Repetition Training Quotes

Repetition is important in the training not only of animals but also of humans." Yann Martel in Life of Pi, Page 25

Athletes need to enjoy their training. They don't enjoy going down to the track with a coach making them do repetitions until they're exhausted. From enjoyment comes the will to win.

In the universe we have not to do with repetitions, each time that a cycle is passed, something new is added to the world's evolution and to at its human stage of development

Most of the time, we see only what we want to see, or what others tell us to see, instead of really investigate to see what is really there. We embrace illusions only because we are presented with the illusion that they are embraced by the majority. When in truth, they only become popular because they are pounded at us by the media with such an intensity and high level of repetition that its mere force disguises lies and truths. And like obedient schoolchildren, we do not question their validity and swallow everything up like medicine. Why? Because since the earliest days of our youth, we have been conditioned to accept that the direction of the herd, and authority anywhere — is always right.

It takes a while for revelry to turn to reverence, and much repetition of truth to eventual turn young zeal into habitual channels for good.

The days of my youth, as I look back on them; seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation can.

Your emotional understanding about the preciousness of your human birth comes through conscious, repetitive mind training.

I'm trained as an architect; writing is like architecture. In buildings, there are design motifs that occur again and again, that repeat -- patterns, curves. These motifs help us feel comfortable in a physical space. And the same works in writing, I've found. For me, the way words, punctuation and paragraphs fall on the page is important as well -- the graphic design of the language. That was why the words and thoughts of Estha and Rahel, the twins, were so playful on the page ... I was being creative with their design. Words were broken apart, and then sometimes fused together. "Later" became "Lay. Ter." "An owl" became "A Nowl." "Sour metal smell" became "sourmetal smell." Repetition I love, and used because it made me feel safe. Repeated words and phrases have a rocking feeling, like a lullaby. They help take away the shock of the plot -- death, lives destroyed or the horror of the settings -- a crazy, chaotic, emotional house, the sinister movie theater.

I like Russian trains. Not for comfort, of which there is none, nor speed, of which there is barely any to be spoken about, particularly when you relate it to the size of the country that must be crossed. Not even, particularly, for the view, which is inevitably repetitive, as Mother Nature decrees that her works of wonder can only occur so frequently across such a vast and cultivated space. I like Russian trains, or at least those I travelled on in the early spring of 1956, so many centuries after I gunned Lisle down in cold blood; I like the trains for the sense of unity that all these hardships create in its passengers. I suspect the experience is relative.

We have everyday habits—formative practices—that constitute daily liturgies. By reaching for my smartphone every morning, I had developed a ritual that trained me toward a certain end: entertainment and stimulation via technology. Regardless of my professed worldview or particular Christian subculture, my unexamined daily habit was shaping me into a worshiper of glowing screens. Examining my daily liturgy as a liturgy—as something that both revealed and shaped what I love and worship—allowed me to realize that my daily practices were malforming me, making me less alive, less human, less able to give and receive love throughout my day. Changing this ritual allowed me to form a new repetitive and contemplative habit that pointed me toward a different way of being-in-the-world.

Repetition is important in the training not only of animals but also of humans.

Over time, repetition brings perfection, which brings success.

Pavlov made another significant discovery: the conditioned reflex could be developed most easily in a quiet laboratory with a minimum of disturbing stimuli. Every trained of animals knows this from his own experience; isolation and the patient repetition of stimuli are required to tame wild animals.

There is no 'eugenics' in Nietzsche - despite occasional references to 'breeding'- at least no more than is implicit in the recommendation to choose a partner under decent lightning conditions and with one's self-respect intact. Everything else falls under training, discipline, education and self-design - the Übermensch implies not a biological but an artistic, not to say an acrobatic programme. The only thought-provoking aspect of the marriage recommendation quoted above is the difference between onward and upward propagation. This coincides with a critique of mere repetition - obviously it will no longer suffice in future for children, as one says, to 'return' in their children. There may be a right to imperfection, but not to triviality.

The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car.

Dr. Talbon was struck by another very important thing. It all hung together. The stories Cheryl told — even though it was upsetting to think people could do stuff like that — they were not disjointed They were not repetitive in terms of "I've heard this before". It was not just she'd someone trying consciously or unconsciously to get attention. really processed them out and was done with them. She didn't come up with them again [after telling the story once and dealing with it]. Once it was done, it was done. And I think that was probably the biggest factor for me in her believability. I got no sense that she was using these stories to make herself a really interesting person to me so I'd really want to work with her, or something. Or that she was just living in this stuff like it was her life. Once she dealt with it and processed it, it was gone. We just went on to other things. 'Throughout the whole thing, emotionally Cheryl was getting her life together. Parts of her were integrating where she could say,"I have a sense that some particular alter has folded in with some basic alter", and she didn't bring it up again. She didn't say that this alter has reappeared to cause more problems. That just didn't happen. The therapist had learned from training and experience that when real integration occurs, it is permanent and the patient moves on.

Just the minute another person is drawn into some one's life, there begin to arise undreamed-of complexities, and from such a simple beginning as sexual desire we find built up such alarming yet familiar phenomena as fetes, divertissements, telephone conversations, arrangements, plans, sacrifices, train arrivals, meetings, appointments, tardiness, delays, marriages, dinners, small pets and animals, calumny, children, music lessons, yellow shades for the windows, evasions, lethargy, cigarettes, candies, repetition of stories and anecdotes, infidelity, ineptitude, incompatibility, bronchial trouble, and many others, all of which are entirely foreign to the original urge and way off the subject.

If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination. Artistic accounts include severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us. A travel book may tell us, for example, that the narrator journeyed through the afternoon to reach the hill town of X and after a night in its medieval monastery awoke to a misty dawn. But we never simply 'journey through an afternoon'. We sit in a train. Lunch digests awkwardly within us. The seat cloth is grey. We look out the window at a field. We look back inside. A drum of anxieties resolves in our consciousness. We notice a luggage label affixed to a suitcase in a rack above the seats opposite. We tap a finger on the window ledge. A broken nail on an index finger catches a thread. It starts to rain. A drop wends a muddy path down the dust-coated window. We wonder where our ticket might be. We look back at the field. It continues to rain. At last, the train starts to move. It passes an iron bridge, after which it inexplicably stops. A fly lands on the window And still we may have reached the end only of the first minute of a comprehensive account of the events lurking within the deceptive sentence 'He journeyed through the afternoon'. A storyteller who provides us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearking us out with repetitions, misleading emphases[,] and inconsequential plot lines. It insists on showing us Burdak Electronics, the safety handle in the car, a stray dog, a Christmas card[,] and a fly that lands first on the rim and then the centre of a laden ashtray. Which explains the curious phenomenon whereby valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting woolliness of the present.

Porn does not inform, or persuade, or debate. Porn trains. It etches deep grooves in the psyche, forming powerful associations between arousal and selected stimuli, bypassing that part of us which pauses, considers, thinks. Those associations, strengthened through repetition, reinforce and reproduce the social meaning assigned by patriarchy to sexual difference.

Quick charm will always be easier for me than deep connection. People out there are easier than the ones in here. But quick charm is like sugar—it rots us. It winds us up and leaves us jonesing, but it doesn’t feed us. Only love feeds us. And love happens over years, repetitive motions, staying, staying, staying. Showing up again. Coming clean again, being seen again. That’s how love is built. And if you can wean yourself off the drug of quick charm, off the drug of being good at something, losing yourself in something, the drug of work or money or information or marathon training—whatever it is you do to avoid the scary intimacy required for a rich home life—that’s when love can begin. But only then. It’s all in here, not out there.

Science is possible only where situations repeat themselves, or where you have some control over them, and where do you have more repetition and control than in the army? A cube would not be a cube if it were not just as rectangular at nine o'clock as at seven. The same kind of rules work for keeping the planets in orbit as in ballistics. We'd have no way of understanding or judging anything if things flitted past us only once. Anything that has to be valid and have a name must be repeatable, it must be represented by many specimens, and if you had never seen the moon before, you'd think it was a flashlight.Incidentally, the reason God is such an embarrassment to science is that he was seen only once, at the Creation, before there were any trained observers around.

Looking back down the vale of the ages at the endless recurrence of their reincarnations, before they were forced to drink their vials of forgetting and all became obscure to them again, they could see no pattern at all to their efforts; if the gods had a plan, or even a set of procedures, if the long train of transmigrations was supposed to add up to anything, if it was not just mindless repetition, time itself nothing but a succession of chaoses, no one could discern it; and the story of their transmigrations, rather than being a narrative without death, as the first experiences of reincarnation perhaps seemed to suggest, had become instead a veritable charnel house. Why read on? Why pick up their book from the far wall where it has been thrown away in disgust and pain, and read on? Why submit to such cruelty, such bad karma, such bad plotting? The reason is simple: these things happened. They happened countless times, just like this. The oceans are salt with our tears. No one can deny that these things happened. And so there is no choice in the matter. They cannot escape the wheel of birth and death, not in the experience of it, or in the contemplation of it afterwards; and their anthologist, Old Red Ink himself, must tell their stories honestly, must deal in reality, or else the stories mean nothing. And it is crucial that the stories mean something.

Fill the group’s windshield with clear, accessible models of excellence. • Provide high-repetition, high-feedback training. • Build vivid, memorable rules of thumb (if X, then Y). • Spotlight and honor the fundamentals of the skill.

myofibrillar hypertrophy, more actin, myosin, and other associated proteins are added to those already existing in the cell. More contractile elements within the cell mean more actin/myosin interactions and more force production. This type of hypertrophy is typical of low-repetition, high-intensity training. It adds less mass but produces greater increases in the force generated per unit area of muscle than the second type of hypertrophy, sarcoplasmic hypertrophy.

Someone said that living life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning to play the instrument as we go along. This saying describes the experience very well, but no one should worry about that. We are in this world for exactly that purpose—to learn. While we are learning we do not expect to produce a perfect work. On this plane we are all students, and what matters is that each year we shall find the quality of our workmanship definitely better. People are sometimes depressed because their lives do not present a simple, logical, harmonious unfoldment, because their histories seem to be full of inconsistencies, repetitions, dead ends. This, however, is only to be expected during the learning period. Your life has not been rehearsed. It is an adventure, and a discovery, and a training, and it is the final goal that matters.

The ACM also develops the following traits: •Strength of character; •Experience and intuition through repetitive skills training; •An understanding of the value of self-study; and •Proper understanding of a command climate that promotes adaptability accepts change and encourages innovation.

Affirmations are positive statements and they need to be spoken with absolute, unadulterated faith. If you only speak with your mouth, without an iota of feeling in your heart and belief in your mind, then you’re going the wrong way! You need to feel the vibrancy, the truth, and the positivity of these statements. You need to write them on your mind-slate, create an indelible influence, and engrave them in your consciousness. You can only do that by following the Three Golden Rules of Affirmations – Repetition, Belief, and Positive Expectation. Remember, by making affirmations, you are consciously programming your mind to think in a certain way, so that hopeful and happy thinking becomes a part of your being. Affirmations are a way to train the mind; and training happens when you practice, practice, practice! Training requires conscious effort, discipline, belief, and consistency. That is exactly how you need to practice your affirmations.

Repetitive, forceful corrections had taught this gentle dog that at a specific spot the handler would always yank the lead. Thus, each time the Newf arrived at that point, she'd freeze for a beat and close her eyes in anticipation of the impending blow. This caused her to lag, which led to another correction, which resulted in more lagging, another correction, ad infinitum. It was a classic example of canine learned helplessness, whereby a dog learns to accept abuse as a natural, inevitable consequence of living with humans. Repeated corrections had only frightened and confused the animal, and she was trying to protect herself in the only way she knew how.

It is important for us to realize that emphasis on conformity and the fear of spontaneous living can have an effect almost as devastating as the totalitarian’s deliberate assault on the mind . . . . Trained into conformity the child may well grow up into an adult who welcomes with relief the authoritarian demands of a totalitarian leader. It is the welcome repetition of an old pattern that can be followed without investment of a new emotional energy.14

We listen to rap lyrics, but few study the history. One of the most significant contributions of hip hop. It offers a profound social commentary on the black experience. This is an aspect of the music that is overlooked because most people choose to pay more attention to “the hook” (the catchy repetitive phrase) than the complete body of work. In doing so, the listener misses the message: the essence of the music, the breakdown of the bars. That’s tantamount to someone who is able to quote scripture, but has never read the bible.

Look at a skilled blacksmith working steel. To the untrained eye, he's merely repeating the same hammer blows, but anyone trained in the art of calligraphy knows that each time the blacksmith lifts the hammer and brings it down, the intensity of the blow is different. The hand repeats the same gesture, but as it approaches the metal it understands that it must touch it with more or less force. It's the same thing with repetition: it may seem the same, but it's always different. The moment will come when you no longer think about what you're doing. You become the letter, the ink, the paper, the word.

The founding of a science more or less on the notion of repetition brings in its train yet another delusion of a quantitative kind, the delusion that consists in thinking that the accumulation of a large number of facts can be of use by itself as ‘proof' of a theory; nevertheless, even a little reflection will make it evident that facts of the same kind are always indefinite in multitude, so that they can never all be taken into account, quite apart from the consideration that the same facts usually fit several different theories equally well. It will be said that the establishment of a greater number of facts does at least give more ‘probability' to a theory; but to say so is to admit that no certitude can be arrived at in that way, and that therefore the conclusions promulgated have nothing ‘exact' about them; it is also an admission of the wholly ‘empirical' character of modern science, although, by a strange irony, its partisans are pleased to accuse of ‘empiricism' the knowledge of the ancients, whereas exactly the opposite is the truth: for this ancient knowledge, of the true nature of which they have no idea whatever, started from principles and not from experimental observations, so that it can truly be said that profane science is built up exactly the opposite way round to traditional science.

Flexible people are rare. Organizations discourage flexibility by rewarding performance rather than development. Many organizations train people without developing them, or expect society at large to pay the price of development. These organizations may be penny-wise and pound-foolish. Organizations have to develop people in order to have promotable “raw material” that can be trained later on. The cost of training people who reject change and are defensive about their deficiencies is many times more expensive than the cost of development. Developing human resources is inexpensive as compared with the costs of turnover, the costs of repetitive training, and the costs of lowered morale.

In 1998, he helped organize the first “advanced chess” tournament, in which each human player, including Kasparov himself, paired with a computer. Years of pattern study were obviated. The machine partner could handle tactics so the human could focus on strategy. It was like Tiger Woods facing off in a golf video game against the best gamers. His years of repetition would be neutralized, and the contest would shift to one of strategy rather than tactical execution. In chess, it changed the pecking order instantly. “Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions, not less,” according to Kasparov. Kasparov settled for a 3–3 draw with a player he had trounced four games to zero just a month earlier in a traditional match. “My advantage in calculating tactics had been nullified by the machine.” The primary benefit of years of experience with specialized training was outsourced, and in a contest where humans focused on strategy, he suddenly had peers. A few years later, the first “freestyle chess” tournament was held. Teams could be made up of multiple humans and computers. The lifetime-of-specialized-practice advantage that had been diluted in advanced chess was obliterated in freestyle. A duo of amateur players with three normal computers not only destroyed Hydra, the best chess supercomputer, they also crushed teams of grandmasters using computers. Kasparov concluded that the humans on the winning team were the best at “coaching” multiple computers on what to examine, and then synthesizing that information for an overall strategy. Human/Computer combo teams—known as “centaurs”—were playing the highest level of chess ever seen. If Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov signaled the transfer of chess power from humans to computers, the victory of centaurs over Hydra symbolized something more interesting still: humans empowered to do what they do best without the prerequisite of years of specialized pattern recognition.

When players study all those patterns, they are mastering tactics. Bigger-picture planning in chess—how to manage the little battles to win the war—is called strategy. As Susan Polgar has written, “you can get a lot further by being very good in tactics”—that is, knowing a lot of patterns—“and have only a basic understanding of strategy.” Thanks to their calculation power, computers are tactically flawless compared to humans. Grandmasters predict the near future, but computers do it better. What if, Kasparov wondered, computer tactical prowess were combined with human big-picture, strategic thinking? In 1998, he helped organize the first “advanced chess” tournament, in which each human player, including Kasparov himself, paired with a computer. Years of pattern study were obviated. The machine partner could handle tactics so the human could focus on strategy. It was like Tiger Woods facing off in a golf video game against the best gamers. His years of repetition would be neutralized, and the contest would shift to one of strategy rather than tactical execution. In chess, it changed the pecking order instantly. “Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions, not less,” according to Kasparov. Kasparov settled for a 3–3 draw with a player he had trounced four games to zero just a month earlier in a traditional match. “My advantage in calculating tactics had been nullified by the machine.” The primary benefit of years of experience with specialized training was outsourced, and in a contest where humans focused on strategy, he suddenly had peers. A few years later, the first “freestyle chess” tournament was held. Teams could be made up of multiple humans and computers. The lifetime-of-specialized-practice advantage that had been diluted in advanced chess was obliterated in freestyle. A duo of amateur players with three normal computers not only destroyed Hydra, the best chess supercomputer, they also crushed teams of grandmasters using computers. Kasparov concluded that the humans on the winning team were the best at “coaching” multiple computers on what to examine, and then synthesizing that information for an overall strategy. Human/Computer combo teams—known as “centaurs”—were playing the highest level of chess ever seen. If Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov signaled the transfer of chess power from humans to computers, the victory of centaurs over Hydra symbolized something more interesting still: humans empowered to do what they do best without the prerequisite of years of specialized pattern recognition.

In 2009, Kahneman and Klein took the unusual step of coauthoring a paper in which they laid out their views and sought common ground. And they found it. Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform. The domains Klein studied, in which instinctive pattern recognition worked powerfully, are what psychologist Robin Hogarth termed “kind” learning environments. Patterns repeat over and over, and feedback is extremely accurate and usually very rapid. In golf or chess, a ball or piece is moved according to rules and within defined boundaries, a consequence is quickly apparent, and similar challenges occur repeatedly. Drive a golf ball, and it either goes too far or not far enough; it slices, hooks, or flies straight. The player observes what happened, attempts to correct the error, tries again, and repeats for years. That is the very definition of deliberate practice, the type identified with both the ten-thousand-hours rule and the rush to early specialization in technical training. The learning environment is kind because a learner improves simply by engaging in the activity and trying to do better. Kahneman was focused on the flip side of kind learning environments; Hogarth called them “wicked.” In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both. In the most devilishly wicked learning environments, experience will reinforce the exact wrong lessons. Hogarth noted a famous New York City physician renowned for his skill as a diagnostician. The man’s particular specialty was typhoid fever, and he examined patients for it by feeling around their tongues with his hands. Again and again, his testing yielded a positive diagnosis before the patient displayed a single symptom. And over and over, his diagnosis turned out to be correct. As another physician later pointed out, “He was a more productive carrier, using only his hands, than Typhoid Mary.” Repetitive success, it turned out, taught him the worst possible lesson. Few learning environments are that wicked, but it doesn’t take much to throw experienced pros off course. Expert firefighters, when faced with a new situation, like a fire in a skyscraper, can find themselves suddenly deprived of the intuition formed in years of house fires, and prone to poor decisions. With a change of the status quo, chess masters too can find that the skill they took years to build is suddenly obsolete.

Develop a rapid cadence. Ideal running requires a cadence that may be much quicker than you’re used to. Shoot for 180 footfalls per minute. Developing the proper cadence will help you achieve more speed because it increases the number of push-offs per minute. It will also help prevent injury, as you avoid overstriding and placing impact force on your heel. To practice, get an electronic metronome (or download an app for this), set it for 90+ beats per minute, and time the pull of your left foot to the chirp of the metronome. Develop a proper forward lean. With core muscles slightly engaged to generate a bracing effect, the runner leans forward—from the ankles, not from the waist. Land underneath your center of gravity. MacKenzie drills his athletes to make contact with the ground as their midfoot or forefoot passes directly under their center of gravity, rather than having their heels strike out in front of the body. When runners become proficient at this, the pounding stops, and the movement of their legs begins to more closely resemble that of a spinning wheel. Keep contact time brief. “The runner skims over the ground with a slithering motion that does not make the pounding noise heard by the plodder who runs at one speed,” the legendary coach Percy Cerutty once said.7 MacKenzie drills runners to practice a foot pull that spends as little time as possible on the ground. His runners aim to touch down with a light sort of tap that creates little or no sound. The theory is that with less time spent on the ground, the foot has less time to get into the kind of trouble caused by the sheering forces of excessive inward foot rolling, known as “overpronation.” Pull with the hamstring. To create a rapid, piston-like running form, the CFE runner, after the light, quick impact of the foot, pulls the ankle and foot up with the hamstring. Imagine that you had to confine your running stride to the space of a phone booth—you would naturally develop an extremely quick, compact form to gain optimal efficiency. Practice this skill by standing barefoot and raising one leg by sliding your ankle up along the opposite leg. Perform up to 20 repetitions on each leg. Maintain proper posture and position. Proper posture, MacKenzie says, shifts the impact stress of running from the knees to larger muscles in the trunk, namely, the hips and hamstrings. The runner’s head remains up and the eyes focused down the road. With the core muscles engaged, power flows from the larger muscles through to the extremities. Practice proper position by standing with your body weight balanced on the ball of one foot. Keep the knee of your planted leg slightly bent and your lifted foot relaxed as you hold your ankle directly below your hip. In this position, your body is in proper alignment. Practice holding this position for up to 1 minute on each leg. Be patient. Choose one day a week for practicing form drills and technique. MacKenzie recommends wearing minimalist shoes to encourage proper form, but not without taking care of the other necessary work. A quick changeover from motion-control shoes to minimalist shoes is a recipe for tendon problems. Instead of making a rapid transition, ease into minimalist shoes by wearing them just one day per week, during skill work. Then slowly integrate them into your training runs as your feet and legs adapt. Your patience will pay off.

The benefits of weight lifting on running performance were demonstrated in a 2008 study by Norwegian researchers (Støren et al. 2008). Seventeen well-trained runners were divided into two groups. Members of one group continued with their normal run training, while members of the other group added to their routine three weekly strength sessions consisting of four, four-repetition sets of half-squats using their four-repetition maximal load (i.e., the heaviest weight they could lift four times). After eight weeks, members of the strength group exhibited not only the expected gains in maximal strength and rate of force development, but also significant improvements in running economy (5 percent) and in time to exhaustion at maximal aerobic running speed (21.3 percent). The control group showed no improvement in any of the measured parameters.

To create successful habits, align your habits with desired results. This is accomplished with repetition and therefore you create the habit you wish to acquire.

Letters of the alphabet are the base of reading and writing. It is through letters that form words. For your children to learn the alphabet, you can buy educational books geared for this purpose. My book the grocery cart of spring writing abc is very affordable and helpful when it comes to teaching. Train an hour a day, until they learn slowly and learn to differentiate one letter from another. Repetition and association are the keys to learning fast.

Building this kind of repetition and focus into training might seem costly, but it’s not. As we’ll discuss later, most organizations measure training based on the time spent, not on the behaviors changed. It’s a better investment to deliver less content and have people retain it, than it is to deliver more hours of “learning” that is quickly forgotten.

You live here in Copper Creek, Miss Ashford?” She dipped a fresh cloth in the water and washed the bullet wound in the patient’s shoulder as best she could. “I do now. We arrived today.” She paused and straightened, the muscles in her back in spasms from bending over the table, and from too much riding on trains and coaches and wagons. She thought of Janie waiting at home, watching for her, and hoped she wasn’t worrying. Robert’s only concern would be that she’d left him overlong with people he didn’t know. He hated making chitchat. She just hoped he wasn’t acting sullen and stone-faced with Vince, Janie, and Emma, like he so often did with her. Hearing a clock ticking somewhere behind her, she rethreaded the needle and focused again on her task. Suturing a man was different from suturing a horse, and very definitely different from sewing saddles. Yet something about the repetition of the act felt similar, which made her wonder if she was doing it right. “We?” Finishing the third suture in the man’s shoulder, she peered up at Caradon, the needle poised between her right thumb and forefinger. “I beg your pardon?” “You said ‘we arrived today.’” Not wanting to talk, she tied off a fourth suture, and a fifth, aware of him watching her. “My brother and I.” “Where did you move from?” She raised her head to find him leaning close, their faces inches apart. “If you don’t mind, Marshal Caradon, could we . . . not talk right now?” The tanned lines at the corners of his eyes tightened ever so slightly. “Not much on that, are you, ma’am? Talking, I mean.” Though his expression denied it, she heard a smile in his voice, yet she held back from responding to it. Outwardly anyway. Someone like Wyatt Caradon was the last person she, or Robert, needed in their lives right now. “I don’t mind talking, Marshal. When I’m not exhausted, famished, and stitching up a gunshot wound.” Catching his grin before she looked away, she finished suturing and bandaging the wound.

When you train yourself, through repetition and practice, to overcome procrastination and get your most important tasks completed quickly, you will move yourself onto the fast track in your life and career and step on the accelerator.

If you really want to take isometrics to the next level, you can use a technique that Jay calls “extreme isometrics,” in which you move, but very, very s-l-o-w-l-y. We’re talking five to ten minutes per repetition. This technique takes intense focus. Go ahead and try to do a ten-minute push-up and see how your entire body responds.

Think of your memory as much more than a tool that relies on repetition to function. While repetition is a key to storing information, it is only one way in which your brain absorbs important details.

The fallacy that passes for truth by the mere frequency of its repetition is a particular peril for lawyers working in the common-law system. Like all men and women, we are comfortable with familiar formulations, and in addition are trained to follow what has been said before. It is sometimes worth pausing to consider whether it has been said aright.

SUCCESSFUL MUSCLE BUILDING: 7 TIPS FOR MORE MUSCLE MASS How does successful muscle building work? Today I have 7 tips for more muscle mass for you. In addition to the training itself, there are many other factors that determine success in building muscle. The more of the following points you take into account, the faster and more successfully you will be able to build muscle. THE RIGHT TRAINING PLAN No training plan is suitable for everyone. Find or create a training plan that matches your level and goals. For beginners, I recommend a full-body plan . The whole body is trained every time in 2-3 units per week. If you have been training longer and have some experience, I would recommend a 2 or 3 split. Every muscle group can be trained up to 2 times a week. I would fundamentally advise against a 4 or 5 split, but of course, there are also professionals for whom such a plan can make sense. CONTINUALLY GROW STRONGER The increase in strength is a very good indicator of successful muscle building. Try to train so that you slowly but surely get stronger. That doesn't mean that you have to move heavy weights every time you exercise. You can also improve your technique or do one more repetition here and there. It is only important that you make progress. PROPER NUTRITION You could easily write your own contribution to the muscle building diet. The most important thing is that you consume enough calories. Your body needs a slight excess of calories, i.e. more calories than it consumes. This is the only way you can gain weight and therefore also muscle mass. It is also important that you consume enough protein: approx. 2g protein per kilo of body weight. For example, if you weigh 80 KG, you should eat around 160g of protein a day. The remaining calories can then be consumed divided into fats and carbohydrates. The higher the quality of the food, the more strength you will have in training. ADEQUATE SLEEP FOR REGENERATION Your muscles grow in the resting phases and not during training. It is all the more important for the body that it receives sufficient regeneration and sleep. JUST FOCUS ON YOURSELF Everyone does it every now and then and compares himself with the other members in the gym. Especially when it comes to strength and muscle mass, it quickly becomes a competition who is stronger or wider. However, this way of thinking is dangerous because it leads you to overexert yourself. In these situations in particular, high spirits or even a little inattentiveness can quickly lead to an injury. Apart from injuries, you are not doing yourself a favor, because everyone is different and has different requirements. Do not try to compare yourself with other members, but concentrate on yourself and try to become better than before. DRINK ENOUGH Your body needs enough fluid and, above all, water to function properly. It is best to drink 1 liter per 20kg bodyweight . So if you weigh 80kg, you should drink about 4 liters a day. In addition to water, you can always drink unsweetened tea. This has a pleasant taste and you can drink it both warm and cold. Thus, your body is ideally supplied with liquid, which supports many important processes in your body. TAKE THE CREATINE SUPPLEMENT Creatine (or creatine written) can give you additional strength and volume in your muscles. Many studies have proven the effective effects of creatine. When you take creatine, the cellular energy level of your muscles improves, which increases your short-term performance, so you can train harder, increase your maximum strength and reduce cell damage during long endurance sessions. I recommend taking 5g a day. Either in a shake before or after training or immediately after getting up with a large glass of water. If you take these tips to heart, successful muscle building is almost guaranteed

sets of one up to a maximum of four repetitions. ​Use four to six sets of each exercise per session. ​Allow three to five minutes of rest between sets. ​Do not go to muscular failure on any set. That will cause you to gain muscle mass. ​Do this twice a week.

One argument that I shall make in this book is that the very notion that a rational agent in full possession of his or her faculties could, in any meaningful sense, freely reject God absolutely and forever is a logically incoherent one. Another is that, for this and other reasons, a final state of eternal torment could be neither a just sentence pronounced upon nor a just fate suffered by a finite being, no matter how depraved that being might have become. Still another is that, even if that fate were in some purely abstract sense “just,” the God who would permit it to become anyone’s actual fate could never be perfectly good—or, rather, as Christian metaphysical tradition obliges us to phrase it, could never be absolute Goodness as such—but could be at most only a relative calculable good in relation to other relative calculable goods. And yet another is that the traditional doctrine of hell’s perpetuity renders other aspects of the tradition, such as orthodox Christology or the eschatological claims of the Apostle Paul, ultimately meaningless. If all of this seems obscure, which at this point it should, I hope it will have become clear by the end of the book. I cannot be certain that it will have done so, however, because Christians have been trained at a very deep level of their thinking to believe that the idea of an eternal hell is a clear and unambiguous element of their faith, and that therefore the idea must make perfect moral sense. They are in error on both counts, as it happens, but a sufficiently thorough conditioning can make an otherwise sound mind perceive even the most ostentatiously absurd proposition to be the very epitome of rational good sense. In fact, where the absurdity proves only slight, the mind that has been trained most thoroughly will, as often as not, fabricate further and more extravagant absurdities, in order to secure the initial offense against reason within a more encompassing and intoxicating atmosphere of corroborating nonsense. Sooner or later, it will all seem to make sense, simply through ceaseless repetition and restatement and rhetorical reinforcement. The most effective technique for subduing the moral imagination is to teach it to mistake the contradictory for the paradoxical, and thereby to accept incoherence as profundity, or moral idiocy as spiritual subtlety. If this can be accomplished with sufficient nuance and delicacy, it can sustain even a very powerful intellect for an entire lifetime. In the end, with sufficient practice, one really can, like the White Queen, learn to believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

You can’t just tune out and do the work. Sport, combat, and life don’t work like that. You have to train smart and hard, with consciousness. This is what training is for. Resolve now to change your criteria from quantity to quality and judge your movement based on form, not on how many repetitions you can complete.

While making studies of the revolutionary movement, I was aided for a time by Angelica Balabanoff. This restless, diminutive Russian knew almost everyone engaged in socialist and communist activities. Aflame with the spirit of revolt, she spared no effort to infect others with her hatred for the capitalist regime. She was very useful as she not only brought me in contact with everyone I wished to meet, but she also spoke fluently many of the European languages. She would often sit beside me at conferences and in restaurants, translating into my ear, in a soft and to others almost inaudible voice, everything of interest said by the various speakers, no matter from what country they came. She was afterward one of Mussolini's chief aids and became his assistant editor when he took control of *Avanti*. In 1917 she went back to Russia with Lenin and other communists in the train so kindly provided by the German government, which expected them to augment the chaos already paralyzing its enemies on the East. Revolutionists talk fast and are often well educated. In some groups at dinner three or four languages would be spoken and, of course, at all the socialists and labor conferences delegates from many countries delivered their addresses in their native tongues. These different languages were laboriously translated by official interpreters. It was unnecessary to follow these dreary repetitions when Balabanoff sat beside me. She was often the official interpreter at the larger gatherings and her translations were never questioned — although she often excelled the orator in eloquence when he was expressing some of her cherished and more violently revolutionary views. Although she was a valued aid to both Mussolini and Lenin — I believe she brought them together at one time — and the most impassioned revolutionist I have ever met, she left Russia in 1921, ill and thoroughly disillusioned by the Reign of Terror.

Faced with the task of building a strong, cohesive corporate culture, many software companies have borrowed heavily from other organizations. Trilogy Software made headlines by sending its new recruits to a training “boot camp” for three months—with classes running from 8:00 a.m. to midnight, seven days a week, for the first month. Other companies, such as Scient, subject their new recruits to intense pep rallies, with constant repetition of the company slogan— “I’m on fire!” The popularity of these tactics has even led to some hand-wringing about the cult-like character of many business initiation rituals. One writer for Shift magazine captured the dilemma quite well in a brilliant article entitled “Why Your Fabulous Job Sucks.” “Work is a blast. Your colleagues are cool and they dig having your dog around. But something evil lures you to the company beer fridge. Ever wonder why you’re never home?” The observation here is quite astute. Creating a cool work environment, holding fabulous office parties with great bands, letting people wear whatever they want, setting up the LAN for multiplayer gaming— this may all seem like corporate generosity. But it also has a sound economic rationale. All these devices help to build among young employees allegiance, loyalty, and a willingness to work. The easiest way to persuade people to pull an all-nighter is to make being at the office more fun than being at home.

Coach Bobby put up his fists like a boxer. I did likewise, though my stance was far less rigid. I kept my knees flexed, bounced a bit. Bobby was a very big guy and local-neighborhood tough and used to intimidating opponents. But he was out of his league. A few quick facts about fighting. One, the cardinal rule: You never really know how it is going to go. Anyone can land a lucky blow. Overconfidence is always a mistake. But the truth was, Coach Bobby had virtually no chance. I don’t say this to sound immodest or repetitive. Despite what the parents in those rickety stands want to believe with their private coaches and overly aggressive third-grade travel league schedules, athletes are mostly created in the womb. Yes, you need the hunger and the training and the practice, but the difference, the big difference, is natural ability. Nature over nurture every time. I had been gifted with ridiculously quick reflexes and hand-eye coordination. That’s not bragging. It’s like your hair color or your height or your hearing. It just is. And I’m not even talking here about the years of training I did to improve my body and to learn how to fight. But that’s there too. Coach

What if, Elliott suggested, The Stepford Wives was more than just about housewifely ennui but also about the alienation and unending tedium of all modern work - of a moneymaking need that expands to fill the time available? Why else this constant repetition and reinforcement of a fiction that reality keeps refuting but that fiction keeps reimposing: the fiction of progress, the feeling that we are going somewhere, getting somewhere, that our lives have meaning, that we are not caught in a constant recursion, an infinite loop? Is there progress? What is progress? What if author Ira Levin was not ripping off Betty Friedan but was on her side? What if he was calling back to her, saying, 'I feel you, sister! Fuck the patriarchy!' What if, as Elliott suggested, The Stepford Wives was an allegory for the lives not just of suburban housewives but of global corporate capitalism? of working ceaselessly with nothing to show for it at the end? What if it represented anxieties about lives of pointless repetition with no progress, no end result, and no possibility of transformation? If it wasn't just the housewives' problem, or a problem caused by housewives who ceased to perform their housewifely duties, but everyone's problem? What if 'the problem that has no name turns out to be caused by the life that has no more plot?

In some cases, the difference between a model and the real world is literally a matter of life and death. In the military and in law enforcement, for example, repetitive, rote training is considered a key means for instilling line-of-fire skills. The goal is to drill certain motions and tactics to the point that they become totally automatic. But when overfitting creeps in, it can prove disastrous. There are stories of police officers who find themselves, for instance, taking time out during a gunfight to put their spent casings in their

The various branches of the US military have special operations forces. These are made up of units of soldiers who have been specially trained to tackle the most risky and dangerous military operations in the world—most of which are never heard about by the general public. Special-ops forces such as the Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets, Marine RECONs, and Air Force Special Tactics are comprised of the most elite soldiers in the world. Their training is beyond rigorous, and the qualifications to join such exclusive groups of warriors are extremely high. These elite soldiers make up a small percentage of the total military, but they are the tip of the spear when it comes to critical combat operations. These units usually operate in small numbers, drop behind enemy lines, practice tactics repetitively before executing a given operation, and train for every combat condition they might encounter. But even with an exceptional level of training and expertise, there is one critical component that is absolutely necessary for them to successfully reach their objective: communication. These elite special-ops fighters are part of a larger overarching entity with which they must stay in communication—SOCOM. This acronym stands for Special Operations Command.1 Key to their success from the elite soldier on the field all the way to the commander-in-chief is communication through SOCOM. A unit or soldier on mission in the theater of battle can have the latest weapons and technology, but they cannot access the fuller power and might of the military without the critical link—communications. If a satellite phone goes down or can’t access a signal, this life-or-death communication is broken. Without the ability to call in for air support when being overrun, medical evacuation when someone is injured, or passing on key intelligence information to SOCOM, an operation can be compromised. When communication is absent, things can go south in a hurry. In the realm of special military operations, communication is life.

Inventions cast moral shadows, she well knew, better than most, in fact. But... could simple convenience prove so perniciously evil? The action of doing things, laborious things, repetitive things, such actions invited ritual, and with ritual came meaning that expanded beyond the accomplishment of the deed itself. From such ritual self-identity emerged, and with it self-worth. Even so, to make life easier must possess some inherent value, mustn't it? Easier. Nothing earned, the language of recompense fading away until as lost as that ancient tribe's cherished tongue. Worth dimished, value transformed into arbitrariness, oh gods below, and I was so bold as to speak of freedom! She kicked her horse forward until she came alongside the Toblakai. "But is that all? Karsa Orlong! I ask you, is that all?" "Among my people," he said after a moment, "the day is filled, as is the night." "With what? Weaving baskets, trapping fish, sharpening swords, training horses, cooking, eating, sewing, fucking—" "Telling stories, mocking fools who do and say foolish things, yes, all that. You must have visited there, then?" "I have not." A faint smile, then gone. "There are things to do. And, always, witch, ways of cheating them. But no-one truly in their lives is naïve." "Truly in their lives?" "Exulting in the moment, witch, does not require wild dancing." "And so, without those rituals..." "The young warriors go looking for war.

The Official Soviet Weightlifting Textbook Girevoy Sport Competition Training Guidelines (Falameyev, 1986) Train three times a week on non-consecutive days, preferably at the same time of the day. In the beginning limit your sessions to 30 min and your load to 3 sets per exercise in two arm exercises and 3 sets per arm in one arm drills. Select a weight that enables you to do 5-16 repetitions in a given exercise. Perform your exercises through the full range of motion. Breathe deep and smooth without excessive straining and breath holding. Rest for 2 min between sets. Calmly walk around. Train the one arm snatches, presses, and C&Js in 3-5 sets. Complete all the sets for the weaker arm first. Once a week work both arms back to back without setting the kettlebell down on the platform. Perform 2-3 such competition style sets. Do extra snatches with the weaker arm. Pay a lot of attention to the development of your wrist strength. Before tackling the competition-level, two arm/two kettlebell C&Js, master one arm/one KB C&Js, with a special emphasis on the weaker arm. Train the two arm/two kettlebell C&J in 6-8 sets. Include two different kettlebell exercises in a training session and follow them up with 2-3 barbell exercises. As the competition approaches, the number of barbell exercises in a session is decreased, so is their volume.

This ability to change the brain’s wiring, to grow new neural connections, has been demonstrated in experiments such as one conducted by Doctors Avi Karni and Leslie Underleider at the National Institutes of Mental Health. In that experiment, the researchers had subjects perform a simple motor task, a finger-tapping exercise, and identified the parts of the brain involved in the task by taking a MRI brain scan. The subjects then practiced the finger exercise daily for four weeks, gradually becoming more efficient and quicker at it. At the end of the four-week period, the brain scan was repeated and showed that the area of the brain involved in the task had expanded; this indicated that the regular practice and repetition of the task had recruited new nerve cells and changed the neural connections that had originally been involved in the task. This remarkable feature of the brain appears to be the physiological basis for the possibility of transforming our minds. By mobilizing our thoughts and practicing new ways of thinking, we can reshape our nerve cells and change the way our brains work. It is also the basis for the idea that inner transformation begins with learning (new input) and involves the discipline of gradually replacing our “negative conditioning” (corresponding with our present characteristic nerve cell activation patterns) with “positive conditioning” (forming new neural circuits). Thus, the idea of training the mind for happiness becomes a very real possibility.

Through gradual and repetitive training to contemplate the three characteristics of existence—namely, suffering, impermanence, and non-self—the mind will progressively develop qualities and skills to reduce suffering.

She was truly skilled in the blade, not just talented or trained, but skilled, the way a master of an art became with endless repetition.

Sergeant Dix told me that at Fort Bragg they found that two to three days of constant tension was what it took to figure out if a soldier was going to break. Most who made it to the Special Forces Qualification Course could take anything the Army cared to throw at them for forty-eight hours. But by day three, with reserves depleted and nothing but misery on the horizon, a soldier’s core became exposed. His baseline ability. His essence. Superficially, this was evidenced by the decision to quit or continue, a temptation the drill sergeants dangled every time they spoke.  The real game, of course, was mental. Beating the Q boiled down to a soldier’s ability to disassociate his body from his mind, his being from his circumstance. This was relatively easy during the mindless procedures — the hikes, runs, and repetitive drills that form the backbone of military training. Disassociation became much tougher, however, when the physical activity was paired with judgment calls and problem solving. If a soldier could engage his higher-order thinking while simultaneously ignoring the pain and willing his body to continue beyond fatigue, then he had a chance at making it to the end. If he couldn’t, then the strength of his back, heart, and lungs didn’t matter.  Dix had concluded that the Q-Course was as much about self-discovery as a prestigious shoulder patch.  Katya was in that discovery phase now.  The big question was what we’d do if she decided to quit. She broke the silence after a few miles. “Do you ever get used to it?” “The killing?” “Yes.” “We’re all used to killing — just not people. We kill when we spray for bugs, or squash a spider, or buy a leather bag, or order a hamburger. I don’t think of the individuals I’ve killed as people any more than you thought of the last steak you ate as Bessie.

Yet this unlearning is precisely what needs to be done if we are to make the shift from a belief-based Buddhism (version 1.0) to a praxis-based Buddhism (version 2.0). We have to train ourselves to the point where on hearing or reading a text from the canon our initial response is no longer “Is that true?” but “Does this work?” At the same time, we also need to undertake a critical analysis of the texts themselves in order to uncover, as best we can at this distance in time, the core terms and narrative strategies that inform a particular passage or discourse. If we subtract the words “noble truth” from the phrase “four noble truths,” we are simply left with “four.” And the most economic formulation of the Four, to be found throughout Buddhist traditions, is this: Suffering (dukkha) Arising (samudaya) Ceasing (nirodha) Path (magga) Once deprived of the epithet “noble truth” and no longer phrased in propositional language, we arrive at the four keystones on which both Buddhism 1.0 and Buddhism 2.0 are erected. Just as there are four nucleobases (cytosine, guanine, adenine, and thymine) that make up DNA, the nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions for all living organisms, one might say that suffering, arising, ceasing, and path are the four nucleobases that make up the dharma, the body of instructive ideas, values, and practices that give rise to all forms of Buddhism. ( 9 ) Craving is repetitive, it wallows in attachment and greed, obsessively indulging in this and that: the craving of sensory desire, craving for being, craving for non-being. —THE FIRST DISCOURSE Following Carol S. Anderson (1999), I translate samudaya as “arising” rather than the more familiar “origiṇ” I also

D: To work for yourself. NR: To have others work for you. D: To work when you want to. NR: To prevent work for work’s sake, and to do the minimum necessary for maximum effect (“minimum effective load”). D: To retire early or young. NR: To distribute recovery periods and adventures (mini-retirements) throughout life on a regular basis and recognize that inactivity is not the goal. Doing that which excites you is. D: To buy all the things you want to have. NR: To do all the things you want to do, and be all the things you want to be. If this includes some tools and gadgets, so be it, but they are either means to an end or bonuses, not the focus. D: To be the boss instead of the employee; to be in charge. NR: To be neither the boss nor the employee, but the owner. To own the trains and have someone else ensure they run on time. D: To make a ton of money. NR: To make a ton of money with specific reasons and defined dreams to chase, timelines and steps included. What are you working for? D: To have more. NR: To have more quality and less clutter. To have huge financial reserves but recognize that most material wants are justifications for spending time on the things that don’t really matter, including buying things and preparing to buy things. You spent two weeks negotiating your new Infiniti with the dealership and got $10,000 off? That’s great. Does your life have a purpose? Are you contributing anything useful to this world, or just shuffling papers, banging on a keyboard, and coming home to a drunken existence on the weekends? D: To reach the big pay-off, whether IPO, acquisition, retirement, or other pot of gold. NR: To think big but ensure payday comes every day: cash flow first, big payday second. D: To have freedom from doing that which you dislike. NR: To have freedom from doing that which you dislike, but also the freedom and resolve to pursue your dreams without reverting to work for work’s sake (W4W). After years of repetitive work, you will often need to dig hard to find your passions, redefine your dreams, and revive hobbies that you let atrophy to near extinction. The goal is not to simply eliminate the bad, which does nothing more than leave you with a vacuum, but to pursue and experience the best in the world.

War is fraught with random dangers and careless missteps. Clear orders and relentless rehearsals based on intelligence and repetitive training build muscle—not once or twice, but hundreds of times.

With proper training, you should gradually get measurably stronger. Strength gains may take place quicker in the first year. When this happens, you’ll notice it’s getting easier to reach your five or six reps — that’s the time to consider gradually adding weight. Add weight carefully, sometimes starting with just a couple of pounds. Adding weight replaces the need to perform more repetitions. If, for whatever reason, you go through a period when you don’t perform any strength training, such as a few weeks or months, you may eventually lose some of the strength you gained. In this case, when getting back into training, reduce the amount of weight you previously used until you begin to get stronger again. Then you can increase the weight as needed. Sometimes we think we’re stronger than we are, relating to those days when we actually were stronger.

As in everything, leaders must find the balance in training and focus on three critical aspects: realism, fundamentals, and repetition.

Kettlebell deadlift. The kettlebell deadlift primarily targets the posterior chain (lower back, glutes, and hamstrings). It is an excellent companion to the kettlebell box squat and additionally helps teach proper hip-creasing mechanics, creating an important foundation for the classical kettlebell exercises (e.g., swing, clean, snatch). With the kettlebell on the ground, stand with your feet shoulder-width apart with the kettlebell just in front of you (see figure 7.9a). Keep your chest lifted as you sit back with your hips until your hands can reach the handle (see figure 7.9b). Grab the handle with both hands and stand up by pressing your feet into the ground until your body is fully upright (see figure 7.9c). Repeat by sitting back to lightly touch the kettlebell to the ground. Do 10 controlled repetitions with a light weight and then repeat with a more challenging weight (e.g., women start with 8 kg [18 lb] for 10 repetitions and then use 12 kg [26 lb] for 10 repetitions; men start with 16 kg [35 lb] for 10 repetitions and then use 24 kg [53 lb] for 10 repetitions). This basic exercise teaches you to keep your center of gravity aligned vertically over your base of support. It is important to have control over your center of mass because kettlebell training involves such dynamic movements. A strong and stable base will keep you safe when swinging the kettlebell. KEY PRINCIPLES Crease at the hips instead of bending at the waist. Maintain a neutral spine and slightly arched lower back. Legs can be bent or straight depending on the desired training effect. Straight legs will recruit the hamstrings more and bent legs will recruit the quadriceps more.

Single clean. The single clean is a natural progression from the swing and is the intermediary point between the swing and many of the overhead lifts. The clean introduces hand insertion, alignment points connected to the rack position, and positioning of the kettlebell in the hand in order to avoid injury and grip fatigue. It also teaches you how to use your legs to transmit vertical power from the lower to upper body. With practice, your clean becomes a smooth, rhythmic movement that you can sustain for extended lengths of time, although it may take hundreds of practice repetitions before it flows and becomes polished. Resting the kettlebell on the forearm is a distinguishing characteristic of kettlebells that makes them behave differently than dumbbells and makes them effective for developing the fitness that comes with high-repetition resistance training. By placing most of the load on the forearm, the muscles of the hand and grip are able to relax. It takes practice before the kettlebell will move smoothly in your hand and into position. Sometimes you will have bad repetitions and the kettlebell will crash into your forearm. To make this learning process a little kinder, you can wear wrist wraps or wristbands. In time your technique will become more polished and the kettlebell will just float into position on your arm in cleans and snatches, and at that point you may prefer to not use any wraps at all. However, it is an option for those with more tender arms—no sense giving yourself bruises if you do not need to. With the kettlebell on the floor, sit back with your hips and grip the handle with the fingers of one hand (see figure 7.11, a and b). Swing the kettlebell back through your legs as you did in the one-handed swing (see figure 7.11c), and as it swings forward, keep your forearm braced against your body (see figure 7.11d). During the swing, your arm comes away from the body as inertia pulls the kettlebell forward and up. During the clean, on the other hand, the arm does not disconnect from body, and at the point where the arm would disconnect during the swing, it instead moves vertically along the front of your body. Imagine you are standing inside a chimney. The walls of the chimney block you so that you cannot move out or to the side; you can only move the kettlebell up and down the chimney wall. When the hips reach forward extension, pull with the hip on the working side and give a gentle tug with your trapezius on the same side, pulling the kettlebell up the chimney (see figure 7.11e). Before the kettlebell settles to the chest, loosen your grip and open your hand to insert your fingers as deeply into the handle as you can at a curved angle until the medial portion of your forearm, the ulna, blocks you from inserting the hand any further (see figure 7.11f). Complete the vertical pull by letting the kettlebell rest on your chest and arm (see figure 7.11g) into what is called the rack position. This

Snatch. The kettlebell snatch is a total-body exercise with special emphasis on the entire posterior chain. It simultaneously develops strength, explosiveness, structural integrity, cardiorespiratory capacity, and virtually every attribute on the athletic continuum. There are six stages to the snatch: Inertia swing Acceleration pull with hip and trapezius Hand insertion deep into the handle Overhead lockout Direction change into the drop Grip change into the backswing To perform this exercise, with the kettlebell on the floor in front of you, load your hips and grip the kettlebell with your fingers as you would for the swing (see figure 7.21a). Swing the kettlebell back between your legs as you begin to stand, further loading the hips (see figure 7.21b). As with the swing and clean, various thumb positions can be used in the downswing and upswing portion of the snatch. The most common is to rotate the thumb back at the end of the downswing and transition to a 45-degree angle (thumb up) at the beginning of the acceleration pull. Keep your arm connected to your body and extend your knees and hips, allowing the inertia of the kettlebell to pull your arm forward (figure 7.21c). Just as the arm begins to separate from the body, accelerate the kettlebell vertically as fast as you can by rapidly pulling with the hip, followed by a shrug of the trapezius. If you are snatching with your right hand, push forcefully with your left leg, pull back your right hip, and shrug with your right trapezius (see figure 7.21d). As the kettlebell is accelerating upward, release your fingers and insert your palm deeply into the handle (see figure 7.21e). Allow the momentum to carry the kettlebell all the way to the top and lock out your arm in the fully extended elbow position (see figure 7.21f). This overhead lockout position is identical to the overhead position in the push or push press (thumb facing back, no or minimal rotation). To drop the kettlebell back down, first shift your weight to the opposite foot (if snatching with the right hand, shift to the left foot) and lean your upper body back (see figure 7.21g). Keep your hips and torso extended maximally and let your triceps connect to your torso. Finish the downswing by changing grips and pulling your hand back to catch the handle with your fingers (see figure 7.21h), and tighten the fingers as you follow the kettlebell between your legs into the backswing (see figure 7.21i). Use the rhythmic motion to continue the snatch for the desired repetitions.

typical training session should run 30-90 seconds. Resist the urge to push longer, even if you’re doing well; that’s a great time to stop, before any mistakes happen! When your dog really understands this behavior, you should be completing about 15 target repetitions per minute.

Train like a scientist. Even though it may be possible that anyone can make a new scientific discovery, and anyone can win a fight against a professional fighter, the truth of the matter is the odds are against you. In fact, the odds are so unfavorably stacked against you, if you don’t train efficiently and push yourself to the very limits of what the human body and mind can endure, your chances of success are slim at best. While there is nothing new about pushing limits and training hard when it comes to fighting, successful modern fighters are starting to train with skepticism. I still remember the first day of one of my undergraduate physics classes, when the professor said, “Don’t trust me. If you don’t question everything I say here in class, if you don’t go home and check it yourself because you’re skeptical and refuse to take my word for it, then you don’t belong here, and you’re going to have a hard time making it in physics.” I remember it because at first it seemed like the opposite of what a professor should say, but once it sunk in, I realized he was right. Real mastery of physics does not come from memorization and repetition. Real mastery comes from understanding how well the laws of physics hold up when you try your best to break them. The same thing is true in fighting. You will never really master a choke until you have tried to choke out someone who does not want you to succeed at it. During an actual fight, on the street or in the ring, there is far too much chaos for anyone to succeed just by listening in class and repeating techniques. Everyone needs to have some rough personal failures to learn from. Everyone should have that awkward moment when your opponent’s only reaction to your attempted wristlock is a blank stare, and everyone needs to get knocked over once or twice because an opponent kicked right through the perfect block. Of course, sometimes there are techniques we do not have the luxury of testing out, either because they are too dangerous or the opportunities to use them in sparring may not come very often. You can’t learn everything the hard way, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still be a skeptic.

The kettlebell is one of the best grip and forearm developers in existence. It has been hailed by such grip greats as John Brookfield. Dr. Fred Hatfield, a powerlifting legend and strength training expert, once quipped, “The best grip exercises are always going to be pulling at heavy weights ballistically.” High-rep snatches forge steel trap fingers and painfully pump the forearms to new growth. Their action is similar to the ballistic repetitive loading of rock climbing.

Pick a kettlebell you can clean and press—a clean before each press, that is—roughly five to eight times. C&P it once with your weaker arm, switch hands and put it up with your stronger arm. Rest. Two reps. Another short break. Three reps. Then start over at one. Do three ladders, for a total of 18 repetitions, the first week; add a ladder the next week and a ladder the week after. Five ladders, total 30 reps. You will stay with five ladders from now on. Although the top “rung” of each ladder, especially the last, should be tough, you must not fail! Never train to failure! If you want to know why, read Power to the People! The Party is always right.

Training pays off and hard work pays off and repetition pays off,” O’Reilly adds. “When you do those things with purpose year-in and year-out, then when these big moments come, people think it’s so incredible and such a miracle, but in reality, it was just practice and, in the biggest moment, being able to execute.

Muscular endurance training, in which you use a lighter load for higher repetitions, will increase the health of your bones and joints. The reduced likelihood of muscular fatigue will also lessen your likelihood of suffering a fatigue related injury or accident.

Believe me, porn’s not easy. It’s not just screwing hot chicks. Especially when you’ve made a name for yourself. A lot’s expected of you, man. A lot. Sometimes for hours. You got all those crew members standing around expecting you to perform, waiting on you, wanting to get home to their wives or their kids or whatever but they can’t till you do what you gotta do. And it’s repetitive. There’s only so many ways to fuck somebody. And most of your co-workers become friends and you get to know them too well, to the point they irritate you, and there’s just no sexual chemistry most times—like I said, it’s a job—and you gotta psyche yourself up, like training for a marathon.

new experiences can create new neural pathways. These new neural pathways become strengthened through repetition and deepened through focused attention. Essentially, the more we practice something, the more we train our brain to change. This fundamental principle is reflected in a phrase that summarizes the work Canadian neuropsychologist Donald Hebb presented in 1949: “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” In essence, when brain cells activate together, the connection between them strengthens. Simply put, each time we repeat a particular experience, it becomes more ingrained in us. With enough repetition, it can become automatic.

To learn, dogs need time, patience, change of location, reinforcement, opportunity to make choices, and repetition.

Phonics was used to teach reading in America without question until the 1890s when John Dewey began a movement to change education from intellectual training to conditioning students to be obedient, conformist, non-thinkers. One of his disciples William Gray, dean of the University of Chicago’s School of Education, convinced the National Education Association that phonics instruction should be replaced with the look-say technique. (Look-say involves memorizing a whole word without recognizing the individual sounds of letters in the word. Committing the word to memory through repetition is a form of behavior conditioning.) In 1930 Scott Foresman published Gray’s new reader, Dick and Jane. These readers, or primers, soon gained dominance in American elementary schools.

The difference between how we currently train and prepare versus the philosophy I am advocating is similar to the difference between techniques and tactics. Techniques require inflexibility and repetition, while tactics require flexibility, good judgment and creativity. Officers can only gain the ability to execute this new philosophy with experience and education, stressing free play force on force training brought to a conclusion with clear winners and losers. Keep in mind no tactical concept is an end in itself and that there is more than one solution to a tactical dilemma.   

Fifty long years rapidly up and yet how quietly and without fuss they continued to glide into the future on a smooth and silent electric train that had no brakes; not moving dramatically fast but simply and inexorably, as though it, being a monstrous, impassive machine, saw no need to pick up speed to arrive at a future that too would be so unnervingly dull, so much a numbing repetition of fruitless routine, its incapacitating tedium to be interrupted only by death, that final, endless, terrifying yawn.

The fact that someone has talent and is able to develop it into a higher skill or craft and achieve remarkable things does nothing to diminish the obvious—it still is a gift from God. It is part of the sunnah of God in creation, that divine order woven in the fabric of existence, that one must toil to refine his or her skills or talent. A calligrapher, for example, makes his craft appear easy to the onlooker, but one does not see the years of tireless preparation, perseverance, and repetition to master the curves of one letter of the Arabic alphabet and then whole words. On top of that, consider the various styles of calligraphy that the great Muslim calligraphers have developed over the centuries. There are plenty of talented and refined artisans of the world who deem their work astonishing and magnificent. They think only of their long training and deceive themselves into thinking, “I worked so hard, and I did this all by myself.” Similarly, one often finds businessmen truly talented and bold in building business, but who admire themselves and extol their financial prowess. Undoubtedly, this invites illness into the heart, for it is God who is the bestower of success and talent.

consisting of an initial video presentation of the target dialogue, followed by choral and pair repetition of the text and rule explanation. Students then underwent structured drilling of the chunks within a communicative context, and finally they memorized and performed short dialogues that included the target sequences. … The results indicated a substantial development, with the range and number of the chunks performed by the students doubling over the training period. This approach seems to combine the features of both a communicative approach and (the much maligned) audiolingual one, with its emphasis on memorized dialogues – a case of East meets

Dear friends and enemies, Season’s greetings! It’s me, Serge! Don’t you just hate these form letters people stuff in Christmas cards? Nothing screams “you’re close to my heart” like a once-a-year Xerox. Plus, all the lame jazz that’s going on in their lives. “Had a great time in Memphis.” “Bobby lost his retainer down a storm drain.” “I think the neighbors are dealing drugs.” But this letter is different. You are special to me. I’m just forced to use a copy machine and gloves because of advancements in forensics. I love those TV shows! Has a whole year already flown by? Much to report! Let’s get to it! Number one: I ended a war. You guessed correct, the War on Christmas! When I first heard about it, I said to Coleman, “That’s just not right! We must enlist!” I rushed to the front lines, running downtown yelling “Merry Christmas” at everyone I saw. And they’re all saying “Merry Christmas” back. Hmmm. That’s odd: Nobody’s stopping us from saying “Merry Christmas.” Then I did some research, and it turns out the real war is against people saying “Happy holidays.” The nerve: trying to be inclusive. So, everyone … Merry Christmas! Happy Hannukah! Good times! Soul Train! Purple mountain majesties! The Pompatus of Love! There. War over. And just before it became a quagmire. Next: Decline of Florida Roundup. —They tore down the Big Bamboo Lounge near Orlando. Where was everybody on that one? —Remember the old “Big Daddy’s” lounges around Florida with the logo of that bearded guy? They’re now Flannery’s or something. —They closed 20,000 Leagues. And opened Buzz Lightyear. I offered to bring my own submarine. Okay, actually threatened, but they only wanted to discuss it in the security office. I’ve been doing a lot of running lately at theme parks. —Here’s a warm-and-fuzzy. Anyone who grew up down here knows this one, and everyone else won’t have any idea what I’m talking about: that schoolyard rumor of the girl bitten by a rattlesnake on the Steeplechase at Pirate’s World (now condos). I’ve started dropping it into all conversations with mixed results. —In John Mellencamp’s megahit “Pink Houses,” the guy compliments his wife’s beauty by saying her face could “stop a clock.” Doesn’t that mean she was butt ugly? Nothing to do with Florida. Just been bugging me. Good news alert! I’ve decided to become a children’s author! Instilling state pride in the youngest residents may be the only way to save the future. The book’s almost finished. I’ve only completed the first page, but the rest just flows after that. It’s called Shrimp Boat Surprise. Coleman asked what the title meant, and I said life is like sailing on one big, happy shrimp boat. He asked what the surprise was, and I said you grow up and learn that life bones you up the ass ten ways to Tuesday. He started reading and asked if a children’s book should have the word “motherfucker” eight times on the first page. I say, absolutely. They’re little kids, after all. If you want a lesson to stick, you have to hammer it home through repetition…In advance: Happy New Year! (Unlike 2008—ouch!)

The first surviving manuals of European swordsmanship date from the early fourteenth century, so it is impossible to know precisely how William trained and fought with this weapon, but it is clear that he honed his ability to wield his sword both while mounted and on foot. This must have required the daily repetition of practice sword strokes through his teenage years and beyond – so as to develop strength and acquire muscle memory – and regular sparring to refine coordination and agility. By the time he became a knight, Marshal was an effective swordsman, but so far as the History was concerned, his primary gift was not flashy technique, but the brutish physicality that enabled him to deliver crushing blows. With sword in hand, William was, in the words of his biographer, a man who ‘hammered like a blacksmith on iron’. Marshal probably also trained with a number of other mêlée weapons popular with twelfth-century knights, including the dagger, axe, mace and war-hammer, but much of his time would have been devoted to mastering the lance. By construction this was a fairly rudimentary weapon – often simply a ten- to twelve-foot-long straight spar of hewn wood, usually of ash – but it was fiendishly difficult to use from horseback. The lance would be held under the arm (or couched) during a charge, and directing its point towards a target with any accuracy required immense skill. Lances often broke after one or two uses, but a successful strike could cause devastating damage to an opponent. In the course of his career, William would witness the lethal potential of this weapon with his own eyes and he would also be called upon to charge down one of the greatest warriors of the age, Richard the Lionheart, with lance in hand.

Adam became an expert, able to navigate through the different war zones, killing everything in his path with relative ease. Moving from scene to scene, the skill of quickly reloading before his magazine emptied was vital to acquiring the most kills in the shortest amount of time. Through repetitive play of Call of Duty, Adam learned how to load the second cartridge in a single fluid motion before the first was emptied by ejecting the magazine with the hand holding the weapon while drawing a new magazine from its place using his fourth and fifth fingers, and inserting a fresh magazine with the thumb and index finger. That skill, called the “tactical reload,” had previously been available only to law enforcement or for military training. Call

To test this they gave mice a first stroke in motor cortex and then waited a week before beginning retraining. As expected, the mice recovered only minimally because too much time had been allowed to pass before training was initiated. They then gave these same mice a second stroke in an area near to the original stroke, and, not surprisingly, the animals developed an even worse impairment. The surprising result was that with retraining the mice returned to normal levels of performance. In essence a previous stroke was treated with a new stroke. It should be made clear that this experiment was done to prove definitively that there is a sensitive period after stroke that allows training to promote full recovery at the level of impairment. It is clearly not a viable therapeutic option to induce a second stroke in patients after a first stroke. Other means will need to be found to have the same desired effect without causing more damage to the brain. One promising option is to combine drugs, such as the serotonin reuptake inhibitor Fluoxetine (Prozac), with training early after stroke.25 Another is to drastically increase the intensity and dosage of behavioral training that patients receive early after stroke. At the current time in the first weeks after stroke patients spend about 60 percent of their time alone and 85 percent of the time immobile.26 We know from basic science that hundreds, if not thousands, of movement repetitions are needed to induce detectable changes in motor cortex in animal models.27 Current therapy offers only about thirty!28

Change the brain’s response to its environment, even without being able to change that environment itself, and you could change behaviors. You did this through repetitive practices, the same way you learned any other skill or trained any other muscle.

researchers have run experiments25 showing that experts can be trained to be better at estimating probabilities by applying a battery of estimation tests, giving the experts a lot of quick, repetitive, clear feedback along with training in techniques for improving subjective probabilities.

An image-based culture communicates through narratives, pictures, and pseudo-drama. Scandalous affairs, hurricanes, untimely deaths, train wrecks—these events play well on computer screens and television. International diplomacy, labor union negotiations, and convoluted bailout packages do not yield exciting personal narratives or stimulating images … Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion … We become trapped in the linguistic prison of incessant repetition.

I’m not saying that you should ignore your critics. This is the approach our culture often takes to criticism, and I think it’s a big mistake. Instead of ignoring your critics or listening to them, if you can edit them, you’ll have an amazing competitive advantage. You’ll be able to take something that would distract or derail most people and use it as leverage to help you get where you’re trying to go. This is the strength of a champion. When you learn to edit your critics, criticism suddenly goes from being a stumbling block to being an incredible tool for building character, improving your performance, and giving you the strength you need to finish first. It will take some practice, sure. But I have great news. You can use the criticism in your life right this minute to help you strengthen the muscle. Just like any muscle, repetition and training will get you where you are trying to go. This is about character. What kind of person do you want to be? Are you going to be the kind of person who hides from conflict and criticism, or are you going to give yourself permission to live up to your full potential? Are you going to do the work to become strong enough to receive and filter criticism, so editing your critics becomes second nature, or are you going to let critics distract you from what you’ve already decided is most important?

A method we developed to shock the muscle was “stripping.” In a normal weight training sequence, you do your first set with lighter weight and then work your way up. But in stripping, you do the reverse. For example, in preparation for London, I needed to bulk up my deltoids. So I’d do dumbbell presses, where you hold a dumbbell in each hand at shoulder height and then raise them up above your head. With stripping, I’d start at my top weight: six repetitions with 100-pound dumbbells. Put those down, take the 90-pound dumbbells and do six reps. And so on, all the way down the rack. By the time I reached the 40s, my shoulders would be on fire and six reps would feel like each arm was lifting 110 pounds, not 40. But before putting down the weights, I’d shock the deltoids further by doing lateral raises, lifting the 40s from hip level out to shoulder height. After that, my shoulder muscles would be so totally berserk that I did not know where to put my hands. It was agony to let them hang by my sides and impossible to lift them. All I could do was drape my arms on a table or a piece of equipment to relieve the excruciating pain. The deltoids were screaming from the unexpected sequence of sets. I’d shown them who was boss. Their only option now was to heal and grow.

Just as the globus pallidus fixes various body parts in particular positions, so does the striate body initiate and monitor many stereotyped movements. Cats and dogs and horses and pigs all graze and chew, prick up their ears at a new sound, coordinate various gaits, and so on. Humans also share a wide range of stereotyped movements, similar in their features because they are designed to accomplish the same things for each individual. And further, we have noted that although both dogs and cats do many similar things—sitting, walking, drinking, jumping, grooming, and the like—they each do them in distinctly canine or feline ways. Every species has a way of doing the normal tasks of living, a manner of movement that is peculiar to it. A good mime can represent “cat” or “mouse,” or “horse,” or “ape” with a brief imitation of these animals’ manner of movement just as effectively as he could with an elaborate costume. These too are stereotypes of movement. The striate body seems to control a wide range of such movements—individual movements that have common utility, movements which continually correct our balance, movements which are the synchronized background motions’ that necessarily accompany the use of a limb, or movements which establish such standard communications as sexual arousal, docility, fear, anger, or defensiveness. As with fixed positions, in the human being both the repertoire of stereotyped movements and the stereotyped manner in which all movements are done may markedly display habitual preferences built up by compulsions, training, job requirements, and dispositions. And as with chronic fixations, there is the tendency over long periods of repetition to confuse how I do things with who I am. My most common movements, designed to be controlled by my unconscious mind so that I can freely direct my attention elsewhere, become more than stereotypes; they become straight jackets, and I find myself the prisoner of the very unconscious processes which are supposed to protect and liberate me. Re-establishing for the individual the sense of a wide array of equally possible movements is the real significance behind the work of freeing a person from limited neuromuscular patterns.

The sensory roles of the anulospiral receptor and the tendon organ are absolutely central in this process of exerting and adjusting muscle tone. These devices establish the “feel” for length and tension, and it is this feeling which is maintained by the gamma motor system, the reflex arcs, and the alpha skeletal muscles. All of my muscle cells—both alpha and gamma—are continually felt by the mind as they work, whether most of these “feelings” ever reach my conscious awareness or not. And it is primarily these muscular feelings which supply my central nervous system with the constant information necessary to successfully combine the demands of free motion with those of basic structural stability. The sophistication required for this maintenance of structure and flexibility can be appreciated if we remember that almost any simple motion—such as raising the arm out to the side—changes either the length or the tension values in most of the body’s muscle cells. If one is to avoid tipping towards the extended arm, then the feet, the legs, the hips, the back, the neck, and the opposite arm all must participate in a new distribution of balance created by the “isolated” movement of raising the arm. The difficulties experienced by every child learning to sit, to stand erect, and to walk with an even gait attest to the complexity of the demands which these shifts in balance and tone make upon us. The entire musculature must learn to participate in the motion of any of its parts. And to do this, the entire musculature must feel its own activity, fully and in rich detail. Competent posture and movement are among the chief points of sensory self-awareness. The purpose of bodywork is to heighten and focus this awareness. It is the child’s task during this early motor training to experiment by trial and error, and to set the precise lengths and tensions—and changes in length and tension—in all his muscle fibers for these basic skills of standing and walking. This is the education of the basal ganglia and the gamma motor system, as learned reflex responses are added to our inherited ones. The lengths and rates of change of the spindle fibers are set at values which experience has confirmed to be appropriate for the movement desired, and then the sensorimotor reflex arcs of the spindles and the Golgis command the alpha motor nerves, and hence the skeletal muscles, to respond exactly to those specifications that have been established in the gamma system by previous trial and error. And this chain of events holds true not only for the actual limb being moved, but for all other parts of the musculature that must brace, or shift, or compensate in any way. In this complicated process, the child is guided primarily by sensory cues which become more consistent and more predictable with every repetition of his efforts.

As noted earlier, current theory states that it takes two thousand to three thousand repetitions to master a physical act or develop physical “muscle memory.” I believe it takes an equal amount of “mental muscle memory” to ingrain a thought process or act.

You must also understand that with muscle memory, at least two to three thousand repetitions are necessary to help master a simple skill.

I don’t know, Apollo,” Hera said, shaking her head. “That was a little . . . repetitive.

Here are some examples: DON’T DO THIS! DO THIS! Leader-follower Leader-leader Take control Give control Give orders Avoid giving orders When you give orders, be confident, unambiguous, and resolute When you do give orders, leave room for questioning Brief Certify Have meetings Have conversations Have a mentor-mentee program Have a mentor-mentor program Focus on technology Focus on people Think short-term Think long-term Want to be missed after you depart Want not to be missed after you depart Have high-repetition, low-quality training Have low-repetition, high-quality training Limit communications to terse, succinct, formal orders Augment orders with rich, contextual, informal communications Be questioning Be curious Make inefficient processes efficient Eliminate entire steps and processes that don’t add value Increase monitoring and inspection points Reduce monitoring and inspection points Protect information Pass information

All of our training relies on these two practices: mindfulness and awareness. Awareness is our consciousness of being in the present. Mindfulness means “to remember” or “not to forget” to watch the mind and see when it drifts away from the present. The moment we see that, we’re back again. Without the activity of mindfulness, we get lost in the mind’s continual flow of thoughts, and our awareness becomes like a child lost in a thick forest. Of the two, mindfulness is usually emphasized more because it’s responsible for maintaining the continuity of our awareness. Mindfulness means to remember again and again. It has a certain quality of repetitiveness. That’s how we develop all of our habitual patterns, negative or positive—through repetition. So in this case, by cultivating a sense of mindful presence, we’re establishing a positive tendency that has the power to transform any negative tendency.