Details.

What Brian Jacques Taught Me. 

One of my favorite book series that is inextricably linked to my childhood is the Redwall series. As a youngster, I can vividly remember those trips to the school library where I would go to the fantasy/fiction section so I could check out a new Redwall book. Sometimes I just enjoyed gazing at the cover art of each book; as a child, the idea of animals wielding medieval weapons and going on long journeys was a proposition I couldn’t miss out on. Brian Jacques, the author, was a talented writer. I know this, not because I can recite the exact words of the specific passages that captivated my attention, but because I can remember the picture that was painted through those passages. Mr. Jacques’ writing style was infused with the ability to blur the distinction between words on a page and the images those words were intended to represent. I can still “see” the feasts the good-natured animals had whenever they celebrated the end of that novel’s story. The descriptions of those feasts seemingly transcended the pages they are written on and become a living, breathing scene in the mind’s eye. 

How?

Details.

If your goal is to successfully tell a story, then the medium through which your story travels cannot be one dimensional. It cannot just be a logical sequence of events that takes you from beginning to end. Perhaps the facts are laid out and the causal links between the sequences are revealed, but if this is all you rely on then you are almost certainly dragging your audience along with you. Instead of captivating your audience’s attention - to the degree where your audience “forgets” they are reading words on a page and instead substitute your words with what their imagination supposes your words mean - you are holding your audience’s attention captive. It is hard to stay motivated to read such a story. As the sentences and paragraphs accumulate it feels like a long, drawn out, and monotone conversation you feel ever more inclined to stop listening to. This risk runs higher when the only dimension your story travels through is logic. 

Of course stories need logic; the aspects of a story that keep it grounded and naturally flowing. Even fantasy stories, where little mice talk and go on perilous adventures, have a thread of logic running through them that connects the parts of the story. Things have to make sense at some fundamental level. But, stories also need detail; the little breaks in logical flow that provide the imagination with enough context to pull itself into. Before moving forward, it must be said that not all details are good. Details can slow a story down. They can be repetitive. They can be irrelevent. Good Details then possess certain qualities that make them discernable from bad details. There is probably much that could be said about this, but for the sake of length, a good detail is one that provides you with interesting and relevant information that adds a unique element to the story.  

Finally, the impact that details provide becomes larger when details are authentic. Details are at their most interesting when they are a product of your own experience. Something you noticed, something you felt, something you observed that maybe no one else has. The best details are those that represent the way your mind grasps the world. 

Find Details in Training

Let’s imagine your training is written as a story. If the exact way you thought about your training was written on paper, would you find it an interesting read? Don’t get ahead of yourself and start diving into the infrastructure of your training: sets, reps, volume, intensity…this periodization method or that one. Training does not have to contain the “most advanced” programming strategies in order for it to be interesting. In fact, I often find it difficult to read the programs listed in training books. Generally I just gloss over each week because the infrastructure is really not that interesting at all. Only think about the act of training, not the underpinning theories that explain the different ways you can train. Are we on the same page? If not, think about questions like these…

• Where is your mind when you show up to train? Are you focused? Do you want to be there? How focused are you? How much do you want to be there?

• How tired do you feel today? Do you feel tired at all? Do you feel fresh and ready to go? Are your joints achy? Are your muscles sore? 

• How heavy does the bar feel on your back? Does it feel heavier than normal? Does it feel hilariously light? Does it feel good?

What are questions like these asking you to provide? Details.

I am sure we agree (good) details make a story more interesting. Shouldn’t (good) details make experience more interesting then? I don’t see any reason for the predominant feature of details - to pull you into the world - to be any different whether they are details of a story or details of your current, happening experience. Ofcourse, how we interact with the details of a story and experience are fundamentally different. I have to “touch” the details of a story with my imagination, yet I can quite literally touch the details of experience through my senses. Even with this stark difference, however, the function of details remains unchanged. They represent something interesting about the world.

Most importantly, you are the author who reveals the details of your experience. You get to choose what is interesting to you. 

The crux of this argument, and the purpose of my writing this, is that I believe the more interested you are in your training, the better your training will be. At first glance this seems like an obvious statement, but I don’t think this is the case because…we don’t talk about it. I don’t think we spend enough time thinking about what it means to be interested in your training. The majority of fitness information that is disseminated today is concrete. It is scientific. It is, “You should perform this exercise because through biomechanics we can reason it will stimulate the most muscle growth.” And this is necessary information! It is extremely important to train correctly, efficiently, and with sound principles. But, to me, it seems like the pendulum has swung so far in that direction that we forget to ask ourselves, why am I even training in the first place?

There are a number of points I can make as to why training is better when you are more interested in it. However, one point in particular is more than sufficient. It is where everything stems from. Your interest in training serves as the progenitor from which all other training outcomes originate. It is not something you can quantify, you can not put it on a scale and measure it, you can not calculate its volume on a spreadsheet. The more details you find, the more interested you are, the better the training decisions you will make, the better you will be.  

I will leave you with some details I have noticed about what is generally an afterthought; gripping the barbell. Some things I have picked up, that I have found interesting, on a seemingly inconspicuous subject. 

Grip.

Each barbell has its own signature of knurling. The knurling on some barbells greets your hands with subtlety. You barely even know it is there and it quickly fades into the background as you lift. Some barbells seem to reach up and slap you with their knurling. As you pull on them you can feel your skin sink down into the sharp ridges separating each knurl. The knurling on some commercial gym bars is nonexistent, especially in somewhere like a Crunch Fitness. Those bars have a rough life. They are subjected to nonstop use. From nearly sun up to sun down the knurling on those bars are being weathered away like a mountain creek wearing down a rock face. Good luck trying to do snatches on barbells like those, you might as well rub the shaft with oil (pause) while you’re at it. 

The exercise you’re doing will dictate the severity of the knurling you want, or at least it should if you have the option. For something like heavy deadlifts, you want sharper knurling. There is no other exercise that will quite test your grip strength like a deadlift, and although you may tear a callous or two, the more of your hand you can mesh with the knurling the stronger your grip will be. For most other exercises, where the goal is not to pick up as much weight as you possibly can from the floor, this kind of knurling will do more damage than necessary. There is no point in beating your hands up for bent rows. 

Of course, you can circumvent knurling altogether if you use straps. If you use straps correctly they will nearly hold the bar for you, it doesn’t even feel like you have to actively grip the bar. That’s only if you use them correctly, however. If you have no idea how to use them, they will just get in the way. You can refine exactly how you use them for various exercises as well. I use a different feel when using straps for snatches than a deadlift. With snatches, I try to get the entire length of the strap wrapped around the barbell so that my entire hand is touching the strap. I want my hand to be completely level on the bar. With deadlifts, I usually just go with one tight wrap and allow the rest of the strap to hang. I don’t care about any subtle nuance here, I just need to know the strap is tight and then I pull as hard as possible. 

There is more to grip than just reaching down and grabbing the barbell. Each exercise has an ideal orientation for where the bar is in your hand. If you look at the section of your hand between where your finger starts and your thumb protrudes outwards, there is about a 2-3 inch section of where the barbell could potentially sit in your hand. Wherever the bar is located within this section will have a huge impact on how that exercise feels and consequently how well you perform it. For pulling exercises from the floor, you want the bar to meet your hand below the base of your fingers. This allows the entire length of your fingers to curl around the bar, creating the most grip strength. It would also just feel weird if you attempted to deadlift with the bar shoved deep into the palm of your hand. Pressing exercises require their own orientation of the barbell and are somewhat opposite of pulling exercises. I prefer to have the bar deeper in my palm when I am pressing so that I have less wrist extension and the bar is stacked more directly over my wrist joint. 

By now, you can see the pattern, there is more to every single aspect of gripping a barbell, even chalking your hands. When you are not using straps and are performing a heavy exercise, especially olympic lifts, you should be using chalk. Chalk absorbs the moisture from your hands and increases the friction between you and the barbell; making for a stronger grip. But you don’t want to just stick your hand in a chalk bowl, covering your hands nonchalantly, then go to perform your exercise. I find my grip feels the best when I initially use the powder in a chalk bowl. I cover the majority of my hands and fingers lightly, then rub them together so that any excess chalk is removed. I then grab a chunk of chalk and cover almost the entire length of the inside of my thumb, the ridge between my thumb and my pointer finger, and the outside of my pointer finger. I will especially cover that “ridge” because I find moisture tends to pool there, so I want more chalk in that location to mop up as much of that as possible. If you do this enough times you will know exactly what type of feel you are looking for with the amount of chalk and where exactly you want more concentrated portions. Then, ofcourse, you clap a couple of times after the ritual to make sure any unnecessary chalk flies off, and it just looks cool before you go to do a big lift. 

I think the most important detail, however, is how great of an indicator your grip is in relation to how strong you might be for any given day. The stronger your grip feels, the better you will perform and vice versa. There are some days where I don’t even feel the barbell in my hands because my grip feels so strong, and on days like those, the weights are in trouble. On the same token, the bar can feel like a foreign object in my hand. It can feel uncomfortable. Inevitably, on days like these, I know my strength will not reveal itself to its full degree. My grip is my most reliable indicator for my strength for the day. Such a detail will help you make smarter training decisions; it provides a reliable suggestion for the extent to which you can push yourself for the day. 

Details are everywhere. They make everything interesting, even training. Pay attention to the world. 

Training is Fun.