Learning to Learn

A counter point, or maybe complementary point (b/c I agree w/ the quote). I killed myself trying to do more than 8 pull ups in a gym for ages; at times I'd be going to the gym 4x a week doing full body workouts, always working hard, always sweating, always gassed at the end; consistently doing pull ups to exhaustion on multiple sets. Yet 8 was a kind of ceiling. At some point I stopped working out, but got a pull up bar at home. I stuck it in my office doorway. I would do occasional pull ups -- never more than 2-3, usually only 1. But just casually a few times a day, nearly every day, when I walked by it. It was never hard, it never felt like work. It became more of a way to briefly relax, an alternative to the cigarettes I used to smoke. Well after a year of that when someone challenged me to a friendly pull up competition, I was shocked that I could do 15 in a row easily, I still had more in the tank even. That always stuck with me because it taught me that while hard work is important, consistency is _more_ important. Working "hard" as such is often not only not required, but perhaps often not actually the thing that will help.

That’s a reasonably well known strategy to pull-ups. Start at one regularly and slowly build up once it becomes easy enough to do so.

I think learning is more like growing plants, you don’t need to get everything perfect, or even one thing perfect, but a set of things to good enough.

There are a lot of things that interfere with learning so the presence of those will inhibit learning regardless of effort.

how much weight did you loose during that time?

you either lost significant weight, or added significant muscle .. no other way .. the end result here is more significant than how you reached it

for pull up, loosing weight is usually far more important than adding muscle, so i am leaning toward you lost weight

For anyone not familiar with this methodology, it's called 'greasing the groove.'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmOEgK5o2yg

Oh, I'm pretty lightweight / lanky (hover around 165lb, BMI around 20-21). I didn't see any significant weight change at the time, perhaps I transferred muscle if that's a thing since I was doing less general muscle building at that point - just pushups and the casual pull up routine, running (sprints) to blow off steam.

I can see weight loss being a significant factor for heavier people, esp. those that are heavy and strong. I am definitely neither (typical things like bench press / squat etc I used pretty light weights).

Eh, you can also improve your lifts by just not being exhausted every time you go to the gym. With lifting, more is not always more. Fatigue and failure to properly recover is a fairly common reason for plateaus, especially with full body pulls.

Did you do them in full range of motion (starting from dead hang) and slow eccentric motion on the way down? Not all workouts which are equally exhausting are optimal for strength.

Were you completely resting between sessions? How’s your sleep?

A recent study that I read showed muscle strength is best developed by not performing the maximum number of <lift/exercise/whatever>. It showed that stopping somewhere around 90%-ish was optimal, beyond was suboptimal for strength.

For muscle size, going to maximum is optimal, but it's less optimal for strength.

Their example was: instead of doing 8 reps of bench press where you can barely get the final rep, do maybe 1 fewer. They were more precise in the point to stop, but it's not something avg person can detect compared to their analysis, so this is just ballpark-ish.

Actually, what you experienced is a well known technique to increase the number of pullups, the idea is that your previous training only allowed to get 8 reps, which is a low volume for a muscle, so you are not working optimally, by doing one by one, you can focus on giving maximum power at each rep, so if you want to increase even more, do series of 2-3 with explosiveness, pause 30-60 sec, start again, and try to reach a volume of 20 or something. It should feel easy enough to be able to do the 2-3 reps at maximum strength. If you are already at >15 you can increase the number of base reps, but the key is that each one should be kinda easy.

There is a related concept called grease the goove if you want to Google.

Now, regarding learning, while some parallels between muscle building and studying exists, I find it a stretch. Yes consistency is often key, but now suppose that instead of focusing for 1h every day on difficult problems I only do 5min, certainly it will work, I'll learn stuff, but not as much as someone doing consistently 1h study.

Recovery time is important in study and muscle though

I did do the full range of motion and started from dead hang; sometimes I did them slowly, but often just at a regular speed, though definitely never fast. I did not usually do multiple sets so usually was fully rested between sessions. IIRC was sleeping fairly standard at the time ~8 hrs. I don't carry a lot of muscle / strength naturally which may or may not be relevant; e.g. my untrained grip strength is very low, only slightly higher than my wife's.

Thanks for sharing, cool to see it has a name. I definitely agree it is pretty miraculous how it works; to just never shoot for more than 5 and then "suddenly" one day I'm doing 15+ like it was nothing.

This is called "greasing the groove" by some OG fitness gurus. It's the only way to break plateaus I know of.