I don't buy the Agile part but I find it interesting that the part about pain and exercise has to be explained at all. I have a friend who used to talk about improving his physique. It was one of the hopes and frustrations that we shared chronically for fifteen years. Then one day I realized he hadn't said anything positive about exercise in... years! (Apparently I can be slow to recognize when an old friend changes something about him that's been the same since I met him twenty years ago.) So what's the deal, I asked him.
"Exercise hurts," he said. Well, yeah, I said. But that isn't really a strike against it, is it?
"How can you say that? Pain is unpleasant. When I exercise, it hurts, and I feel really bad." That doesn't make any sense, I said. I mean, it makes superficial sense, I said, but does it doesn't really work that way. It hurts, but it feels good. "Yeah, it does work that way. I've tried it plenty of times. It hurts, it makes me feel bad, it makes me miserable. It always made me miserable, but I figured I'd be better off if I could do it and live with being miserable. Now I'm married and [wife's name] doesn't care that I'm fat, so I'm done with it." (The part about his wife is true. They're both obese and revel in eating huge amounts of food together. Sometimes she tags him on Facebook when posting about "fourth meal," which means hitting a drive-through at midnight for burgers or fajitas.)
This is something you've always wanted to do, I said. You bought the P90x DVDs and yoga mat. It was just a few years ago when you bought the Chuck Norris Total Gym. You were already married then.
"Old habits die hard. I wanted to be tough enough to take the pain. Wishful thinking. Now I know it's okay that I'm not a badass." Badass? You think I'm a badass? You think everyone at the gym is a badass? "More of a badass than me."
That was it. I've brought up exercise a few times since then, and his story hasn't changed. I get that he legitimately finds exercise to be extremely unpleasant. I guess I get that my experience of exercise requires as much explanation as his. What I don't get is how we arrived at opposite ends of the spectrum and why his experiences with physical exertion didn't push him over to my way of experiencing it. Did he not work out hard enough? Did he not work out long enough? What was the missing ingredient that would have made him experience exercise the same way I do?
The important shift for me was developing a little humility and learning how to train at my own pace.
When I started running, I would try to go as fast as I thought I should be going. Which meant as fast as other people were going, or as fast as my high expectations for improvement told me I should be going. It was hard, it hurt a lot, and it wasn't fun at all.
Eventually I learned to pay attention to my actual (rather than desired) fitness level, what my recent training history actually looked like, and how my body was responding. That hurt a little, but was also very pleasurable once I got going, and the pleasure more than counterbalanced the pain. I also learned to distinguish different sorts of pain. For me the first mile is never very pleasant, but I know it's all getting-warmed-up pain. That's different that the you're-training-too-hard-and-its-time-to-stop pain.
Then, don't be arrogant about it. Don't say, "Hey, I want to run a race sooner, so I'll just skip 4 weeks ahead." If you are going to err, err on the side of gentleness. Start with week 1, and if that seems hard, just do week 1 again until it seems right. You are trying to develop a lifetime habit, so you have a lifetime to get this right.
Also, get a heart rate monitor. Set it to beep if you your heart rate gets too high. Ideally, get one that records data, so you can understand your workouts in context. If you are looking mainly forward, it's easy to get impatient. But if you have actual data showing what you ran the last month, it's easier to say, "Oh, I can see the improvement, so I'll try to do a little better next week."
I am almost like your friend in that I only enjoy the results of exercise. It's really, really difficult to make myself go through the pain for indefinite results at an indefinite time in the future, which means I go through cycles of exercising steadily for a few weeks or months (during which I see almost immediate and quite noticeable improvements) and then quitting once the improvements are not so immediate or noticeable.
I notice the same pattern in other areas of my life: when I played World of Warcraft, the first 15-20 levels were great fun, and I usually could convince myself to keep going to level 30 or so. Somewhere between 25 and 35 I'd stop playing. Later, they made it faster to level, and the sweet spot moved up to 45-60, and then it became faster still, and I managed to get a coupla characters to 80. I was still treating the actual game as something to get through to enjoy the leveling up experience, though, and if I couldn't expect to level up in this session of play, I would have very little interest in playing right now.
In programming, if I'm working on something I don't actively enjoy, I have to structure my work as a series of small victories, or I will put it off until time pressure forces me to grind through it all at once.
Regarding that specific case the issues of subjective and objective pain migh be a hint to a broader explanation.
I also know that different individuals will objectively feel pain in various degrees for the same stimuli(not sure about the spelling).
Time needed to restore the body to a "normal" or relaxed/replenished state after physicial activities isn't the same from one individual to another.
An another social theory also states that people tend to get fat/lean, give up smoking/etc., when most of their social connections do (even though they aren't in direct contact with them). Citation needed, will dig later after it but not sure if i can find it again.
I believe that there are physical and/or neurochemical properties that make this either true or false for specific individuals. I'm just like your friend: exercise doesn't make me feel good or give me any sort of endorphin high; it just makes me tired and sore. I do the minimum that I figure will keep me in reasonable shape (and yes, I've done more in the past), but I'd much rather spend my time either being productive or relaxing.
For what it's worth, I totally buy the Agile part. By the time I left my last company we were releasing circa 5x/day. We got there bit by bit, and often through applying "if it hurts, do it more".
Indeed, I learned the principle first professionally, and it was only later that I realized how many areas of my life it applied to.
Agile focuses on painful things with the goal of making them less painful. The blog post compares embracing the pain of exercise to the Agile practice of taking big painful jobs, like merging and releasing, and streamlining them so you can do them more often in smaller increments. The pain decreases because of automation, practice, and reduced change size. Basically, the complexity of tackling change scales more than linearly with the size of change, so splitting a large change into smaller changes means less pain if the constant factor of handling each change can be made small. From this perspective, Agile means tackling change in small chunks, and Agile practices are focused on reducing the constant factor. The end result is less pain for the same amount of forward progress.
The reason I don't buy the analogy is because embracing the pain of exercising doesn't reduce the pain and doesn't have anything to do with the size or frequency of workouts. It's entirely about perception. You know the pain is there, but your experience of the pain changes. It's like your brain learns the pattern exertion => accomplishment => pleasure and satisfaction and short-circuits the logic so that exertion is rewarded directly with pleasure and satisfaction. Or maybe it's endorphins. Whatever the explanation, pleasure is layered over the pain, but the pain remains underneath. It's still there, but it doesn't hurt. Or it hurts, but it feels good. I don't know how to describe it, but the physical sensation of pain is still there.
I disagree specifically, and also with your interpretation of his point.
Embracing the pain of exercise absolutely does reduce the pain. If you don't exercise for months, it hurts like hell to get started again. The natural reaction, especially for people who have never exercised, is to avoid the pain and stop. But if you are returning to exercise after, say, an illness, you will slowly work through the pain until your body responds. There is still some underlying pain, but it is much less for a person who's in shape.
But I don't think he's making the direct analogy you're seeing. I think his broad point is exactly what the title says, that one should lean into the pain in many aspects of life. Exercise and software development are just two examples of applying the principle.
"Exercise hurts," he said. Well, yeah, I said. But that isn't really a strike against it, is it?
"How can you say that? Pain is unpleasant. When I exercise, it hurts, and I feel really bad." That doesn't make any sense, I said. I mean, it makes superficial sense, I said, but does it doesn't really work that way. It hurts, but it feels good. "Yeah, it does work that way. I've tried it plenty of times. It hurts, it makes me feel bad, it makes me miserable. It always made me miserable, but I figured I'd be better off if I could do it and live with being miserable. Now I'm married and [wife's name] doesn't care that I'm fat, so I'm done with it." (The part about his wife is true. They're both obese and revel in eating huge amounts of food together. Sometimes she tags him on Facebook when posting about "fourth meal," which means hitting a drive-through at midnight for burgers or fajitas.)
This is something you've always wanted to do, I said. You bought the P90x DVDs and yoga mat. It was just a few years ago when you bought the Chuck Norris Total Gym. You were already married then.
"Old habits die hard. I wanted to be tough enough to take the pain. Wishful thinking. Now I know it's okay that I'm not a badass." Badass? You think I'm a badass? You think everyone at the gym is a badass? "More of a badass than me."
That was it. I've brought up exercise a few times since then, and his story hasn't changed. I get that he legitimately finds exercise to be extremely unpleasant. I guess I get that my experience of exercise requires as much explanation as his. What I don't get is how we arrived at opposite ends of the spectrum and why his experiences with physical exertion didn't push him over to my way of experiencing it. Did he not work out hard enough? Did he not work out long enough? What was the missing ingredient that would have made him experience exercise the same way I do?