A mantra that’s been tossed around the current Weightlessness Process Tribe: “Failure is Where The Practice Begins.”

This isn’t meant as a Gogginsian “Stay Hard” type dictum, but rather acknowledgment that all the juicy and nuanced skills we cultivate within Weightlessness need a playground, or perhaps laboratory is better, where we can actually test their efficacy and activate greater depths of growth and performance.

This mantra surfaced in this particular tribe for, what I think I can safely call, a first time. For those at level 2 along the Weightlessness Spectrum (intermediate level) and beyond, it’s not uncommon to have set-rep structures that dramatically exceed what the trainee can do in a single set.

For example, one might have a number like 100 or 200 next to an exercise, with no other specified sets/reps to break it down. This is included for one reason - to ensure failure within a specific exercise, and to push well beyond it. In pursuit of 200 reps for example, they might first fail at 55, then after a brief rest, fail at 38, then after a brief rest, fail at 29, etc, until the total specific reps are completed. Each effort should result in failure to add additional reps, and rests should be kept to a bare minimum.

This isn't the only way failure is approached or programmed, however, and some of the more formal approaches can add useful insight into this idea that “Failure is Where The Practice Begins.” I'll look at it first from a fitness perspective, and then from the perspective of embodiment, and then from a remembrance of death.

In Fitness: Progressive Overload
Fitness and mind-body novices enjoy the comfort of defined sets and reps, and these generally present a challenge in the early stage of a new training program, lasting a few weeks to a couple months. And then when they continue on that program long enough they plateau, in part due to programs that don’t implement enough theoretical stress for the evolving body, and in part due to the unwillingness of the trainee to push beyond the boundaries of prior efforts. Rather than increase reps, load, or sets, they repeat the same workout over and over, and in so doing, they fail to fail.

Intermediate to advanced trainees are defined by this skill - to push one’s mind-body to the point of failure, locally within a certain exercise, or globally to a point of deep systemic fatigue. This will all but guarantee deeper adaptations are triggered, and strength will improve. Finding that sweet spot - following a program / prescription that meets your personal performance capacity today, but also keeping in mind that growth comes from doing more today than you did yesterday - is how novices become experts.

But just as the novice can become comfortable meeting program specs without pushing themselves into truly uncomfortable territory, so too can the intermediate train become comfortable failing at prior limits. Whether this is a true capacity limitation, or a psychological familiarity that restrains deeper effort, is hard to diagnose. Regardless, advanced trainees carry a secret with them that the others don't - failure is where the practice begins.

Those who are dead set on crushing plateaus and forcing deep and rapid change in the mind body use meta-program structures - programs that inform order flow that factors in intensity and load, exercise selection, and training frequency - but their aim, rather than reach failure within an exercise and rest or move on, to reach failure and continue.

This isn’t easy, and it isn’t always appropriate, as it can result in injury or over training in the less experienced, but it will get results.

Forms this can take:
Supersets: For beginners, this may mean compounding two exercises without a rest, where each exercise hits different body parts. For intermediate trainees this may look like compounding agonist and antagonist muscles within the same muscle pairing, i.e. doing a set of bicep curls followed immediately by tricep extensions. And in advanced trainees this might look like compounding two exercises that target the same muscle, i.e. chest flys followed immediately by bench press for the pecs (an isolation exercise to pre-fatigue the muscle, and then a compound lift to apply as much load / stress as possible to push it to absolute failure).

Drop Sets: Drop sets are pretty self explanatory. Failure at one weight doesn’t mean failure at another. This can be performed with any exercise and / or muscle group, but lets stick with bicep curls as an example. Let’s say 10 reps of a given weight gets you to failure on that set. A drop set would mean as soon as you truly fail to complete another rep, you drop that weight, and pick up another that’s lighter, perhaps 30% lighter. That weight is then curled to absolute failure, dropped, and then followed by rest, or yet another set with yet a lighter weight.

Rest-Pause Training: This approach pushes beyond failure by eating into the recovery window, and condensing the stress that would otherwise be applied by multiple sets into one semi-compound set. Let’s take pushups as an example: If 12 pushups gets you to failure, you take a brief rest, perhaps 10 to 20 seconds (or 3 breaths as my preference), and then you dive back in to squeeze out as many more reps as possible. This will generally only result in a couple more reps if you truly failed on the first set, but it’s enough to push beyond that limit and apply more stress in a shorter period of time.

Now that we’ve cleared some of the fitness applications, let’s explore other applications of “Failure is Where The Practice Begins.”

In Embodied Awareness: Somatic Competence
“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” - Joseph Campbell

A phenomena I’ve been privy to over the last few years, while pushing the somatic personality types - grit, cerebral, sensate, fluid - harder and harder within The Weightlessness 12-Week Mind Body Transformation Process, is the glaring consistency in resistance that each of these archetypes expresses when faced with improving their performance capacity in the antithetical archetype.

These antithetical relations:
Grit and Fluid - On a Spectrum of Tension
Cerebral and Sensate - On a Spectrum of Attention

These are fascinating patterns that play out time and time again because they’re not just based on personal preference, but are actually conditioned when young, and stored in the body - neuromuscular conditioning, myofascial molding, and psychoemotional states.

Grit personality types consistently struggle with flexibility exercises, which mandate the reduction of tension in the mind-body.

Fluid personality types consistently struggle to push beyond comfortable ranges of strength based effort into those that feel truly intense or stressful.

Cerebral personality types have a hard time stilling and opening the mind, and attending through the body to immediate, present experience.

And Sensate personality types struggle with concentration based work, as well as following external systems and processes that design order and organize thought processes.

And while these challenges are potent and consistent, they are also the caves that hold those compensatory traits required to attain to mind-body center, self control, and mastery. Amalgams of all four, albeit with one primary default, we all find our heights of self awareness when we push beyond the somatic impulse to retreat in corresponding training pillars.

In Life: Memento Mori (Remembering Death)

Death is the final failure. It takes everything from us. And as such, we live as if it isn’t an ever present risk and a certainty of outcome.

The more I reflect on my own inadequacies, the more I’m convinced the compromises and excuses made in betrayal of my true purpose and passions occurs as a result of forgetting death, and thinking tomorrow is a guaranteed promise.

It isn’t.

In remembering death, something magical happens. The fears, insecurities, and self doubts that sabotage our dreams and ambitions, and have a way of designing mediocrity and powerlessness, dissolve when we realize time is an illusion. In remembering death we find right perspective - we are but mere dots hustling and importing, dreaming and avoiding, located somewhere insignificant on a giant blue ball floating in the infinite depth of space.

Nothing we say or do today will be remembered after 50 years.
Nothing we achieve will we carry beyond the walls of death.
And nothing we fail at will carry one iota of meaning without the self-absorption that sustains it.

And so, with deep irony, in remembering death and moving beyond, we discover life.

We discover the strength to fight, the passion to love, the patience to build, and the freedom to let go.

We discover the space... to try.
Remember death, and…

Be Weightless!

Tom Fazio