What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger… or does it?

This was originally going to be titled “why Nietzsche was wrong”, but then I lost confidence in myself Really, I’m just thinking this through – so if it makes no sense, or you just think I’m barmy, feel free to let me know!

In various forms of MMA or martial arts training, as with army boot camps, there seems to be a school of thought that putting people through stressful, painful, humiliating or just generally nasty experiences will necessarily make them stronger, better fighters or be somehow “character building”. Does it?

The evidence, both scientific and otherwise, is pretty mixed. Repeated or ongoing painful experiences can have two different results – tolerance or sensitization. If you give someone enough electric shocks under certain conditions, you may increase their pain threshold (at least for that particular kind of pain). Vary the circumstances slightly though, and you end up making them more sensitive rather than less. Change the conditions again, and voila, you have learned helplessness. In other words, if you beat someone up repeatedly while he’s learning to box, you may just toughen him up, or you may make him glove shy. 

So what makes the difference? Is it something innate that depends on character of the person in question? Is it true that there are two kinds of people and (to quote an annoying cliche) “whether life grinds you down or polishes you depends on what you are made of”? Or is there more to it than that? 

I’ve been pondering this one for some time, and then recently made a connection. Time for a brief digression. I was recently revisiting some material by physical therapist and athletic trainer Grey Cook. He was talking about why you shouldn’t try to build strength on top of dysfunctional movement patterns. Roughly speaking that means that if your body is out of balance and isn’t moving the way it should be, then stressing it by shifting big weights without first addressing the problem will only make things worse. 

It occurred to me that this is probably true of psychological stress too. There’s no point stressing a “dysfunctional” psychological pattern. If someone has good coping strategies in place for the kind of stress they’re under, then yes – it can make them stronger. It’s the mental equivalent of having good movement patterns and good technique when you’re lifting weights. On the other hand, if the way they’re processing that particular stress is “dysfunctional” in some way, then at best it’s going to reinforce bad habits, and at worst be entirely counterproductive. 

We probably all have some dysfunctional psychological/emotional patterns – but no doubt some of us have more than others. Some people cope really well with the stresses that the aforementioned neanderthal training regime might throw at them. Others don’t. Perhaps sometimes that doesn’t matter – you just throw out the people who can’t deal with it and toughen up the rest. 

I’m never that impressed, though, with any training program which only benefits people who are naturally above average already. That just screams “poor coaching” to me. 

In physical terms, what you need to do with someone with a faulty movement pattern is to remove the stress, work out what’s going wrong and find a way to correct it. Then you can load that person back up and have them shifting more weight than they would have been able to before. I reckon this analogy carries over perfectly to dealing with psychological stress – it’s not so much the stress that makes you stronger, it’s how you deal with it. If someone has the mental equivalent of good technique, then you can overload them to a degree and they’ll benefit from it. Teaching those improved strategies can be the role of a sports psychologist, but it also relies on a coach to understand how, when and what kind of stressors to use, when to back off and when to increase the load.  

Or you could just toughen up, stop whining and throw some more weight on the bar… come on, do you wanna be a f****** fighter or not?