How to Build Confidence with Weight Training

Today we have a very important topic to discuss, one that is very close to my own initial motivations for beginning weight training and that is how do we build confidence with weight training.

First off, what is confidence? Confidence is the probable certainty of a positive outcome of a specific endeavor that has been determined thru repeated practice and experience. An example would be a willingness or confidence if you will, to take repeated 3 point shots in a basketball game. This readiness to take a higher risk shot is reinforced by one’s previous experience with making 3 point shots. Confidence comes from experience. The difference between confidence and arrogance is that confidence is reinforced by experience where as arrogance is an unrealistic display of confidence.

Weight training is a very good way to begin to build confidence but it must be understood properly and taken into context. Weight training will make you stronger, it will make you more muscular which in our society is a desirable trait to many people in addition to having practical benefits such as protection from injury, weight training shows the value of using incremental increases to drive improvement which is an important lesson that is valuable in many other areas of your life. What weight training will not do on it’s own is make you better at talking to girls, or independent of specific practice make you better at sport skills. It will not improve the way you dress, or your facial structure (other then making you lose fat from your face which can actually help your looks tremendously.)

The two biggest benefits from weight training are 1. All the physical muscle and strength related changes to your body, and the creation of an appreciation for fitness that will stay with you and improve your quality of life in the future, and 2. The confidence that comes from setting goals and doing the work to achieve them and creating a habit of that.

I first decided to get into weight lifting to impress a girl i had a crush on. I was 13 and a very small and nerdy guy, at least to conventional high school kids. I got picked on a lot and was too small and scrawny to attract this girl’s attention who was accustomed to hanging out with the athletic football and baseball guys who were older. This was my initial motivation for picking up the weights.

Within a year the changes to my physique dramatically improved how people looked at me. I was attracting the looks of more girls and I was becoming less and less a target for older kids to pick on. This increase in size and strength pushed me into high school wrestling where my new love of weight training helped me greatly and as my strength and size increased and my wrestling got better and better my confidence grew more and more. This increase in confidence spilled over into my BMX riding as well because my experience with changing my physique and increasing my strength encouraged me to push the limits on my bike more and more. The increase in my resilience to injury and my ability to rapidly recover from injuries further helped build my confidence in BMX to a point where I was able to overcome extreme fear fairly easily. Overall i was getting much more confident in a variety of areas in a large part due to the lasting effects of my passion for weight training. Oddly enough my initial motivation of wanting to impress someone else quickly faded away as a significant external motivator. As I got bigger and stronger my weight lifting goals became more and more focused on benefiting myself and less and less as a means to impress or gain approval from others. This is a healthy step in the road to confidence as it is causing you to accept yourself as having more and more value and you begin to realize that your value is not dependent upon the approval of other people.

Fast forward a few years and I am now 31, and my confidence in many areas has increased dramatically. It’s not to say that I am confident in everything I do all the time, no one is but I am very confident in a lot of situations where I can relate the experience somewhat to my weight training. I’m not the strongest guy in my gym, by a huge amount, or the biggest, or the most ripped, or smartest but I can walk into my gym or any gym anywhere and hold my head high among the best because I know that i have the ability to achieve goals in this aspect of my life. Being confident doesn’t mean you think you are the best, it just means that you act and know that thru experience that you have a high probability of a successful outcome in a given endeavor. I could walk into Westside Barbell tomorrow, home of the strongest powerlifters in the country and be confident, confident that I can learn from these guys, confident that I have some experience that can add to the discussion, confident that I can endure being the weakest guy in the room and still not let that diminish my own value.

An aspect of confidence that is rarely discussed is the ability to accept your failures and short comings and re position them into a positive vehicle to help achieve the results you want. I made a lot of mistakes during the years I’ve been lifting weights, lots of mistakes. These mistakes have allowed me to make positive changes so as to avoid them in the future and it has shown that I can still make progress despite not being perfect, or the smartest, strongest, or whatever.

Enough about me, now on to you, here are some ways that you can build your confidence thru weight training. Obviously you need to start weight training, that should be your first step. I would encourage you to use a simple beginner plan focused around the main compound lifts, and the Olympic style lifts, good examples of plans like this are Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength plan, or Bill Starr’s 5×5 of which more info can be found in his book “the Strongest Shall Survive, Strength Training for Football.” A plan that is good for beginners that is more similar to what I used in high school would be Jim Wendler’s 531 program. I have included links to where you can obtain these resources and these are not affiliate links and I am not associated with these people or their products in any way, this is strictly for your benefit.

If you try programs like this and stick to them and be patient and dedicated then you will see results very fast. The good thing about a beginner linear progression plan like these is that you’re going to be making improvements during every workout, you will actually be able to see more and more plates going onto the bar each week and this will begin to show you that by using manageable, incremental increases that you can make significant changes to your physique and your strength and this lesson is applicable in many other areas of your life as well.

Ultimately weight training will teach you that hard work and dedication will take you farther then you can imagine, and as you accomplish more and more goals in this manner it will make you less fearful of striving for new goals in the future, that kids, is confidence.