Everything is muscle training (even more than you think)
Suboptimization
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Everything is muscle training (even more than you think)<br>A framework that has helped me focus substantially better
Suboptimization<br>Aug 19, 2026
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I feel like I often see people comparing various types of practice and habit forming metaphorically to working out. “Language learning is just like going to the gym, you have to be consistent/work your brain muscle/push yourself etc etc to see results.”<br>While the basic advice is true, if a bit banal at this point, I actually had a thought based on it that has made the analogy even more useful to me personally.<br>Thanks for reading Suboptimization! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
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It was just the realization that it’s not a metaphor at all. Everything we do really is literal muscle control. The act of focusing intently on something for a long time is literal, not metaphorical, resistance training of muscles. You have an impulse, and that impulse is exerting a real physiological pull on you to lift your hand, pick up your phone, move your wrist and fingers to put in the PIN, and check Twitter/HN. To resist the impulse is to exert executive effort get your muscles to do something different from what they’re being physically pulled towards by the chemical physiology and signaling of another internal system.<br>It is (non-metaphorically) the same action as at the gym when you need to use your brain’s willpower to get your muscles to do something they don’t want to. Your executive frontal cortex, in both cases, is sending overriding impulses to your muscles to change their default behavior and do something uncomfortable, and doing that override repeatedly strengthens the system.<br>For some reason, this thought has been immensely helpful to me. When I’m doing Ankis to learn Korean, I need to sit there and use my finger muscles to type in the proper Hangul for the card. I need them NOT to type twitter.com. When I frame it as a “lift” the same way I’d lift at the gym, it makes each time the impulse comes and I resist it feel like a useful rep.<br>It applies to language learning (typing on a keyboard is finger muscles), having difficult conversations (your diaphragm expels air and your vocal cord and tongue muscles turn it into speech), chores (quads, arms, etc). Everything is a game of “can my brain supply the activation signal to my limbs/core to make this effect happen in the world instead of the default.”<br>I’m sure this seems dumb or obvious to many people, but hopefully this framing helps someone with the same brain wiring as me in their battle against the daily onslaught of attention thieves.<br>Thanks for reading Suboptimization! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
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