Guidance Towards Getting Results #

Simple activities are too often overlooked. They are as beneficial as they are powerful. You can hit the ground running and keep making progress in small, digestible steps.

And yet beginners dismiss them in favor of the more complicated ones.

The way to get results, with either the simple or the complicated activity, is by learning and practicing what comes after the introduction and the basics. The underlying principles, techniques, methods and protocols.

Practicing KettleBells is one of these activities that you learn everything you need to learn in a few hours. Then you can dedicate your time to getting results rather than wasting time on figuring out the intricacies of each exercise machine. There are no secrets or extensive guides. And the learnings are transferable to other sports like barbell lifting.

“That’s it?” is a common question to dismiss the simple. When a beginner sees what they will be doing they fail to see what the next stages are. The process of getting the results they want still remains unclear. After being hesitant for days, or weeks, or months, or sometimes even years, to start. It just can’t be.

In contrast, complicated activities present themselves as the solution right from the start. “Just spend a lot of time learning all the intricacies of the machine and you will be fine” is their motto. A misleading one tho. These activities tend to be highly specific with little transferable knowledge. Good for the advanced practitioners to go the extra mile but not good for much else. The time and difficulty to move past the basics will most surely make the beginner to abandon the whole endeavour altogether.

Although not stated in bold capitalized letters, a complicated system attempts to lure in new beginners by promising that it will compensate for all their shortcomings. That they are indeed the all-in-one solution that the beginner has been so eagerly looking for.

Don’t know how to properly do a free weight squat? Don’t worry about it, the barbell on rails will do it for you. Don’t know how to write code? Don’t worry about it, this “No Code” solution will solve your problem or even worse, AI.

This holds true as long as the beginners complies 100% with the machine. Not even 1% of experimentation is allowed or the system might break down. And while the result might look like the real thing, it’s in fact just an imitation.

All that upfront complexity is mistakenly interpreted by the beginner as a “All-In-One” solution to their problems. At this moment, the mentor has to step in and guide the beginner towards the better decision. To explain the learning curve of the activity. To clarify how the easiness of the smooth learning curve and the hardships of the steep learning curve has nothing to do with getting results. It only makes the activity harder to master.

A beginner cannot be expected to know that the activity is not what gives results because the activity is all they see all around them. They see people running, swinging kettlebells, writing code and assume that if they pick the hardest path like running at capacity, lift a kettlebell that’s half their body weight or choose the hardest programming language and go through all the hoops eventually they will get the same results.

The mentor has to teach the beginner how getting results has less to do with the activity per se and a lot more to do with the principles, techniques, methodologies and protocols that the beginner will learn once the basics are covered. How applying them at each practice session and practicing as often as possible is how results are achieved.

The best answer to the question “Is that it?” is, “Yes, that’s it!” followed by “Let me show you what you can do with this simple thing”. At this moment, the mentor must show the beginner a preview of the activity and also a few principles, techniques, methods and protocols. Just a taste of it, not a mouthful. Just enough to reassure to the beginner that they are on the right path to get the results they want.

I have made this mistake many times, both with kettlebells and software. I always answered “Yes, that’s it!” and stopped. I expected the beginner to fill in all the gaps. I expected them to have a vision for where they want to get and they were just window shopping for solutions as if the they knew the 99% of things that come after the basics but somehow just missed that 1% at the beginning.

For Kettlebells, this moments means to show how the 1 Hand Swing can be used for cardio or strength purposes. How variations in weight and resting time affects the whole. How combinations of a single exercise can be an entire hour of practice.

For software, these moments means to show how a few types of variables and structural blocks are used to create more advanced patterns and how a combination of a few patterns build an entire application.

For this reason, simple activities become harder and harder the more you learn about them, the more juice you can squeeze from each individual component of the activity. The hardships come out of the ability to structure the practices or the code in such a way to move the needle accomplish your goals. The good thing is that it happens one small step at a time. An even better thing is that you can stop anyway along the line and still get a slice of the results.

But the beginner is still attracted to the complicated things because ultimately it can be used as a scapegoat for lack of determination to do the work required as often as possible in order to get results. The complicated can always be blamed by saying “I tried it a few time now and then but I couldn’t figure it out so it must not be for me”.

This fallacy is carried over from school where if you just go through the process of learning complicated things you get the good grades and therefore “results” completely missing the point that you still have not learned how to apply that knowledge to the real world in order to get tangible results other than grades on how good you are at solving that isolated problem.

It’s the mentors job to teach the beginner that what gets results is how often you practice the activities, not how hard they are to learn. To explain that what moves the needle forward is the amount of time you spend actively practicing the techniques, methods and protocols while respecting the principles of the activity. To clarify that a hard learning process has nothing to do with the beginner’s ability to get the results they want.

The beginner must understand that the learning process is just a step in the way to get results, not the end result.

“Is that it?!”, “Yes!, and this is how you get results.”