The Mind Body Project
The Mind Body Project
MM Ep 23: The Heaviness of Life
The word heavy gets tossed around like it comes with a universal number, but our bodies and our lives don’t work that way. We break down why five pounds can be crushing for one person and a warm-up for another, and how that same relativity shows up in the stressors we carry outside the gym. When we drop the obsession with numbers and tune into feel—breath, position, control—we build strength that actually transfers to real life.
I share why I often hide the weight label when coaching and what changes when people judge the load by experience instead of expectation. We talk through the progression that turns an old heavy into today’s comfortable, the role of clean technique and patient increments, and the mindset shift from proving to improving. Then we map that concept to everyday challenges: finances, tough talks, new roles, and the invisible burdens that don’t show up on a scoreboard. Your heavy is valid, mine is too, and both deserve skillful handling.
You’ll leave with a practical lens for resilience: stress plus recovery equals adaptation. That means choosing loads that are challenging but safe, spotting each other without judgment, and honoring the season you’re in. Over time, capacity expands. The breath steadies under pressure. The next rep becomes possible. If you’re ready to stop chasing arbitrary numbers and start building strength that sticks—physically and mentally—this conversation will meet you where you are and help you move forward.
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Welcome back to a mindful moment. How heavy is five pounds? How heavy is ten pounds? How heavy is a hundred pounds? Would somebody think that five pounds was heavy? Would somebody think that a hundred pounds is heavy? When we say heavy, I always like to say heavy is heavy. So five pounds to somebody might be really heavy. Yet a hundred pounds to somebody else might be really heavy. And the five might be light. So when we say it's heavy, we don't know a number. All we know is what heavy means. It means it's hard to maybe move, hard to push, hard to whatever it's hard. It's it weighs a lot. It's it's heavy on us. It's it's a challenge, it's a struggle. So whether somebody says this weight's heavy, if we're lifting weights, that could mean 100 pounds, that could mean 20 pounds, that could mean five pounds, that could mean mean two pounds. It all depends on the weight. A lot of times when I'm training clients, I just hand them the weight. I don't tell them what how much weight we're lifting. Because a lot of times the the number is irrelevant. We just use the number to decide, okay, this is what I did last time. If I'm lifting weights, I'm going to use that number again. When really what if, and sometimes we go, oh, I want to lift more. So we look at the weight, we want to increase the weight. But what if we just went on, wow, this feels a lot heavier, this feels good. We would choose things a little differently. But in regards to heavy is heavy, if somebody's only lifting five pounds and we can lift 75, well, I can't believe that's all they can do. But to them, that is heavy. Same as to us, 75 pounds is heavy. The same is true in life. There are things that we come in contact with, things that happen in our lives. And for us in our life, that's heavy. That's some heavy stuff we're dealing with. Those are some heavy things that we're having to deal with. When someone else might look at our life and go, I can't believe they're stressing about that. I can't believe, you know, they're making a big deal about that. That's nothing. But to that person, there's other things that we might not think is heavy, but to us, that's heavy. And we have to remember that when we're, and again, it's it's not really, we can't really judge because we don't know what heavy is to that person. And and something that may be really heavy to somebody else, we have may have just like we can lift five pounds, might have seemed heavy, and then we lift 10 pounds, then we lift 15, and then 20. So now our new heavy is 25 or 30 pounds. Whereas when we started first started, it's five pounds. Same thing is true with things our life. These little problems, these little things that come up in our life could have been a huge heavy weight. But as we as we accomplished that, we went got through it, and it we realized that things got better on the other side, and then something a little bit bigger, a little bit heavier came along. We got through that. It got a little better. We realized there was sunny days on the other side of that, and the next thing was a little bigger, a little heavier. And so we progress through life with our heaviness based on our experiences with the weight of our life. So I encourage you to have understanding with others that heavy to you, heavy to me is the same. Heavy is heavy. It doesn't matter the weight, just like it doesn't matter the situation, the condition, whatever's going on in our lives, my heavy may look dramatically different than your heavy. But our heavies are the same. Our challenges and getting over them are the same. Heavy is heavy. So just remember that as you go through life, that getting stronger means lifting heavier weight. So getting better at overcoming means that you're gonna have things that are gonna be a struggle and that you have to get better at getting over. To get stronger, we don't do that without getting heavier and heavier weights, heavier and heavier burdens, heavier and heavier circumstances in our life. We don't get better, we don't get stronger without our heavy. Thanks for joining me on this week's mindful moment. I look forward to seeing you right here next time on Mindful Moments.