GoodFriday: On solutions, seeds, & speed
Happy GoodFriday!
Here's something I heard, thought, and did this week.
Something I Heard: Tradeoffs
“There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.” — Thomas Sowell
Something I Thought: The Seed and the Inferno
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about personal development. I’m the kind of person who is always striving to become the best version of myself possible. To me, life is about constantly refining yourself into the purest form you can become. We all start as a kind of raw material, and part of the work of life is shaping ourselves into something more complete.
But for the longest time, I thought growth meant doing away with your old self completely. That version of you had to die in order for the new version to be revealed.
Naturally, I took that idea to its extreme. I carried that belief for much longer than I’d like to admit.
I started interpreting self-improvement in an almost adversarial way. It became me against me. I tried to purge myself of what I saw as the weaker version of myself.
Achievement became the fuel. More money, more clients, more views. Everything I valued was something I could count. I decided the only way to reach any of it was to be completely consumed by the pursuit, so I ran as hard as I could and I hardened myself along the way. Vulnerability looked like weakness to me. Softness looked like weakness. My worth was in what I could produce, which meant anything that wasn't producing felt like waste.
Eventually, I discovered that this version of me behaves like an inferno. It burns with unbelievable intensity, consuming itself and everything around it until there’s nothing left in its path.
It was only recently that I started to understand that transformation doesn’t have to be about destruction.
A seed is the perfect example.
A seed ceases to be a seed in order to become a plant. But the plant isn’t unrelated to the seed. It is the seed fulfilled.
That’s very different from replacing the seed with something foreign.
Viewing personal growth through this lens helped me realize that growth is less about destroying who you were and more about allowing the parts of you that are true to mature, while letting the false parts fall away.
I can't control the outcomes that fortune grants me. I can control my effort, my character, and my values. That's the whole shift. The drive is still there, I just stopped believing it had to run every hour of the day. I don't need to burn when I'm home.
Something I'm Doing: Velocity Training
I’ve been writing workout programs for years. Usually, they’re written weeks in advance. You do 5 sets of 5 at 80% because that's what the spreadsheet said back when it was written, regardless of whether you slept four hours or ate like garbage or came in feeling like a truck. Velocity-based training flips that. I put a device called the OVR Performance on the bar, and it tells me how fast the weight is actually moving. Speed doesn't lie. If the bar is moving slower than it should at a given weight, the athlete is more fatigued than the plan assumed and we adjust that day. If it's flying, we add weight. The program adapts to the person instead of the person forcing themselves into the program.
I'll be honest about one thing. I got it wrong at first. These devices report a few different numbers, and I was building programs off peak velocity when I should have been using mean velocity. Peak is the fastest single moment of the lift, which is basically noise. Mean is the average across the whole rep, and it's the one that actually tracks with effort. I had to catch that, throw out the work, and rebuild the blocks from scratch. Better to eat that than to keep coaching off a number that doesn't mean anything.
The results have been hard to argue with. Clients started hitting PRs. Klayton pulled 515 on the deadlift. Rob came in with a 475. We're chasing 500 now. Aaron is working from a 365 bench toward 405 on a 12-week block, three days a week. Same lifters, same bodies. The difference is that we stopped guessing what they had in the tank on a given day and started measuring it.
You don't need the device to steal the principle. Pay attention to how the weight moves, not just whether it went up. If a rep that should be smooth turns into a grind, that's information. Most people ignore it and push anyway. That's how you end up hurt or stalled.
Until next week!
-Cameron Harn
