Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
You can't outscience hard training
The more into the weeds people get, the less hard they tend to train, based on one scientist's own observation. PhD bodybuilder Mike Israel put it this way: you can't outscience hard training.
Part of what hard training builds is confidence, from doing something difficult and seeing a payoff at the end. Confidence has no hack to read about. It comes from getting in the arena, which can be a sport or a PhD, anything hard where you put yourself out there with a goal and go for it.
Why do confidence and difficulty go together?
The psychologist Albert Bandura developed the idea of self-efficacy, a person's belief in their own ability to succeed at a task. He identified mastery experiences, meaning actual successes at hard things, as the strongest source of that belief. Watching others succeed and encouragement from others rank below it. Confidence built this way attaches to the specific kind of challenge that was overcome.
Why does harder training drive more muscle growth?
Muscle grows in response to demands beyond what it is used to, with mechanical tension on the fibers as a primary driver. Training close to failure recruits high-threshold motor units, which control the fibers with the greatest growth potential. Meta-analyses by Brad Schoenfeld and colleagues have found similar growth across a wide range of loads when sets are taken near failure.
More from Andrew Huberman
