How to Become Stronger — Physically & Spiritually

Where Do Meaning and Happiness Really Come From?

Photo by Kyle Johnson on Unsplash

This is one of the hardest truths of life. Life must be lived under tension. You don’t flourish by being strong; you flourish by getting stronger. And how do you get stronger? By carrying a load!

Becoming Physically Stronger

I do Olympic weightlifting. That sport is infamously known to be hard on the knees. Like many weightlifters, I have regular knee tendonitis, which essentially means I have achy knees. It turns out that muscle stretches more than tendons (tendons are what connect your muscle to your bones). Because of this, you have to train them in different ways. If you move too fast with a lot of weight (which is what weightlifting is, and that’s why many struggle with joint pain), the tendon can’t keep up like the muscle, and that causes pain and eventually degradation of the tendon.

Growth Happens By Carrying a Load

What do you do in such a situation? Well, it turns out that you can make your tendons stronger the same way you make everything else stronger: by putting tension on it. You do this by either doing really slow squats, or by doing isometrics where you hold a certain position, like a wall squat.