An Argument for Getting Stronger
Why a little 💪🏼💪🏼🦵🏼🦵🏼 goes a long way.
I believe strongly (pun intended) in the power of getting stronger. It has nothing to do with bulging, over-sized muscles or pointless feats of strength. It’s not about fulfilling some expectation of masculinity, power, or expressing dominance.
It’s about stress.
Strain, pressure, or force that causes mental, physical, and emotional responses from the body. Common mental (and physical) health wisdom advises us to avoid stress whenever possible. That’s good advice, but it’s rarely as simple as that. Stress is all but unavoidable: work, relationships, politics - the state of the world is generally stressful when you’re paying attention.
So what can we do when stress is unavoidable?
In most talk therapy type situations, a trained professional helps people develop strategies to cope with stress. I, of course, am not one of these trained professionals, so please do not confuse these ideas with medical advice of any sort. However, coping strategies are things that help us manage stress and develop resilience against it.
You probably see where I’m going with this.
Exercise is a physical version of a coping strategy.
Let me clarify one thing before we proceed: lots of people use exercise as a coping mechanism for emotional stress and anxiety. It’s a physical release that allows them to blow off steam and get away from the problems in their heads. That’s not what I’m talking about here. Exercise is not therapy. In that sense, it is a hobby that gives us space to process our fears, anxieties, and worries - not a substitute for an actual mental health-related coping strategy.
When I say exercise is a physical coping strategy, I mean it is a way for us to experience stress in a controlled situation for the purpose of being able to handle more stress in the future. That stress can be literal - the physical stress of a load on our body - or metaphorical - persevering over a task we didn’t think we could do.
But here’s the catch: stress (in the form of exercise) leads to adaptation. More adaptation means more stress will be needed - AKA lifting the same weight will at some point become ineffective and no longer lead to adaptation. In order to be able to handle more stress, you need more stress. In order to get stronger, you’re going to have to experience more load at some point.
Eventually it’s going to have to be hard. It needs to be challenging. Somewhere along the line “hard” or “limit pushing” became synonymous with dangerous in exercise. I’m not suggesting anything like that. Just like so many things in life, healthy, safe exercise requires strong, clear boundaries. An open dialogue between yourself and your body is very important to the process. Being honest with yourself about what you can do, and what things feel like is central to figuring out what your limits are. Once you’ve established those, you can much more easily push up against them and expand them in a safe way.
Getting stronger is an incremental process. When done intelligently, it contains no more risk than doing any repetitive exercise. All that is needed is an awareness of current capacity - what can you do now? Do that, do a little more next week, etc.
The body needs enough stress to disrupt the body’s baseline. Without enough exposure to that “good” stress, the body doesn’t adapt nor become more resilient. Again, I’m not suggesting that you need to be in danger or feel unsafe to become stronger. In fact, one of the necessary prerequisites to any progress - especially related to the body - is feeling safe in your space. Once that is established, the process of getting stronger becomes much easier.
Figure out what you can do right now. Find a little stress. Do some work. Get stronger. It helps.