Did you know that it's possible to reach muscular failure with a smile on your face, and wanting the set not to end, because it feels so good?
Sounds crazy, right? If anything, many people compare this kind of training to "torture." After all, how can you be smiling while your muscles are taken to the very limit of their full potential, with the intense burning and metabolic demand that involves?
The answer is Mindful Strength Training to Failure (MSTF), a term Philip Shepherd and I coined for our upcoming book. It all comes down to what's going on in your brain.
Scientists studying the pleasure neurotransmitter dopamine conducted an experiment in which monkeys were shown two boxes, each with a lightbulb. When a lightbulb turned on, it indicated that there was food in the box associated with that lightbulb; the other box would be empty. For the experiment, the scientists turned on those lightbulbs randomly and measured the monkeys' dopamine levels. In the beginning, the monkeys randomly opened the boxes and, each time they found food, got a spike in dopamine. After a while, they figured out the rule and only opened the box associated with the lightbulb. What the scientists discovered is that the food itself did not stimulate any dopamine, after the monkeys learned the rules. Dopamine was still produced, but what stimulated it was the lightbulb! This showed that dopamine was not linked to the reward itself, but rather to the anticipation of it. We produce feel-good dopamine when we anticipate a possibility, and experience something unexpected!
So a discovery can stimulate a pleasure response! That teaches us so much about so many different aspects of our life. It suggests a way to keep our romantic relationships fresh, helps explain our behaviors (planning for upcoming vacations, or waiting for job promotions, and then planning a new goal or adventure once we attain them), and reveals why it's possible to smile while your muscles reach failure when doing MSTF.
MSTF is about this one quality: the quality of discovery. Once you understand the mechanical aspects of proper exercise, such as proper form and technique, you can practice MSTF. What you are trying to do is to bring your whole awareness to what you are experiencing in the moment, free from any idea of what you should be feeling. You are in a process of discovery. You must be able to accept anything that shows up without judgement and express it freely. If someone were to look at you, they would know everything you are going through moment by moment. This is an intimate experience, and is born of integrity, as you are being truly honest with yourself and your life in those moments. This is truly a freeing, deeply rewarding, and meditative experience. Your muscles are exhausted, but there is a deep sense of feeling good, as you are discovering something new and unexpected moment-to-moment, and supposedly producing dopamine during those discoveries.
Producing dopamine doesn't just help you feel good. If you recall from our previous blog post, dopamine pushes back on norepinephrine (adrenaline); and when norepinephrine spikes, our glia cells tell the brain to shut off any voluntary muscular contraction, which essentially makes us give up or "fail." So we can fail before our muscles do. By producing dopamine, we can go all the way to the point of muscular failure, creating a more potent stimulus for building strength.