The Road to Discipline, Chapter 7

Learning Strategies

Mark Brown

May 31, 2022

Any physical development needs to be paired with both mental and intelligence development to see the most growth. It is possible to get both individually but development of them will be slower because structure of discipline is less complete. I’ve seen evidence of it multiple times in my life. Learning how to accomplish tasks, both simple and complex, is at the core of what “good” discipline is about. I have talked about learning directly through experience and through supplemental resources in past chapters. There are a couple other learning strategies worth exploring. This chapter is dedicated to them and the what they bring to the table.

I believe I need to start this with a look at the physiological part of learning because I need to discuss how the body itself is effected. Learning how to perform tasks is amongst the most important things a person has to be able to do in general. This often gets overlooked because it is such an obvious statement to make it sounds stupid to say aloud. However, we know many things that get in the way of that: Learning or physical disabilities, upbringing, traumatic injury, etc. This opening stage of learning can be very frustrating because there are multiple layers of expectations at work regarding the rate of learning. The first involves one’s own ego and the second involves what others think of how fast one is picking it up. This can all come together into a storm that sets everyone back.

Getting better at athletic movements is particularly difficult because they can be only be learned by feeling the motions and seeing success from those actions. The difficulty is only added to by the fact that success in this situation could be send the wrong message. There are almost always multiple ways of performing tasks that will create successful outcomes. Each one has specific short term and long term consequences. Luck is always present and must be accounted for also. Determining what happened because of skill and what happened because of luck is extremely important and sometimes supremely difficult. This is what makes golf so damned hard. It is also why coaches, private trainers and training partners are in such high demand for athletes who seek to improve, especially when room for it decreases. Their ability to see what is happening from a third person point of view allows for the athlete to combine experience based learning with supplemental information to create a more complete breakdown of the technique was just used. This happens in an endless loop between the practices and games. Thus, the learning process never ends.

What I just described is why I favor prioritizing learning through experience over from supplemental resources. Learning how their actions feel allows one to funnel information about it from other sources more efficiently. That could be from watching directly as a spectator in person, from a video or from a magazine or blog. I often people watch at the gym to see how a movement I normally do is effecting another lifter’s body for this reason. It will also allow them how to better spot incorrect information within sources. Maintaining discipline is crucial to both physical and mental development because gathering information is always a good thing. “Paralysis by analysis” only happens when someone tries to accomplish too many things at once with the information given. If one knows their goal, has conviction, understands the consequences and the information backs up their feeling then the decision becomes easier to make.

Supplemental resources become more important the longer a lifter stays on the path because they will experience things that require some form of research to figure out what it is, how they could be doing it better, and what other things they can do achieve that effect. As I stated in last chapter, discipline’s structure allows knowledge that wasn’t learned through experience to filter in at a greater rate. The information becomes actionable much faster than if one isn’t actively building up their discipline. There are thousands of podcasts and videos about physical education on the internet so the supplemental learning is far easier to attain than ever before. The hard part is filtering through the information to distinguish what is really quite useless, helpful, game changing, and worth passing on. Information from these resources needs to be actionable first and foremost. It has to function the way a supplemental lift does. In the case of the information, it must aid the experience based learning. The best personal example I have is EliteFTS owner Dave Tate explaining how to plan sessions. Learning how to plan individual sessions has helped me learn programming much better. I can see my lifting before 2021 was planned but not structured. Seeing the differences between the two has elevated both my learning and my activity.

The metaphor I use for the path lifters take is that they start out on a flat, plain field then dip down into a deep, highly vegetated ravine and back up again onto another flat, more vegetated field. The first represents the initial organic phase of a lifting plan, which is more basic in nature. The ravine is what happens when a lifter starts to dig into supplemental information to enhance what they are doing. One could do this through experimentation alone but that would be a major commitment to do blind. Generally speaking, that doesn’t happen without significant research because of how expensive equipment in. The flat field on the other side of the ravine is what happens when someone puts a serious effort into the physical and intellectual part of lifting. The metaphor I used is what I feel my strength training journey has looked like. Most of the equipment I own is a result of living in the ravine for the last half of the 2010s. The tricky part is navigating the ravine. It’s easier to get lost than it is to find the path to the other side. Strength training really is a simple game when one finally understands it, which isn’t inevitable. It is entirely possible to never leave the ravine.

Learning is done in a multitude of ways. I’ve already talked about 2 of them at length through The Road to Disciple. There are a couple more learning strategies worth noting. Becoming proficient at assimilating information straight from a book, magazine, podcast or video is the most ideal way to pick up knowledge from supplemental resources. That isn’t as easy as it seems. It is a skill in and of itself that requires a lot of training to acquire. It is mostly done through reading, writing and listening. These are simple acts that require no physical activity to complete but one has to commit time to them actively and repeatedly. This grind is where the most intellectual growth is made. Do it consistently and one will become much more proficient at it. Naturally reading faster, listening closer and writing quicker are all the ways this will manifest itself in this setting. In the gym, moving with increased confidence, developing more strength and muscular growth and doing so more instinctively is how it will manifest itself there. When it comes to learning actions, thinking about the action will always slow one down and be less natural. There are moments where this is necessary, but it leads to more negative than positive outcomes, in my experience.

Another way learn is to bounce the information derived from both experience and other resources off other people and get their feedback. More than likely it will be a less efficient way to learning for most people because it is essentially a team effort to get everyone to learn it by the end. Looking at the information from multiple trains of thought can be just as effective as being able to get it right off the page, but it may take more time to get there. It illuminates the potential consequences that comes from decisions based on the information being shared. That can cause paralysis by analysis but it is better to know them than not. Some of the group will inevitably pick up the information faster. That is a good thing because it helps build respect in the room for peers rather than only respecting the teacher, professor, speaker or boss. Learning to learn from peers has effects that will last a lifetime. It builds relationships that put entire networks together. One never knows what will be the thing that stands out to someone in a conversation. This is the structure of learning that has been referenced many times about how Louie Simmons, the recently passed owner of Westside Barbell, strove for in his powerlifting gym.

The first thing learning this way does for someone is that it forces them to become better communicators, both in the verbal and non-verbal spectrums. This is something only learning from the source itself can’t give the learner. The source material can give only its take on the information given. The extra time invested in learning together is voided by the solo learner having to read or listen to more sources than the other group. This is what makes writing long term papers solo difficult. The time investment is through the roof and there’s usually a due date that’s relatively soon. It also explains why most of the important decisions one makes in their lives will be done as a group or team. Every decision has a consequence for each individual in the team effort. Even when the group succeeds as a whole, some individuals may get a sense of defeat or loss from the effort. Walter Payton being visibly and emotionally shaken in the locker room by not scoring one of the many touchdowns the Bears put on the New England Patriots in Super XX, played after the 1985 NFL season in January of 1986, in a 46-10 beatdown comes to mind immediately. He pulled personal betrayal over the joy of the team’s success.

The second thing it does is that it forces everyone in the group to do the work they promised, either overtly or tacitly, in the amount of time that was agreed upon to get the most learning done. People need to understand that if they fail to accomplish the work they were tasked to do that it has negative consequences for the group and themselves. The group is made weaker because that individual’s voice is either going to be missing or lessened by the fact they haven’t done the work. Individually, they will not be able to accurately and confidently put forward the consequences of any future decision will effect them to the group. Part of the psychology of group learning is putting as much pressure on the individual to put in the work as possible. Making and individual feel like they are impacting others negatively is a proven way to get the best results from them. There are exceptions to this, of course. Give people a reason to care about the person next to them and it will probably happen. This is not guilt tripping.

I have the best success with group learning, which is a bit of an ironic statement since I have lifted solo since the end of 2020 and seen a lot of improvement. I much preferred classroom settings while at Drake to online based courses. I just found no motivation to complete the work that was assigned, even though I knew the consequences of that inaction. Person to person interaction in person is best and most effective way of accomplishing the goal of group learning because of the ability to read non-verbal communication. Dave Tate has talked about this numerous times in his podcast regarding coaching lifters. The non-verbal communication is especially important when attempting to learn actions and action based processes. There’s simply no time to verbalize in the moment what is happening or being felt. With lifting it’s all the more impossible because controlling breath is one of the most important skills for a lifter to master. Lifting as a team also ensures that people are putting in the work that was agreed upon. The team bond becomes much more ingrained, natural and eventually instinctive when everyone is learning together. That is how you build team discipline inside an individual. If a coach or manager wants people to come together as a team, they need to push group learning to the members of the team. This can even be accomplished in sports or workplaces that are solo in nature.

I didn’t associate good grades or positive mindset with better physical health in high school. I always laughed when Keith Gurius, one of the PE teachers and the head football coach at North Polk when I was there, said that better physical health led to better grades. I came around to his side when he was proven right. The lesson was proven again when I went to Drake University because I let my physical health slip. I told myself I would be in the gym like I had been my senior year at North Polk but my discipline was dead by that point. I won’t retell the rest of this here but what I have learned from the experience of diving into the deep end of the strength training pool has helped me see the mistakes I made over the bulk of my 20s so I will not be making them again. They all stem from both a lack of confidence and discipline. I can firmly say that becoming physically stronger and understanding both why and how that has happened through supplemental information has made me a stronger, more disciplined learner in both solo and group learning. Even if I never become a master of my craft, I’m still better for trying to be.

Discipline requires a lot of things to maintain its strength. A continued drive to be an active learner is among the highest priorities on that list. It plays both primary and supplemental roles in whatever training someone does. Becoming better at one’s craft allows them to get into a position to help others with the same goals get better at theirs. The cycle of learning only stops when one puts up the stop sign. When that goes up, that’s one of the biggest signs that someone’s discipline is in danger. If killed, it can be replaced with a stronger, more durable discipline. One that uses group learning to help benefit everyone around. Using that shared learning experience helps build connections and networks. That starts to bind an individual’s discipline with other people’s to create a team discipline that is cohesive, even when individual goals differ.