Past Performance Does Not Guarantee Future Results

Are your actions moving you towards your current goals? Or further away? Like a circle, head in the same direction long enough and you’ll ultimately end up moving back to your starting point.

Let’s say that you are relatively new to strength and conditioning and you want to find yourself more drawn to the specifics of getting stronger. You want to learn how to perform strict pull-ups and do sound back squats. You’d probably ask coaching questions centered around strength, cherry pick the movements you perform in the name of energy conservation towards that goal, etc. Let’s say you do this for three years and you get strong as hell. But three years is plenty of time for permanence of behavior to set in and before you know it, your path has not only converged with those goals, but become one with it. You are the strength approach.

You may not even have strength-specific goals any longer, but your circuitry does not know any other way because you’ve always only understood that path of ‘going’ towards that goal. You learned with a saw and never understood a knife might work better.

So when you try to form a new goal, you find yourself quite literally unable to make progress towards it because you’ve only ever hardwired one approach, and that approach may be the single thing preventing you from ever progressing past it.

It’s kind of like someone who took pain killers for migraines, not they get migraines if they don’t take the pain killers.

New goals often need divergence, to temporarily or even permanently move away from what from you know and love if it doesn’t serve what you’re trying to achieve. A runner overcomes running fatigue by trying to run more. A powerlifter who overcomes a plateau with two extra sessions. A chronically underfed person who keeps underfeeding harder trying to come out of their diet plateau. An overweight person not understanding why their muscle focused only workouts are no longer serving their physique.

There are many instances where we need to focus on divergence, on ‘going’ away from what we know despite its counterintuitive paradox.

Settling into routine and never budging is harmful, and so too is constantly changing it up before adaptation occurs. There is balance to be had. Periodization of training approaches. Nutrition de-loads. Assessing what you’re doing and what you’re after every twelve weeks or so and never make the mistake that past performance guarantees future results.

-Dave