How to Build a Strength Training Lifestyle by Treating Behaviors as Skills

By: Barbell Logic

One of the best things about training is that it acts as a catalyst for positive changes in every other part of our lives. Do you want to get better at training, and do you want to get the most out of the work you’re putting in? Then you need to eat right, sleep, recover, drink water, and so on. These behaviors surround and encompass your training. Together, they form a strength training lifestyle. But it’s a two-way street. The behaviors you develop because you train can also make or break your training. So, while training may lead to better habits, our goal should be a complete lifestyle of strength—a holistic, whole-person approach to maximize the benefits, results, and longevity of our training efforts.

That’s much easier said than done. Most people approach these lifestyle behaviors as if there’s a switch that they can turn on or off through white-knuckle discipline. We eat like health martyrs. We carve time out of our schedules for strength training and then feel guilty about it. And we try to convince ourselves that certain practices are good for us without taking the time to learn and internalize their benefits. Behaviors do not develop linearly. It’s much more productive to treat these behaviors the same way you’d try to learn a new skill. It’s a process of successes and failures, discipline and motivation, and trial and error.

Skills take time and a process to learn, develop, and master. Even behavioral skills follow a pattern of learning that can be a powerful tool for building lasting habits.

It’s important that we learn to treat certain behaviors as skills. It puts the process of changing behaviors into your control. Failing to recognize these are skills can lead to frustration and feelings of helplessness due to stalled or negative progress. When you engage in the skill-building process, you will find that it is a lot easier and more fun to improve your recovery habits, nutrition, and the behaviors that turn training into a lifestyle of strength.

What Skill Development Teaches Us About Lifestyles

The takeaways from treating behaviors like skills are two-fold: First, we should give ourselves the grace to learn and develop the skill. There will be good and bad days, perfect days, and days you completely blow off. You will hit milestones and have “a-ha” moments, and you will backslide. As with any skill, celebrate the wins and be kind to yourself after the missteps. Over time, the frequency and amplitude of the wins will increase.

Second, and just as importantly, you should plan to develop these training behaviors the way you would learn and master any other skill. It’s the same way that (in the old joke) you get to Carnegie Hall…

… Practice, Practice, Practice

The process of mastering any skill starts with conscious struggles and start-and-stop successes. When the goal is to turn a skill into an unconscious habit—as we might want with things like sleep habits, nutrition, and training schedules—we must learn and internalize the association between actions and outcomes as part of that process. A classic text on human performance describes skills as “involv[ing] an organized sequence of activities,” which includes skilled behaviors “organized with a purpose” and “goal-directed.”[1] Eventually, we can make it to the habit-forming stage, where we can maintain our behaviors with minimal effort, but we are not robots. “[A]lmost every act is dependent upon comparison either of feedback with input… or a comparison of progress toward a goal with some conception of what is desired.”[2] If that’s the case, we should approach these habits the way we develop skills, which is less like entering into a behavior and more like a path through stages that require effort, practice, feedback, and time.

Stages of building a behavioral skill

1. Learn the rules and consciously apply them. (Conscious Effort)
2. Internalize responses based on your desired outcomes. (Associative Phase)
3. Trust your responses and maintain the new habits through consistency. (Habit-Forming)

Much of the research on skill development builds on a basic three-phase model. The first phase, often called the “Early or Cognitive Phase,” is marked by trying to understand the demands of the skill or task. In this phase, the learner should pay attention to “perceptual cues and response characteristics” as feedback for their performance.[3] The second stage is an “Associative Phase,” in which responses learned in the early stage become easier and start to follow new patterns that reduce errors or slip-ups.

Conscious Effort

When learning a behavioral skill, you first learn the rules of making that skill work. Think of it like learning how to squat for the first time. You learn where to put your feet and what to do with a dozen different body parts that all add up to a good squat. The conscious effort to bring it all together feels awkward initially, but every mistake is a change to fix some part of your movement. The goal is to learn how to “feel” the movement so that your brain can automatically cause the proper responses. The more you do it, the easier you respond to shifts in your balance as cues that help you adjust and improve the skill.[4]

There’s a similar process in building behavioral habits like nutrition, sleep, and training consistency. In these earliest stages, you are almost exclusively learning cues and creating the environment for proper responses. For nutrition, understanding your macronutrient needs may be a crucial first step, but that’s a trial-and-error process since your needs are not the same as anyone else’s. Learning what works for your body takes time and attention.

Similarly, if you want to build better sleep habits, the first stage includes internalizing the importance of a consistent sleep schedule. Doing it often enough allows you to appreciate the value of seven to nine hours of rest per night or a quality nap during the day. Failing to stick to your new schedule will also give you comparative results. Once you’ve internalized that value, setting and sticking to a bedtime routine will get easier. So, too does training consistency when you start by adhering to a weekly routine. Forgive early mistakes in consistency and learn to start easy and build up rather than aim for perfection immediately.

Our bodies and environments constantly give us cues and signals: being hungry, tired, stressed, and overwhelmed. Our unmitigated responses to these cues often lead to adverse outcomes. So, when learning a new behavioral skill, recognize that you are uprooting your status quo. That’s never an easy process. Focus on techniques that maximize consistency, but don’t try to be 100%. Instead, focus on the outcomes of your choices.

Associative Phase

You will know you are making progress when you begin associating responses to those cues. The progression gives you more control over your behaviors. It still takes effort to maintain them, but the effort tends to be easier because you work for real (not theoretical) benefits. For nutrition, once you understand your macronutrient needs, you can start planning meals and tracking your intake more closely. Small changes that positively impact your goals will start to feel manageable, and you will build a sense of control over what you eat. Sleep, at this point, should develop from simply having a routine to improving the quality of that routine. The sleep aficionado might practice turning off screens an hour beforehand, adjusting caffeine intake, or making other minor improvements that enhance the experience and ease of falling asleep.

For training schedules, this means you’re building up to a schedule that will best help you meet your physical goals. Your training time has either expanded or become much more efficient, with the enjoyment and energy you bring to training paying off in the quality of your efforts. During this stage, you will often find that interruptions to your routine are far more onerous than the once-challenging behaviors.

Habit-Forming Phase

We may treat habits as automatic behaviors, but it’s more accurate to think of them as behaviors that have gone into a low-maintenance mode, where minimal willpower, motivation, or discipline is needed to keep them. It’s like the difference between breaking a trail and walking a well-worn path. We reach this stage when we build effective cue-response patterns and reinforce them repeatedly with our actions.[5]

In nutrition, meal prep may seem like a burden early on, but planning and making good choices will eventually become desirable. At this stage, you won’t have to track your macros as closely, but it’s still important to maintain the habit through consistent behavior. For sleep, you should reach the point where you begin getting ready for bed without checking the clock. The intrinsic value of good sleep and its benefits to training and daily life usually drive this habit forward with little need for further reinforcement. People at this stage of a strength training lifestyle typically say that it is simply a part of their day.

Ultimately, the value of these habits far outweighs any obstacles you once had in building them.

A Strength Training Lifestyle That Lasts

Treating your behaviors like skills can help change your perspective on some of the most challenging aspects of building a sustainable strength training lifestyle. Be patient with yourself. You’re not failing when a skill takes time to learn. You’re learning because it matters. Seek out systems and support that help you stay consistent. Trust that practice will pay off. As you master these skills, they get easier and support the person you want to become.

References

[1] P.M. Fitts and M.I. Posner, Human Performance, Basic Concepts in Psychology (Brooks/Cole, 1967).

[2] Fitts and Posner, 3.

[3] Fitts and Posner, 12.

[4] Fitts and Posner, 12: “During the early phase of skill learning it is usually necessary to attend to cues, events, and responses that later go unnoticed. In learning a dance step, one attends to kinesthetic and visual information about the feet, information which is later ignored.”

[5] Fitts and Posner, 14: “During the final phase of skill learning, component processes become increasingly autonomous, less directly subject to cognitive control, and less subject to interference from other ongoing activities or environmental distractions. In this phase, skills require less processing.”