Four Life Lessons from the Weight Room
There’s no place quite like the weight room! When it comes to teaching life lessons, we would argue that there is no better classroom. It’s a classroom where there are no shortcuts. No cheating. No retakes. No completion grades. No late work. No bonus points. Everything is earned. What you get is a direct reflection of what you give. It will give you a glimpse of reality and teach you everything you need to know to be successful.

Lesson #1: Failure is inevitable.
Our culture has increasingly found ways to shelter kids from failure. From participation trophies to test retakes, we are creating a false reality for our young people that says, “you always win.” We’re feeding kids the lie that showing up ensures success.
A recent article in the New York Times cited a study done by researchers at the University of California, Irvine. According to the study, a third of students surveyed said they deserved a B for attending lectures and 40% said they deserved a B for completing the required reading. To quote Michelle Cottle’s response to the UCI study in The New Republic, “I don’t want a brain surgeon who graduated at the top of his class because he had perfect attendance. I want one who is an artist with a scalpel.”
These are students, that achieved at levels high enough in high school to get into college, that think the standard for a B should simply be showing up. In the athletic realm, this is equivalent to believing that as long as you show up to every football practice during the regular season, you deserve to go 8–2. That’s absurd, but these students that were surveyed didn’t just make this up. They learned it somewhere. Where?
Not the weight room. Showing up is a big factor to success. We stress effort all the time, but when you put 315 on the bar, it’s not going to care if you showed up to every workout. It’s not going to concern itself with how great your technique is. In reality, it’s not going to care how hard you are trying. It’s either going to move or it’s not. And here’s the best part: if it doesn’t, that’s ok!
You failed.
Get back up.
Go back to work.
That’s life!!
There’s no better teacher than failure as long as you learn from it.
Lesson #2: Adversity is indiscriminate.
You won’t find a more objective place on the planet than the weight room. Toss a couple 45’s on a barbell and you’re going to get 135 pounds of resistance every time. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Monday morning or a Saturday night. If it’s freezing outside or it’s smoldering hot. Whether you feel great or you haven’t slept in 3 days. It doesn’t care about race, ethnicity, age or gender. It’s true to itself all day, every day.
The weight is always honest; sometimes brutally so. It might not always tell you what you want to hear. It will consistently tell you what you need to hear.
Life is very much the same. There’s going to be trials and tribulations. There’s going to be burdens to carry and adversity isn’t going to care about your circumstances; good or bad. Adversity is coming and it rarely picks convenient times to show up. There will be times when you do everything exactly right, but the outcome isn’t what you would hoped it would be.
Not everyone will face the same challenges, but when they show up, we all have the same choice. You can lay down or you can fight. The weight room teaches you to fight. When tough times try to pull you down, the weight room teaches you to push back.
Lesson #3: Growth requires discomfort.
The weight room is uncomfortable. It demands that you challenge yourself. It demands that you try things you’ve never done before. It demands that you make yourself vulnerable to failure.
Growth makes the same demands. If you want to progress in any area of life you must challenge yourself to do things that you’ve never done before, which will mean you have no choice but to accept the vulnerability that failure is a likely outcome.
When we get our athletes in the weight room, they’re never alone. They always have a partner or lifting group. The expectation is that they encourage each other and push each other to be their very best. That can be uncomfortable, too. On a lot of levels.
Do you have the courage to prioritize the goals of your team above your own popularity?
Will you surround yourself with people that will truly challenge you to be better?
Can you put your own ego aside and accept the feedback of those around you?
You better believe that it’s going to be really uncomfortable to honestly answer “yes” to those three questions. At the same time, we truly believe that if you can answer “yes” to all of those, they sky’s the limit in any endeavor of your life.
Carol Dweck said it pretty well in her book, Mindset:
“Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better? Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? Why look for friends or partners who will just shore up your self-esteem instead of ones who will also challenge you to grow? And why seek out the tried and true, instead of experiences that will stretch you? The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset.”
Lesson #4: Your purpose is bigger than your struggle.
The weight room is a means to an end. Not the end in itself. Training only has value insofar as it can be applied to some other goal. We are fortunate to work with some of the best high school athletic programs in the country and they aren’t the best because of their one-rep maxes.
They aren’t trying to get stronger just to be stronger. They aren’t trying to get faster just for the sake of being faster. There is a bigger purpose in all of it. The weight room is simply a tool, that when used well, creates young athletes that are better equipped to perform on the field or court.
As we touched on earlier, adversity is inevitable, but when a person can see the bigger picture, they’re more inclined to fight. When they can see past the struggle, to the purpose behind it, they will become better athletes. They’ll also become better students. Better employees. Better spouses. Better parents. Better people. No matter how tough life gets, when you know your purpose is bigger than your struggles, you have no choice but to persevere.
In life, you’re going to fail at times. Your going to face adversity. Growth and progress are going to require that you step out of your comfort zone. But remember, you’ve got a bigger purpose.
Life’s tough. So is the weight room. You can choose to run and hide. Or you can get in there and get after it.

