“I don’t like that word, regression. I think we should call it a pregression.”

At that moment the roof of the gym parted, angels started playing trumpets, champagne rained from the heavens and a radiant light shone down upon us.

My friend and client, Jane, had solved a problem that had been plaguing me for years.

I hate the word regression. I hate it because it fundamentally contradicts one of my core beliefs that the only thing that matter is starting where you are and moving where you can. Regression implies that you should be “here” but you’re not so you need to do something that isn’t as good. The word literally means a return to a former state. If you’ve never been there then it’s not a regression at all.

However, something that you do before you can do something else is exactly what we’re talking about. A push-up with your hands elevated is a pregression to a push-up with your hands on the floor. You do that now so you can do a full push-up later. You do a full push-up now so that you can do a feet-elevated push-up later. Pregress the movement to make forward progress.

I’m not interested in making people feel small or belittled, but I know for a fact that using the word regression makes some people feel exactly that. If I can change the experience my clients are going to have for the better simply by changing one word that is a no-brainer decision for me.

Words matter. Words alter the way we view and perceive the world. Second only to action, changing your words is the quickest path to changing your thoughts and changing your mind.

What if we were to change the entire perspective of how our clients and we look at and describe pregressions and progressions of exercise by making this simple language change?

 

I knew as soon as the words left my mouth I regretted it. They weren’t my words, and I was just parroting back something I had heard way too often.

“Just keep failing. Just keep failing until you figure it out.”

Ugh. I wince just hearing myself repeat it in my head. It has been bothering me since that day. I was doing an interview with Tyler Bramlett and at the very end he hit me with one final question, “what’s your secret to success?” And that’s how I responded.

Here’s the thing: failure is absolutely an option. No matter what you do at some point you are going to fail. You may fail in a big or spectacular way, or you might fail in some tiny insignificant way. Either way you’re going to fail at some point.

Success however doesn’t come from failure. Success comes from… wait for it… wait for it… success. To be sure you will learn some things from failures along the way to success, and some people will fail more often than they succeed. That doesn’t change the fact that ultimately to succeed, you have to succeed! Success moves you closer and closer to your goal, whatever it may be.

I would argue that even the tiniest successful step forward has a greater net effect of moving you towards your goal than a failure, even if that failure moves you infinitesimally closer to your goal.

Failures teach you what not to do, success teaches you what to do.

You can’t guarantee success which is why it’s so important to just take action even if you ultimately fail. Doing is always, always, always more powerful than not doing. Don’t believe me? Tell someone you’re trying to teach a skill or a task to what not to do and watch them find new and creative ways to screw it up. Tell them what to do and while it may not be perfect on the first or third rep, it will get better and better each time.

Even further, success is not an end state, a mindset, or an outcome. No one is ever “successful.” Rather, success is how we describe a series of successful action steps. Want to be a success or be successful? Rack up the wins.

The takeaway is this: if you can figure out how to make your steps small enough and correct enough that you succeed you will win over, and over again. So if I could revise my statement, I’d say: “Just keep succeeding. Just keep succeeding until your successes get bigger and bigger.”

Imagine a bank account whose balance grows every day. The amount varies based on various factors like your balance and some of your financial decisions, but no matter what it always gets money deposited into it every day.

This bank account has a couple more interesting features. You can spend as much as you want out of it, and it will still be continuously replenished. There is only one “catch” so to speak. If you spend into the negative, your balance will still grow but you will be required to pay 50% interest on what you spend past your available balance. What’s more you won’t know when the bank is going to ask for the repayment.

Would you sign up for this new type of account the financial wizards of Wall St. have come up with?

Believe it or not, this is a fitting analogy for the body and how it handles stress. Your body is very much like a bank account that is constantly being replenished. Provided you go to sleep at night, you wake each morning restored, renewed, and on some level better than before depending on what you “spent” on stresses the day before.

Here’s the other important similarity. Your body, like your bank account, doesn’t differentiate what you spend money, or stress, on. Necessary expenses diminish your bank account just as frivolities do, and your body doesn’t distinguish stress either. Your boss yelling at you carries roughly the same amount of cost as a workout. It’s all stress.

It’s not good, or bad, it’s just stress.

But not when you go into a negative balance – whether it be by necessity or carelessness – you will pay for it.

Undesirable body composition, unexplained illnesses, lethargy, poor output or performance are the costs, the high interest repayments that you must make for spending past your limit.

On the other hand, if you take your available balance into account and only spend (apply stress) within your limits your balance grows and grows. You get better and better all the time without paying the high cost for overdoing it.

The better you account for the myriad stressors in your life and training the better your training progress will be. This is not one of those “try this, it might work for you” statements. This is an absolute fact. How exactly you do that is up to you, and there are various solutions.

You’ve already got the bank account that replenishes itself every day. All you have to do is be careful with your spending.

P.S. I created a companion product to Lift Weights Faster called Lift Weights Faster and Smarter to address this exact idea because I see too many people spending willy-nilly with their conditioning workouts. Well-designed workouts can only take you so far when they are not programmed specifically for YOU and what is going on with YOU at this very moment.