Following A Logical, Natural Progression

When a baby is learning to walk it is literally learning one step at a time. Once they have mastered what we consider to be one of the most basic skills in walking, they are then able to learn other more complex skills in a logical, albeit forced, natural progression. When adults are striving to learn new skills or perform hard tasks we need to follow this blueprint.

When we are trying to perform hard things of a physical nature or intellectual nature we often have a strong willingness to jump to the end, to not lay the logical foundation that will allow us to thrive on the more complex tasks.

As a strength and conditioning coach that helps individuals towards their goals, there is often a big disconnect with what I think an individual should be prioritising and what they want to be prioritising. This is because people want to jump to the final step without properly laying the foundation required to build towards more complex skills and challenging asks.

Learning Requires Patience

Learning challenging skills or performing challenging tasks (e.g. marathons) takes a great deal of patience and time. If you are learning to perform a snatch and cannot perform a bodyweight squat, there is a huge problem. If you want to perform a half-marathon but have never run a 10km then your in for another sort of problem, being injury.

Learning Skills / Performing Tasks Requires Logical Progress

Running and Patience

Running has become extremely popular over the last couple of years, which is resulting in more and more people performing running events like half marathons and marathons. This is an amazing fashion as it has the power to help huge numbers of people improve their health through improving their cardiovascular systems. It also offers the potential of thousands of injuries as people want to perform the marathon without doing the training plan.

Running volume is built through ardent practice, the amount of volume required to run a marathon is a difficult task which the body needs to be ready for. Running a marathon is usually the culmination of years of running training, not two months. This is an important point, it is not to deter people from setting this goal, it is to open peoples eyes to the difficulty of the goal itself which will in the long term help you achieve your goal.

Weightlifting and Patience

I am the owner of a CrossFit gym and I help individuals learn to perform both the Clean and Jerk and the Snatch. These movements are extremely complex movements that requires years of dedication to obtain mastery on. This is why they are so hard for general health practitioners to master. They require a mixture of strength, coordination, balance and mobility all of which results in very challenging exercises to perform. In our gym, we try and push people to our more basic sessions prior to performing the weightlifting sessions as their needs to be a logical progression to learning complex movements. If you cannot do a back squat at your bodyweight, do you really need to be learning how to perform a snatch?

Harry Potter Before Proust

My main intellectual endeavour is language learning, this was born out of moving to France at the beginning of my career. I had to start reading in a foreign language through reading children’s books, doing this in your early 20’s is a difficult task but it is also the logical step in the learning journey. Even though I am passed Harry Potter I am a long way from reading proust, but as I continue to follow the logical progression of difficulty I get closer to more complex books everyday. Just like in running or in weightlifting, when doing other challenging endeavours like language learning, we need to strive to do things in the correct order.

Becoming a Practitioner

At the base of the idea of doing things in a logical progression is something more important, something more satisfying than goal attainment. That is performing behaviours as a practice, that do not require a goal. Doing things because they provide joy, challenge, awe, flow and connection. Run because you love running, not so you can say you did a marathon. Weight lift because you find it fun, not so you can post your snatch on your instagram. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t follow a logical progression, it just means that following a logical progression is part of your practice.