not every skill is playing a violin. How long it takes to develop expertise depends on a lot of different factors. How complex is the skill? Is it something that changes over time? How often are you practicing it? But I’m getting off track.
The point is that while 10,000 hours might be arbitrary, the underlying principle still holds: getting good at something requires doing it. Skills are built through practice, not through wishing you were already better.
Your coach doesn’t expect you to arrive on day one knowing how to execute a technically flawless squat. That’s pretty literally what you’re here for, is to learn. Our favorite clients aren’t the ones who walk in already knowing everything. They’re the ones who are willing to try, willing to work, and open to coaching.
One of the cool things about strength training is that beginners often improve quickly. We call them “newbie gains,” and they happen because your body and your brain are both learning something brand new. You’re building strength, but you’re also building coordination, confidence, and skill. The tricky part is that confidence usually lags behind ability.
A lot of people think they need to feel confident before they start lifting weights, walking into a gym, or trying something new. In reality, confidence is usually the result of collecting enough successful reps that your brain finally starts believing, “Oh…I can do this.” Nobody starts out confident. They start out new.
The person deadlifting twice their bodyweight today probably felt awkward with an empty barbell once. The yoga instructor teaching crow pose probably spent plenty of time falling out of it. The experienced runner probably remembers when a mile felt impossibly long. You don’t skip the beginner stage. You work your way through it.
You get to watch yourself improve. We see it all the time. Just recently I stumbled across a video of one of our members wrestling mightily with a circus dumbbell from a couple of years ago. The weekend prior, I had watched him cranking out very high quality reps with that same circus dumbbell.
That progress doesn’t happen because they were naturally gifted. It happens because they kept showing up. Start while you’re awkward. Start while you have questions. Start while you still need reminders about which bar weighs what. Confidence isn’t what gets you into the gym. It’s one of the things you build by coming back.
