A couple of years ago I wrote about my experience of making some pull up bars in our back yard. Until recently I never used them as much as I should.
I’d try and do some pull ups, but would get despondent that I couldn’t do many, or that I wasn’t increasing my number of pull ups over time. It also gave me very bad hand and wrist pain. So, then the pull up station would go unused for another lengthy period of time before I’d try it out again. Then the old frustration and pain would kick in again.
Well, a few months ago I decided to give it a real crack. What was different about it this time? I had a bit of a kick up the bum. My old back pain was flaring up again from all my sitting at the office job, and I didn’t want to go back to the days of severe sciatica. This was finally the motivation I needed to give this a more honest try.
I had heard that dead hangs are great for bad backs. They help decompress the spine by stretching out the back.
So what is a dead hang? It’s just how it sounds. You hang from the bar at full length.
It’s not the most exciting exercise, but I have seen great benefits.
At the beginning I struggled for 15 seconds. My forearms were on fire and my hands were hanging on to the bar by their fingertips. My grip and wrist strength were exposed through this exercise like no other.
Over the ensuing days I developed monstrous calluses on my hands, just at the top of my hand. This made it extremely difficult to keep this up as the pain was pretty rough. But I’d made a pact with myself that I was going to increase my hang time by 1 second a day. That first month was a constant struggle, but my mental strength won out over my physical weakness for once.
Then the pain slowly subsided. My calluses had broken down and my hand recovered stronger. The other benefits of this boring yet effective exercise were that my back muscles were getting stronger, my grip was stronger and my shoulders became more mobile and stronger. I am now comfortably hanging for 1 and a half minutes.
lessons from not giving up early
There’s a couple of lessons here that I want to tie back to your personal finances.
1/. Habit formation is often slow
When starting out, progress on the pull ups was basically non existent. It wasn’t until the second month that I started to see some of the physical benefits with my body growing stronger. The same can be said for changing your spending or investing habits. When I first went from spending all my money to saving a lot, it was hard. I really missed my dinners out and SKY TV. But as time went on, I didn’t even miss these things. They were obviously never that important in the first place, despite what I would tell myself at the time. Not as important as financial freedom anyway. Saving is now second nature that I need not give it a thought. I don’t even need to budget anymore, it is that much on autopilot.
This slow progress is why so many give up at the first hurdle. They aren’t seeing the rapid progress they would like. All the progress is under the tip of the iceberg.
Just take a look at how slow progress is when starting out investing:
The impact of compound interest over time
2/. Habit formation is hard
Especially when you have been doing things another way for so long. The easy thing to do is to listen to the pain of change and go back to your old ways. The hard thing is to continue through the pain until it gets to that point of second nature. The rewards are so worth the pain though.
What was a couple of months of hard changes, we are now in a position just 7 years later where we can slow down to part time work if we wanted. Not quite financially independent, but not too far off.
Likewise, by working on the foundation muscles of a pull up, I soon hope to be able to dramatically improve my reps there.
The fruits of labour take time to ripen, but once they do, the outcomes become exponential and faster than you ever imagined. This is the underestimation of compound interest that we all fall trap to. We overestimate short term results, but severely underestimate long term results. This results in early difficulty with handling unexpected difficulties and because we underestimate the end results, the motivation is not there to overcome the initial hurdles.
The best thing you can do is reframe your thinking so you expect slow results, but you also expect fantastic long-term results. Embrace your calluses so you re build stronger. Don’t short sell yourself of future goodies.
The information contained on this site is the opinion of the individual author(s) based on their personal opinions, observation, research, and years of experience. The information offered by this website is general education only and is not meant to be taken as individualised financial advice, legal advice, tax advice, or any other kind of advice. You can read more of my disclaimer here