Training with Exercise Is a Magic Golden Goose

The Habit of Training with Exercise Is a Magic Golden Goose

You may have heard the fable about the man who discovers a goose that lays golden eggs. Each day, he goes out to the goose and he collects a golden egg.  But as time goes by, he gets so impatient for the gold that he decides to kill the goose and get all the golden eggs at once. As you might expect, once he kills the goose, he gets nothing.  And hence the expression:  “Don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.”

When it comes to the human mind and body many times we don’t know our goose is cooked, or understand how it got that way, until we see flames coming from the oven.

In retrospect, perhaps the man might have done better if he understood how the goose laid those eggs.   Was it the particular feed the goose was eating?  If so, perhaps he could have refined the feed and then fed it to other geese. Or sold his goose feed company in an IPO on Wall Street. 

Or maybe if it was the genetics of the goose that made the golden eggs. He could have used CRISPR to create clones.

Either way, It's clear that when you don't know how something works, you are relying on luck and circumstance to make things golden - even the quality of your life. And geese that might just be eating a certain way, or have golden genes, may seem like magic.

Either way, If up until now you haven’t been all that interested in the process that keeps your body strong, mobile and healthy, you may have found that, like in the story, the golden mind body benefits you desire stopped coming.

As the poet and soldier Archilochus said: 

“We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”

Archilochus was pointing to the idea that if you have a way to reproduce or create results, then, and only then, you have the power to create the outcomes, and the golden moments, you want for yourself.

A Skill That Isn’t Taught

Talking with a teenager recently who had discovered a new athletic activity that they were increasingly passionate about, they told me that their coach had assigned them some exercises to do, to help them perform better in their sport. 

They shared with me that while they enjoyed the activity itself, the exercises made if feel more like work because they weren't caught up in the fun of the sport when doing the exercises.  So it felt harder.

Training Creates the Golden Moments

Now what caught my attention wasn't that they didn't like to do the exercises, but rather that they didn't really understand the connection between how doing the training would help them perform their sport better. And even enjoy it more. 

Sure, they had a vague notion, but that's like the difference between knowing algebra has something to do with math and having the ability to figure out polynomials.

It's a big difference in understanding.  And it reflects the struggle that many folks have to see the connection between training and solving the problems they want to solve in life.

How Training Shows Up In Your Life

Whether people have been assigned exercises by a coach, a physical therapist, or are doing them in group fitness classes, it can often feel like a process that  they don't understand that deeply - while they're trying to get the golden egg:  less pain, better health, or some other kind of change.

Approaching exercise and training in a way where it just kind of seems like work and there's some vague idea that maybe it's something that one should do and that somehow it might help, often leads to poor and mediocre performance and results.

It's a testament to the miraculous nature of the human body and physical exercise that it still does so much good even when people don't really know what they're doing or how to do it.

But imagine if the process wasn't like trying to communicate in a foreign language where you only know a couple of words and you don't really understand what's going on.

I spent a lot of my early life not really understanding what training was either, even though I was active in sports and movement activities.  It wasn’t taught to me in school, by my parents, by my coaches, or by anyone.

I didn't know what training was or how it worked or how to do it, or why I would want to.

Building Qualities
Learning to train is a skill unto itself. And once you have that skill, it opens up a whole other world. It helps you waste less time, solve more problems, and get where you want to go much faster and create the life you want with much greater control over the process. 

In training, we often talk about building “a quality.” 

It's kind of a vague word, but “quality” means something like:
Strength
Endurance
Flexibility

When people exercise in general, they are still getting some health benefits, but it’s much less likely they are reliably building specific qualities, skills and abilities they want for life or sport.  Even when people DO use training, but don’t really understand it that well it’s likely they will struggle to make progress.

To make matters more complex, each quality has its own approach, which is why training is a vast area.

What quality are you trying to build strength?
Flexibility
Endurance
Speed. 

A more simple way to ask yourself this question is:  what do you want to have happen?

The teenager wanted to enjoy their sport and get really good at it.

Often people want to get out of pain, change their body composition (aka losing weight), or they want to do a cool skill or build and maintain strength.

Combine Training Concepts and a Well Thought Out Plan to Get Results
Once you know what you want to do. You can think about how you might create a plan to do it. 

And rather than trying to do everything at once, like learn the skills of your sport, build strength and endurance, you can separate the tasks.

Sure. You can build strength and endurance playing sports. But not in the same calculated way as when you're in a training session.

A training session allows you to specifically measure what you're doing and what result you're getting.

During your sport or life or movement activity, you can't really track things the same way. 

It's like living your life and spending and earning money, but never tracking anything. After a while, it might get kind of hard to know where you're at or what you need to do or how much you're spending in a given month.

That's not to say that measurement is the be all and end all.  Like every other skill, like reading, once you've been at it a while you don't always experience it as a technical process, but more as a smooth developed seamless habit.  But you only have the habit of reading because you spent months and years building it. That's why it's such a problem that society never teaches people how to build the habit of training.  How to break things down and work on them separately.

When I first started.teaching yoga professionally, I broke my days into what I called
1) technique days, and
2) game days

Game days were like when you go to the field as a kid and you play some baseball or football or soccer.  It's a time to just play the game and have fun and experience what that's like.

But technique days were days where I wasn't so focused on how the exercise was going to make me feel or the game itself, but to really break down the technique and work on the skill. 

Separate Technique Days and Game Days

Think of a baseball player who plays professional baseball but also spends time in the batting cage working on the skill of hitting, or in the weight room building up his strength.

Often this is how we think of training, as something only professional athletes do.  And we could go even more granular and look at how real athletes divide their time so they have time where they work on skill specific skills, or build “qualities” or play and practice their sport. 

And while everyone may not have a goose, everyone does play the game of life, and everyone has a body.

Just living your life with no training plan, is like living your life with no thought about how you will earn money.  It doesn’t work well in the long term.

What you do when you aren’t just living life is what determines both how the quality of your life feels, and how well you’re able to solve mind body problems when they arise.

Training Is Like Insurance: You Want it In Place Before You Need to Call On It
If the teenager’s heart wasn’t strong enough to give her great endurance, then her sport would only allow her to perform at a level equivalent to the endurance she had developed.

If she hadn’t built the strength or flexibility she needed, then her sport would likely stay at a level equivalent to what she built in training.

Her goal was to enjoy her sport and stay with it for a long time and to get better at it.

What she couldn’t see was that it was the training, the exercises, that were what could make her better.   The sport itself, counterintuitively wouldn’t do that on its own.

Now, it’s not unheard of for athletes to love their sport and not love training, but most understand that if they’re lacking a quality that is impacting their performance they are going to have to work on that in training.

In life, most folks don’t see the connection between how they are experiencing their lives both mentally and physically and the quality of their training.

But since the human body follows certain basic principles whether involved in sport or not, the results flow from the same causes.

Use your body and train it effectively and you can enjoy many golden moments, solve problems, and build great skills.. 

But since society doesn’t teach how to train, not in schools, our medical system or even in many fitness settings, it’s something you will have to seek out. 

Training relies on the skillful use of time and effort. You can spend a lot of time. doing things that seem like they're helping, but actually get very little result and waste months and years of your life. 

Blend the Science of Training with the Art of Living
Keep in mind that although training involves some book knowledge, it is also really separate from book knowledge because it has to do with the application in day-to-day life and the limitations of time.

I’ve talked to many bright high school and college kids who are high achievers in biology but have never been taught its relevance to training.  The same goes for medical students, doctors and many others who have advanced training in understanding the body. 

While understanding how the body works is quite helpful, it doesn’t teach you how to train.  How, in a day-to-day life, to manage the practical realites of time, what to do, and how to know if what you’re doing is building the golden egg (the “quality”) you want. 

Since training relies on the skillful use of time and effort, it also means you can spend a lot of time. doing things that seem like they're helping, but actually get very little result and are wasting time - even months and years of your life. 

The other problem is that if you don’t know what to look for in training, you can't tell if you're receiving good training, that will be effective and get you the results.

So, the next time you catch yourself yearning for the golden results that would improve your life and quality of life, consider the possibility of not killing the goose, but understanding how the golden eggs, and golden moments, are achieved through training.