Why Training Fundamentals Beats the Fine Details

You’ve probably heard (or offered) advice about picking the low-hanging fruit—basically opting for quick, often short-term wins.

In a variety of contexts, it’s decent advice. After all, easy wins are still wins. Their minimal resource requirements leave time, money, or energy for other pursuits. And quickly building a list of wins helps to ​increase our self-confidence​—which, even more than experience, is the factor that usually inspires us to reach for the next challenging thing.

But there’s also a counter-argument. Arnold—yes, the Arnold “I’ll be back” Schwarzenegger—made it in ​one of his newsletters​. He said that we should go after the high-hanging fruit because the effort is what makes the reward sweeter. (In other words, ​we tend to remember what we struggled for and shrug at what came easily​.) That’s also good advice—at least in the context of having a little confidence from prior success.

But here’s what both of those arguments have in common: they’re about goals. Today’s tip is about what happens when we apply them to something that isn’t one.

Harder goals don’t require a harder process

Picking low- or high-hanging fruit effectively describes the goals that we choose.

It seems to me that most people instinctually understand Arnold’s point—that achieving harder goals (picking the higher fruit) tends to feel more meaningful. The problem that arises is then also applying that “harder = ‘better’” concept to the process itself.

We assume that we need to finesse all the details to get the best results. In fitness terms, that’s stuff like obsessing over whether to bench press with a bar or dumbbells, how long each rep should take to complete, or what body parts should be trained together vs. separately.

That stuff isn’t nothing—and some of it does matter once we’ve reached a very advanced stage. But in the beginner and intermediate stages (which generally take years of consistent, intentional training to advance beyond), the fundamentals make a much bigger difference. An updated American College of Sports Medicine position stand puts some weight behind that: based on their ​analysis of over 130 systematic reviews covering more than 30,000 people​, the things that more consistently affected results were the unglamorous ones—improving strength by doing multiple sets with heavier loads and using a full range of motion, training at least twice per week, and doing your priority work at the beginning of a session when you’re fresh instead of at the end when you’re fatigued.

Getting back to my fruit metaphor and the (incorrect when it comes to process) idea of “harder = better”: What we often do is climb to the top of an apple tree to pick the ones which happen to be clean and shiny from being more exposed to rain and sunshine—but which also happen to be smaller—when what we should do is simply pluck the bigger but slightly duller ones within arm’s reach.

That doesn’t mean the small apples are worthless—they’re still real fruit. It’s just that, until you’ve used up the big ones, there are easier and more effective uses for your effort.

Putting it into practice

If you’re not currently resistance training, this is actually good news. It means that you’re likely to experience progress if you start lifting almost anything. So don’t obsess over it—just start (and apply the fundamentals I mentioned above)!

If you are currently resistance training, consider a few questions:

1. Which stage of training are you in (e.g. beginner, intermediate, advanced)?^†
2. What are a couple of the training variables that have held your focus lately?
3. Are those variables fundamentals or fine details?
4. Finally, depending on those variables and your stage, might it make sense to shift your focus elsewhere?

And if you’re struggling with that last answer, here’s ​the case for simplifying your training plan​, which arrives at the same place from a different direction.