09 Dec How Learning Chinese Has Helped My Bodybuilding
By: Tucker Loken
I recently picked up some of my old language books to start looking them over again. After a few half hour sessions of vocab and grammar study, it made me reflect on my goal at hand now, and how I could translate my lessons from one to the other. Studying Chinese taught me humility, bodybuilding taught me discipline, and they both taught me persistence.
[wa-wps]
Embarking on a journey towards your passion has several different phases. The first phase is excitement, where you really throw yourself into it. You talk about it to all your friends and want attention for it because it’s cool. Once you get to the intermediate stage, you think you know more than you do (or think you know everything in my case). Progress isn’t as rapid and you have to fight a feeling of stagnation. This tests your patience and sense of self more than you bargained for, so it’s a good thing you were too dumb and cocky when you started to realize the process would suck sometimes. By the advanced stage you’re actually much better than you thought you ever would be, but have also realized just how little you actually know, and are comfortable with it, because you know the way it works for you, and how to improve your ability.
Chinese
In the East Asian Studies departments there’s a joke about studying Chinese – they call it the 6 year lesson in humility. I’m going on eight years and I’m still routinely humbled. Six years is basically the minimum if you’re a major, and usually includes four years of classes in the US, with at least 1-2 years living in China to get to a point where you can actually comfortably handle most things in the language. This doesn’t mean native level fluent by any means though. At this level one on one and group conversations are usually easy and fun, but you’ll still have to really focus while watching TV or movies, and reading the newspaper is still a big challenge.
I started studying Chinese when I was 18. I knew I wanted to be a business major, which later turned into accounting, and I wanted a skill set that would differentiate me from the other business majors around me. Software was one idea, but China’s economy was booming and it just seemed like a cool choice. If I was going to do something nerdy I’d rather spend my time talking than typing on a computer. I studied for a couple years in the states, studied abroad in China, came back to the US for a year, and applied for a scholarship from the Chinese government to go back and study intensively for a year. That would put me at the end of year five. My lesson in humility was almost up, or so I thought.
Before I left Shanghai, I passed a level 5 out of 6 possible levels on a government language exam which certified me as conversationally fluent in Chinese, and able to attend college level courses in China. Although I was pumped that I had gotten to that level, there were still plenty of situations I bumped into where I realized I had more to learn, and that would become a theme going forward. There will always be more to learn, but the key is understanding the process and not rushing things, because small changes over time amount to big changes by the end.
Bodybuilding
I had always been into bodybuilding and being big and strong. I grew up on Stallone and Schwarzenegger movies, and always liked playing sports. I started lifting weights and learning about bodybuilding seriously in early high school, and did my first few shows in late high school and early college. I didn’t feel like I could be consistent enough to do shows during college because of my desire to study abroad and have other experiences, but during that time I laid a good foundation by experimenting on myself with brief diets and bulks, and coaching other first time competitors do their first shows in a healthy and fulfilling way.
Bodybuilding has been a process in humility for me as well, and I’m going on year 10 now. I’ve found myself going back and forth between being intensely focused and then not committed enough. I struggled with that intermediate phase I talked about above, where you think you know so much, but the final goal is still so far away. Some days I just wanted to give up and do something else. I probably spent 4-5 years not really making much in the way of gains, because I didn’t have a lot of resources around me for help, and I was too stubborn and not committed enough to go in search for it.
Putting them together
One of the biggest differences between my success learning Chinese and my plateau in bodybuilding, was that I had a clear path laid out for myself with Chinese. The college route is a more or less straight forward experience – go to school, take the classes, learn the material, take the test, apply it in real life. If you can do that, you’ve done what you’re supposed to with education. Even then though, I found a way to make it difficult for myself, and I spent some time struggling with intermediate Chinese as well. I wasn’t putting enough time into doing the homework and the readings I was assigned and I was doing more talking with people out in the real world. Sounds logical and more practical, but you often won’t have deep conversations with people you just bump in to, so I needed a way to learn that subject material on my own so I could use it at some point. One weekend before a midterm I felt really behind in class, and kept myself in my dorm for several days studying as much as I could. I had a huge breakthrough, and being able to read things at my own pace, digest the material, and then use it on the assigned homework was huge, and I found that my ability increased dramatically over just a few days. TV programs were easier to understand, I sounded better when I spoke, reading and writing the characters seemed to flow much more naturally for me, and overall the language itself just slowed down.
Taking an educational approach in my weight lifting was the missing piece. There aren’t any institutions of higher learning devoted to churning out bodybuilders, and access to information is much more difficult to find, especially years ago before YouTube, Instagram and fitness experts became so mainstream. There’s all this vagueness in the world of fitness as to how different people got to their level of success, but for me I had to find a clear-cut road I could follow, and it all began with the search for knowledge, just like my road to learning Chinese did.
That search was what lead me towards powerlifting and working with Brian and the 10/20/Life program. I wanted to be a better teacher and coach to people I trained, so I knew I needed a greater base of knowledge on not only how to do the big 3 lifts, but how to understand the body from a different perspective and make people not only lean, but strong too. Finding a good teacher and finally seeing the road in front of me was what ultimately brought me back to bodybuilding. I saw the path – find a reputable coach, do what they say, build a foundation, compete, go back and work on weak points, compete again and the more you put in the more you’ll get out. I’ve had many teachers in Chinese, and now had many coaches in weight lifting, all adding to the knowledge I have on myself and the subject.
I had to drop the doubt and fear of failure that was in my head. I had felt that plenty of times with Chinese, when it seemed like no matter how much studying I did I still would walk out into a real world situation and stumble over the most basic conversation topics. I had to remind myself that over time, all those little improvements start to click, and then there you are, having a conversation about economics, politics, family values, historical and pop culture references… Or even just the massive ego stroke that comes from watching a TV show and laughing because you actually get the joke and understood everything they said. Once I put all that to the side, and instead of worrying about if I was indeed doing something right or wrong, and just being in the moment, each little error on my shitty deadlift started to click and I figured out what I was doing wrong. Each time the bench press would hurt my shoulders I would notice how I wasn’t tight in the right places, and I could correct it the next time. Over time those little improvements built up, and I was able to start having a fluent conversation with the weights and my body.
The point is, that I’ve seen myself struggle in two very different and difficult pursuits, and although the end goal seemed so insurmountable at one time, and the plateau was brutal to my self-confidence, once I figured out how to make it work for me, I began to find success rapidly. Half of the battle is just finding out how your mind and body work, and how to best learn information and technique for you to make improvements. It’s different for everyone, but after that it’s just a process of doing what works over and over again until you reach the goal you’re working towards.
It’s not just practice that makes perfect, it’s perfect practice that makes perfect. If you practice saying a word wrong the whole time, you won’t magically be understood, if you always diet wrong and screw up your prep you won’t suddenly come in huge and ripped, if you always squat with poor form, you’ll never have good form. The best way I can relate the two, is that they are both built on a foundation of knowledge, repetition, failure, hard work, and eventually success. That’s probably why you rarely meet arrogant people who are the at the top of their sport or career, because they’ve suffered the lesson of humility to get where they are. They had to put one foot in front of the other, stumble, fall, and decide whether it’s worth it to keep going.
I can tell you this – from all the ups and downs, it has always been worth going forward. If something is a dream and a passion, and if you truly care about it that much, you’ll find success no matter what.
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