Why body building changed how I work

What three years of bodybuilding taught me about stimulation, repair and how people and teams grow.

(Full disclosure, the banner above is not me, I'm middle aged and injure easily, I didn't get anywhere near that level of shred)

Those who don't know me very well, might be surprised to hear that from 2016-2019 I took up bodybuilding as a hobby. Now when I say bodybuilding, I wasn't planning to get on stage in a very small swimsuit and a spray tan, but I did fill my basement with torture equipment, followed various science backed training programs and drank all sorts of protein shakes. My goal was to become healthier and stronger than I'd ever been in my life; I'm confident that I met that goal. Last year I struggled with a few injuries and it's forced me to lower the weights and become much more realistic with my goals. I'm reaching an age where throwing around iron does have risks, and healing takes longer.

Now, you might ask how does building muscle relate to leading product engineering organizations?

If you want to grow muscles, you need to learn about Hypertrophy. This is how muscles get bigger, at its root is a very simple equation:

Stimulation + Repair = Growth

In any strength-based sport, stimulation comes from specific exercises that put strain on muscles under the ideal circumstances, not enough the muscle won't grow, too much you face fatigue or injury. The repair comes from specific rest, recover and feeding of the tissues (proteins, ammino acids, fluids).

Lifting Heavy Weights + Rest Days and Plenty of Protein = Muscles Grow

You become very aware of how much stimulation you need, it requires hard work, sometimes it hurts, but it shouldn't hurt too much. You become very in-tune with how much repair you need, rest and recovery become an active process not a passive one.

This same principle can also be equated to learning, personal development, growing as a person or a group of people.

Facing Challenging Situations + Taking time to learn from the challenge = You Personally Grow

If you encounter a situation that stretches your comfort and might result in some feeling of personal pain, as long as you apply the right level of recovery and learn from the pain, you will grow, you will become stronger.

Ray Dalio, hyper successful individual and author of an amazing book "Principles", documents this as one of his foundational principles.

The key to growth is ensuring BOTH sides of the equation occur and at the right levels.

If you don't stimulate enough, that is you don't put yourself in situations where you are pushing your abilities (heavier weights, more reps) you'll never grow. You'll stay the same.

More importantly, when you do put yourself in these situations if you do not recover from the situation you will also not grow. Recovery needs to be active, in personal growth it might be taking time to be introspective to learning from the situations that were challenging. In team growth, taking actionable outcomes from retrospectives, truly changing how the team operates to adapt to the new challenge you faced with make the team stronger. As an organization, we might generate root cause analysis for risks that materialized and presented the challenging stimulus, from those we could change processes to reduce the likelihood of it occurring again. All of these are the time taken after the stimulus to recover and grow. Below are some specific examples of opportunities to take pain and turn it into growth by embracing this learning culture:

Scrum Team Retrospectives

It’s one of the few scrum events that are the foundation of the process. It is however, often seen as an event with little teeth and teams go through the motions to just check the box, and there is no growth. If you are on a scrum team, you should bring at least one change or set of actions into the upcoming sprint as a story, plan it just like other scope, add tasks, add acceptance criteria, showcase the outcome and impact to the whole team, have pride in the growth you achieved from the pain.

Defect Root Cause Analysis, not just the code change, but the process change

Due to the nature of the impact, product teams tend to focus what needs to be done to directly resolve product defects (especially ones that progressed to higher environments). These are great opportunities to learn from that pain. As well as focusing on which piece of code needs to change to fix the issue, spend some time understanding what the team could do differently next time to ensure these types of issues won’t progress beyond dev. Ask yourselves the question “what could we do differently next time to ensure this never happens again”.

Managers, don’t make people/teams afraid of the pain, coach them to learn from it

Sometimes people or teams are so afraid of a possible management backlash from the pain (even if there isn’t one), that they want to make the pain go away as fast as possible, instead of embracing it and celebrating the opportunity to grow. As a manager, you pay a key role in focusing on what is learned from the pain then the pain itself. Celebrate individuals and teams who show they learn and change. Focus your support on the teams that seem to show patterns of pain with no obvious learning. Help to build that hypertrophic culture.

The three examples above all share a common theme. Unless you are already learning from the pain, it will feel hard, uncomfortable and will take effort. Just as with building strength or muscle, in personal growth there is a decision you need to make. You can choose the easy path or the hard one . The easy path means being the same person you were yesterday, or you take the harder path, you embrace the pain take time to recover and grow from it.

First posted on LinkedIn.