If you want to become physically strong, the default solution to this problem is to go lift weights. The idea is that you can challenge your muscles in the gym, build capacity to develop force, and then next time you need to use strength for real, it’ll be easier. And this works, obviously. Professional athletes lift weights for good reason, and it pays off when they have more strength with which to push back the opposing lineman or whatever.
However, this isn’t the only way to build strength, and done poorly it can have serious downsides.
The alternative is to just go do things that are hard. Not because they’re hard, but because they’re worth doing even though they’re hard. A farmer doesn’t need to lift iron so that lifting bales of hay is easier, he can just lift the hay—and if it’s hard, that will build the strength that makes it easier. If nothing else, this saves him a gym membership and time by doing his strength training on the job.
There’s another more interesting advantage though, which is that the feedback loop is tighter. If you’re trying to lasso a bull and your grip strength is what’s failing, guess which muscles are going to get the impetus to grow? If you’re trying to lift a big rock into the back of a truck, not only does each muscle get its own growth signal in proportion to its need, you get practice learning to use them. There is skill in coordinating muscle contractions into the right postures to use muscles to do real things. There’s skill in knowing when to not use muscles. While I’m sure NFL coaches do a pretty good job of matching training to the field use, it’s easy to overemphasize bicep curls because biceps are what you notice on people that “look strong”, and now you’ve invoked Goodhart’s law. I’ve had a woman I know tell me about guys at Jiu Jitsu who at first intimidated her with all their muscles, only for her to realize after rolling with them “Lol, those are gym muscles” — because these guys lacked the body awareness needed to actually use them effectively.
Figuring out what we’re lifting for matters, because it determines what we lift and how we lift it. Even if we’re just trying to impress people, it’s hard to be more unimpressive than spending all our time building muscles that don’t actually work when we need them.
It is said that meditation is strength training for the mind. Why are we strength training our minds again? What is it that this strength is for, and are we keeping this in mind when we choose what and how we lift?
Meditation has all the same considerations and more, because staying connected to what you actually need meditation for is itself a meditation skill. Arguably the most important.
Anxiety? Why not do CBT or something. Tackle that directly, with whichever skills prove appropriate, and concrete feedback about whether it’s working. How anxious are you, and is it more or less than one perceptual timestep ago? What is correlating with these fluctuations, and what does this imply about how to solve the problem?
Or better yet, why do you care about anxiety in the first place? What are you anxious about anyway?
Oh, public speaking? You’re worried that you’re gonna do a bad job, and this is pulling your attention away from where it needs to be in order to do a good job? Why not tackle that directly, with whichever skills prove appropriate? Skills like holding attention on the topic of your speech. Like awareness of when your attention is drifting towards unhelpful things, and of why your attention keeps getting dragged where it does. And whether there might be a reason that has elided your awareness.
Whatever the goal, there’s always the option of intentionally practicing mindfulness towards the specific things needed to succeed at your goal. Instead of getting your koans from meditation teachers, you can notice the koans that nature puts between us and our goals. If you’re diving for lobsters you might think the limiting skill is grabbing them before they get away, but the limit might actually be in your perceptual ontology. Which one of these pieces of kelp — which is definitely kelp — is about to transform into a lobster?
To the extent that becomes limiting, lobster diving becomes a great way to build the skill of noticing the difference between our low level conclusions and the reality beneath. Would you notice if you were up against this limit? There’s something to meditate on. Something that will keep your practice grounded in what you care about.
Without that, and without a skilled coach who can keep your efforts grounded for you, there’s the risk of developing the meditation equivalent of “gym muscles”. Of becoming someone who is breath aware, and who can let thoughts arise and pass “as thoughts” from a full lotus on the meditation cushion, but reverts to conflating their thoughts with reality under the pressure of thoughts that matter, and might even be right. Without any hard earned skills of coordinating thoughts in ways that stand up to pressure and serve to shape reality.
When the thought that arises is “Shit, I left the front door open. I don’t know where my kid is”, do you have to leave the meditative practice in order to act? Are you building skills for dealing with thoughts of the sort “We’re on track to unacceptable outcomes” that don’t require either giving up on meditation or giving up on reality?
This alternative is much harder. Try to do the thing you actually care about. Hone the skills of noticing exactly where you’re going wrong. Develop awareness of where your perceptual ontology is failing you. And of where your awareness is failing you. Puzzles will multiply faster than the answers.
And as a result, things will stay interesting. It can be hard to stay motivated lifting weights up when they just end up back down in the same spot anyway. Or to focus on your breath when your breath isn’t doing anything interesting, and you have to practice not-noticing the lack of a compelling answer to “Why am I doing this anyway? This is stupid”.
It’s a lot easier to exert yourself to maximum capacity when the connection is solid, and you know what you’re fighting for. When there’s a bull to restrain, or lobsters to catch. Or unacceptable outcomes on the horizon, and no clear way off the track.
The suggestions this essay gives for strength training—that you can simply practice the final task of interest, instead of doing targeted training—is ineffective at best and dangerously wrong at worst. While I’m less familiar with the other topics, I think similar dynamics apply, calling this entire essay into question.
Suppose your only goal in life is to win powerlifting competitions. Following the advice of this essay, you’d think one should just to nothing except practice the competition lifts. And that’s very much not what competitive lifters do.
They do assistance exercises: when a muscle is the bottleneck, train that muscle, instead of training a larger movement that also uses that muscle.
Actually, the essay’s own examples make the point stronger:
> There’s another more interesting advantage though, which is that the feedback loop is tighter. If you’re trying to lasso a bull and your grip strength is what’s failing, guess which muscles are going to get the impetus to grow? If you’re trying to lift a big rock into the back of a truck, not only does each muscle get its own growth signal in proportion to its need, you get practice learning to use them.
No! That is not how it works. While your pull strength might be limited by the grip, your number of reps will be limited by your overall fatigue, which is very much driven by your larger muscles. And thus your grip muscles are actually not getting that much signal to grow.
Actually, did you know that, in many lifts, the limiting factor is not your muscles at all, but rather your central nervous system? (Sometimes “lifting weights for the brain” is literally just lifting weights.)
If someone is doing deadlifts and finding themselves limited by grip strength, then they will start doing assistance exercises for the grip. Or if their actual goal is leg and back strength rather than the raw deadlift number, then they may start using deadlift straps.
This generalizes.
If you’re a pianist, and you struggle through a difficult section of a larger piece, then you practice that section or practice drills or other pieces that exercise the technique underlying that section, instead of getting the small amounts of improvement that come from the few seconds of that section while also practicing the rest of the piece and dividing your attention on other things.
A related issue is that oftentimes the real practice has a larger cost, be it time, money, or health. It’s well-known in lifting that muscles grow faster than connective tissue, so that someone constantly pushing their maximum is guaranteed an injury, even if they have perfect form. Due to the larger family of phenomena this comes from, Eddie Hall, contender for strongest man in the world, said that he only makes 1-rep max attempts in competition. Quite the opposite of trying to do the “real thing” to improve!
Actually, the arguments of this essay are essentially the same as what I argued against nearly a decade ago in The Practice is not the Performance: Why Project-Based Learning Fails. Project-based learning had a lot of mindshare in the 2010s, boosted by various fads such as programming bootcamps. When I first published it, I got a lot of public attacks, along with a lot of private appreciation from people who went through project-based learning programs and came to realize how ineffective they were compared to traditional education. It wound up on the front page of HN again some years later, and was met with a lot of agreement as more had come to realize the failures of the bootcamp approach.
There is a place for doing real projects and noticing when you’re missing the ability to combine individual skills you learned into the whole, and this essay does touch on that. I can most appreciate this essay as a reminder for people who have been too stuck in school of the importance of the 12th virtue of rationality (keeping sight of the end goal). But there’s something I can’t put my finger on that leads me to imagine it being read by people who ought be doing assistance exercises in the gym and practice drills for their career. Should you reverse any advice you hear?
I think most of this can be summarized in the line “Professional athletes lift weights for good reason”, no? There are indeed good reasons to lift weights in judiciously chosen ways. I’ve done a fair bit of lifting myself, and still do some.
Right, so are you working your grip strength because the rope got pulled out of your hand, and you realize that your grip needs more specific work until that stops happening? If your meditation practice involves running up against real limits, working the piece that you observed to fail, and testing with short feedback loops against the actual purpose, then you already get it.
Most people I see talk about meditation don’t have that. People will do it because “Science says it helps with anxiety”, or because “there is no self” sounds profound and fascinating. And then they go focus on their breath for countless hours, hoping that the skills somehow translate while being ironically mindless about the connection. Which is where, I argue, mindfulness counts the most.
Some meditators do pull it off—Dr.K can sure put his “holding thoughts as object” skills to impressive real world use. But you also get people with decades of meditation experience, who make meditation part of their identity, who nonetheless fuse with their thoughts in a stiff breeze. Without noticing.
And if we generalize beyond meditation to rationality, how many people can give a tightly coupled account of exactly how their engagement with LW connects to their broader goals? How many have even noticed that this post contains zero advice?
Deliberate Practice was basically the realization that this isn’t true when talking about rapid skill acquisition. It can be totally fine for normal optimization of life supportive practice.
This is good advice, but it assumes there’s a set of appropriately-difficult tasks to tackle, relative to your current ability level. Not so easy there’s no growth triggered, not so hard you can’t do them enough to get the trigger or can’t attempt them without hurting yourself.
An interesting idea, but I notice that:
Professional athletes do a significant amount of conventional strength training.
Professional musicians practice scales, arpeggios, and pieces called “studies” in addition to their concert pieces, and even do hand mobility exercises. “Studies” are usually short, boring pieces that challenge the limits of dexterity.
These conventional, supplementary strategies push capabilities beyond those required at the time of performance, ensuring that the performer has spare capacity, not operating at their limits when it counts. Also, many exercises have a complementary nature, such as athletes strengthening muscles that balance their physique and prevent injuries.
Overall, by observing the time-tested training methods of high-functioning professionals from in fiercely competitive fields, I think the advice in this post is mostly incorrect :)
High-functioning professionals don’t learn to restrain bulls by actually trying to restrain a bull on day one, that’s how you get gored. You look at the task, decompose it into subskills, drill the subskills until you can do them better than you will need to in the real task, then practice stringing them together, and then you go restrain bulls and catch lobsters.
For example: how does “just do the thing” help me get better sleep?
I think many people are doing meditation in order to reflect on what really matters to them. But let’s focus on the case where meditation is only strength training for a particular goal, for the sake of argument.
I think there are a lot of structural differences between physical strength training and meditative training. In fact, I think meditation is more “resting” than “training” in some ways.
- Figuring out what you really need (why you’re anxious, why you can’t speak in public, why you can’t create long-lasting relationships...) is really hard, and noticeably harder than just doing the meditation.
- Meditation really is that good. We don’t have to guess about whether meditation alone is useful in different domains; it’s a well-studied phenomenon now. It helps regulate your emotions, helps you sleep, can help with obesity and just with general mood. Nobody does meditation to get better at writing emails, but it certainly does help me stay motivated while I write them.
- You can make meditation your fallback state; you can’t make physical training your fallback state. When you’re exhausted and you don’t know what to do next, meditating really helps clean up your thoughts. And once you make it a habit, it does not require any motivation or planning: you just do it.
- I heard the testimony of one guy who said that he developed persistent awareness (a strong meditative state after the end of his meditation) after doing, well, only meditation. If being more aware while you’re working is your goal, then doing just meditation may be enough.