"Gamifying" resistance training, AKA making it "fun"

[Goat]

I've been thinking about this for a while now. Note that I'm using the term "gamification" here very loosely.

I'm looking at this from the perspective of the general population. So I'm not talking about bodybuilders, lifters, or competitive athletes who have to do resistance training to maximize their performance. I'm talking about most people, and most people ain't any of those things I listed.

So we know that resistance training has massive benefits to health and quality of life, so ideally we would get basically everyone to do some kind of resistance training for basically the rest of their lives.

The problem is that the aforementioned most people's find resistance training to be boring and unpleasant. Sure lots of people have gym memberships. It's still a significant minority of people, and what percentage of those membership holders actually go to the gym regularly? I don't know but it's definitely much less than 100%.

Cardio is incredibly easy to turn into a game. See for example most, you know, games. Go play basketball hard a couple times a week and get your steps in, and your cardiovascular fitness will be totally fine. It's not gonna be amazing or anything, but it'll be alright.

But how do you do that with resistance training?

Sure, you can focus on personal records - and that works great for a while, but the problem is that progress is finite. Even IF you manage to stay super consistent and dedicated as things like work, family etc. "get in the way" of training, at the very least you'll hit the wall of age sooner rather than later. The only people making lifetime PR's in their 50's are people who had a late start. If the only thing keeping you going in training is progress, what happens when the progress grinds to a halt, as it inevitably will? You quit, sooner rather than later.

The only thing I can even think of is a shift in mentality where you stop thinking so much about progress and more about how training makes you feel, but that's not a great answer IMO because that probably wouldn't be enough of an incentive for most people.

I'm not a doctor or anything, I just think this is an interesting subject. It'd be great to get everyone who is capable to do SOME KIND of resistance training for the rest of their lives.

[platypus]

But how do you do that with resistance training?

Sure, you can focus on personal records - and that works great for a while, but the problem is that progress is finite. Even IF you manage to stay super consistent and dedicated as things like work, family etc. "get in the way" of training, at the very least you'll hit the wall of age sooner rather than later. The only people making lifetime PR's in their 50's are people who had a late start. If the only thing keeping you going in training is progress, what happens when the progress grinds to a halt, as it inevitably will? You quit, sooner rather than later.

There's a story I heard about Louie Simmons: one max effort bench day, he's hurt, and he does close grip bench with a weight 50lbs under his PR. Then he gets up and excitedly tells everyone he's just set a new PR! His crew is confused, and points out that it's 50lbs lower. Louie grins, holds up his hands, and says "My hands were an inch closer."

A newb might think of PRs only in terms of 5rms on a handful of heavy compound movements, but past the first few months of training this mentality becomes counterproductive. As you progress, your definition of PR has to get broader and broader to remain a motivating factor. You could set a new 11 rep PR on seated barbell curls, a new 4 rep PR on 12" box squats, a new 1 rep PR on close grip weighted chinups, a new density PR for your 5x5 bench weight, etc.

With some creativity, even a person of mild commitment can find something to PR pretty regularly for a very long time. There's probably a limit to how far one can take this, but with thousands of exercises to choose from, the ceiling is quite high.

A PR at Every Workout by Bill Starr gives some ideas.

[cgeorg]

I like that idea Platy - at first it seems hard to track, but with a well-made app it might not actually be all that bad. I have a friend using Fitbod and he seems to get little random trophies on lots of his lifts - highest weight, highest rep count at some weight, highest tonnage on a lift. He is fairly early in his journey but there is also a very wide variety in the programming so there's always some new best to get. Something like "close grip bench press but an inch closer than last time" wouldn't really work, but as you mentioned there are thousands of exercise variations. PRing one or 2 a day is enough for a lifetime. I guess maybe it already exists though, Fitbod being an example.

I remember a very illuminating moment when I was mid-SSLP one afternoon, that the program spoke to me so much because it was like an RPG. I could actually see myself leveling up regularly, which is a thing that Real Life does not often offer.

[asdf]

Bigger, Faster, Stronger:

"You can expect to break 8 or more records per week or 400 per year for as long as you want. There are 66 possible records to break."

http://office.biggerfasterstronger.com/ ... asp?id=264

[Goat]

Those are definitely fair points - although I think even here you can run into the issue of whether or not those PR's continue to actually feel meaningful.

Alan Thrall actually posted a good video a few days ago that kinda touches this subject:

The whole bit about "what will adding another 10lbs to X lift actually accomplish for me?"

[AlanMackey]

I've been thinking about this for a while now. Note that I'm using the term "gamification" here very loosely.

I'm looking at this from the perspective of the general population. So I'm not talking about bodybuilders, lifters, or competitive athletes who have to do resistance training to maximize their performance. I'm talking about most people, and most people ain't any of those things I listed.

So we know that resistance training has massive benefits to health and quality of life, so ideally we would get basically everyone to do some kind of resistance training for basically the rest of their lives.

The problem is that the aforementioned most people's find resistance training to be boring and unpleasant. Sure lots of people have gym memberships. It's still a significant minority of people, and what percentage of those membership holders actually go to the gym regularly? I don't know but it's definitely much less than 100%.

Cardio is incredibly easy to turn into a game. See for example most, you know, games. Go play basketball hard a couple times a week and get your steps in, and your cardiovascular fitness will be totally fine. It's not gonna be amazing or anything, but it'll be alright.

But how do you do that with resistance training?

Sure, you can focus on personal records - and that works great for a while, but the problem is that progress is finite. Even IF you manage to stay super consistent and dedicated as things like work, family etc. "get in the way" of training, at the very least you'll hit the wall of age sooner rather than later. The only people making lifetime PR's in their 50's are people who had a late start. If the only thing keeping you going in training is progress, what happens when the progress grinds to a halt, as it inevitably will? You quit, sooner rather than later.

The only thing I can even think of is a shift in mentality where you stop thinking so much about progress and more about how training makes you feel, but that's not a great answer IMO because that probably wouldn't be enough of an incentive for most people.

I'm not a doctor or anything, I just think this is an interesting subject. It'd be great to get everyone who is capable to do SOME KIND of resistance training for the rest of their lives.

The unparalleled worldwide success of Crossfit is basically that: gamifying exercise in a hundred random ways so it becomes a live-action videogame where everybody feels "elite".

[mgil]

Bingo @AlanMackey.

[Goat]

Crossfit is a good point, hadn't thought of it in this context.

[MarkKO]

You can say a lot of things about Crossfit, but that it isn't inclusive of genpop isn't one of them.

Thinking about it though, it may well be one of the first fitness brands that managed to really sell hard work and lifting weights to the general population. That is absolutely no bad thing.

[CheekiBreekiFitness]

Two thoughts on the matter:
- for lifters I think that focusing on PRs every training session as the main reward signal is not very good in the long run. Not only are the PR's becoming rarer and rarer as you either get better or get older (often a combination of the two), but also (at least for me) it tends to promote a way of thinking where if you don't perform at your best, then the training session is interpreted as a defeat. I mean sure you can play some mind games with yourself by having 100 variations and rep ranges and so on, and if it keeps you in the gym good for you, but in the end it's just mind games. The fact that you went from 10 to 11 reps on the cambered bar wide grip tempo 3 second pause bench does not really mean anything. You could even have gotten weaker for all I know. I think the only way to actually stick to lifting long term is to enjoy the process irrespective of the numbers. The reward signal is the lifting in itself: the fact that you got to the gym, that you slept as much as you could, you tried to eat well etc. It reminds me of the videos of Allan Thrall about "switching" to bodybuilding, where one of the justifications was that he did not enjoy strength training because he could not stop thinking about the numbers, and in bodybuilding every session felt like a win. Now I think the problem is his frame of mind, not strength training, but it goes to show how detrimental this "numbers game" mentality can be.

- for genpop (as opposed to actual lifters) I don't think there is a way to "trick" them into enjoying lifting. Most people are not cut out for lifting anyways. Lifting is relatively repetitive, it's tedious, it's solitary etc. I say they find another form of activity that they can actually stick to because they enjoy it. If you need to "gamify" your training sessions just to hit the gym for 3 months in a row, I'd say just quit. It does not matter, you were not going to stick with this anyways, cut your losses. As for crossfit, I think that the reason why it appeals to genpop is mostly because it's a social thing. Normal people don't care about performance. Especially when it's something so arbitrary like squat/bench/deadlift/whatever. It's lifters that care about performance.

[AlanMackey]

Apparently, this thing is all the rage now: https://hyrox.com/

[DCR]

- for genpop (as opposed to actual lifters) I don't think there is a way to "trick" them into enjoying lifting. Most people are not cut out for lifting anyways. Lifting is relatively repetitive, it's tedious, it's solitary etc. I say they find another form of activity that they can actually stick to because they enjoy it. If you need to "gamify" your training sessions just to hit the gym for 3 months in a row, I'd say just quit. It does not matter, you were not going to stick with this anyways, cut your losses. As for crossfit, I think that the reason why it appeals to genpop is mostly because it's a social thing. Normal people don't care about performance. Especially when it's something so arbitrary like squat/bench/deadlift/whatever. It's lifters that care about performance.

Agree with all of that. Pelaton appears to have cornered the market on these people, to the extent that they want to exercise at all.

[chrisd]

Apparently, this thing is all the rage now: https://hyrox.com/

Dear god that looks awful. A crowd of grinning also-rans collecting plastic trophies and pretending to enjoy something for the sake of participation.

Regarding resistance training. I present the debate between Greg Glassman and Dmitry Klokov:



If you want the results, get used to the fact that resistance training is dull, tiring, painful and dull. If you want fun, go and do a real sport.

[AlanMackey]

Dear god that looks awful. A crowd of grinning also-rans collecting plastic trophies and pretending to enjoy something for the sake of participation.

This irked me to no end.

[psmith]

A crowd of grinning also-rans collecting plastic trophies and pretending to enjoy something for the sake of participation.

I, too, dislike competing in weightlifting and strongman.

[janoycresva]

sometimes I think the correlation between being a life-long lifter and being on the autism spectrum must be extremely high

what other subset of the population is going to grind for 1 oz of muscle tissue gained after a brutal training cycle

[janoycresva]

Those are definitely fair points - although I think even here you can run into the issue of whether or not those PR's continue to actually feel meaningful.

Alan Thrall actually posted a good video a few days ago that kinda touches this subject:

The whole bit about "what will adding another 10lbs to X lift actually accomplish for me?"

this very much aligns with what I started feeling like 2 years ago

I was tired of nagging injuries, I was burned out on S/B/D, the PRs no longer felt meaningful, I was sick of being afraid to lean down because my already mediocre lifts would tank, and I found it really hard to summon the mental energy to attack heavy lifts while also working a mentally demanding engineering job

I've found bodybuilding training to be infinitely more enjoyable and easier to be consistent with while focusing on my career - it just doesn't take as much mental energy to attack sets of 8-20+, my joints feel better, and almost every session feels like a win because I got a fucking huge pump

[CheekiBreekiFitness]

sometimes I think the correlation between being a life-long lifter and being on the autism spectrum must be extremely high

what other subset of the population is going to grind for 1 oz of muscle tissue gained after a brutal training cycle

Isn't that a bit excessive ? By that logic anyone who has a long term hobby would be autistic wouldn't they ? I mean for almost any hobby, be it some sport, playing an instrument, cooking, chess or whatever else you can do and focus on, progress is going to slow down as you get more advanced because when you're good at something, it's harder to get better. Also, how "brutal" is (well executed) resistance training ? I mean you're in a room with air conditioning for say 1h to 1h30 4 times a week moving dumbbells around while resting 3 minutes between sets, that does not sound like a brutal experience to me.

[KarlM]

This is a timely discussion for me, as I just turned 50 this month. I am strongly motivated by numbers, and am relatively late to SBD (powerlifting focused), having started number chasing in 2016. Realistically, I still have some upside since I started late and since I'm not brutally strong anyway. That upside is strongly motivating, and I do wonder what will happen when I can't put weight on the bar anymore (maybe somewhere in my 60s?). I've thought of two psychological approaches that might help me mitigate this:

1) keep in mind what me-not-training will feel and look like compared to what me-training will feel and look like. While it is always the case that one of those scenarios will be imaginary, it's not hard to get a feel for it by simply keeping track of relevant peers. Have they let their physical capacities tank? How are they doing with that? How does that make me feel? Alternatively, have they maintained their physical capacities? Same questions follow from that.

2) My wife brought this one up. She recently read Peter Attia's book Outlive. He frames this as something like training for the octogenarian decathlon, and lists a number of physical capacities to maintain and milestones to hit along the way as you age. Not a bad framing, but I still can't get over his recent youtube video with Stuart McGill about deadlifting heavy... I watched a 75 year old man deadlift 182.5 kg at my last powerlifting meet, and the crowd went freaking wild (and his spine didn't explode; he trains at my gym).

I like Alan Thrall, but I didn't find that video to be too helpful. My answers to his rhetorical questions were along the lines of "yes, I would love to add another x lbs onto y lift." And, while I am motivated by aesthetics, I'm not sure I'm motivated enough to keep pushing the weights hard if that was all that was on the table. If I was only motivated by health, I'd lift way less and up my cardio quite a bit. A two plate squat really is probably enough to get whatever health benefits there are from lifting heavy-ish weights, for example.

[chrisd]

sometimes I think the correlation between being a life-long lifter and being on the autism spectrum must be extremely high

what other subset of the population is going to grind for 1 oz of muscle tissue gained after a brutal training cycle

Stoic, sigma males who spend their time pursuing personal perfection in between reading Marcus Aurelius.