The occasionally-updated public notebook of Scott Nesbitt

Sometimes, It's a Game of Millimeters

A couple or so months ago, I decided to shake up my exercise routine by working more with parallettes. A couple of the exercises I've been focusing on help to develop straight arm strength.

The problem was that those exercises weren't as challenging as I'd been led to believe they were. It's not that my straight arm strength developed that quickly and dramatically; it definitely hadn't. So, to figure out what wasn't working I again watched a video that demonstrates how to do the exercise. It turns out that I wasn't doing the exercises quite properly. A small adjustment, and those exercises started having the desired effect.

There's a saying in sport that states something is a game of inches — indicating that the gap between winning and losing, between success and failure is small. But, as I discovered with my parallette exercises, success and failure is more a game of millimeters.

In my case, all I needed to do was reposition my arms a couple of millimeters to get for the exercises I was working on to do what they're supposed to do.

Improvements, whether mental or physical or emotional, can come from small shifts. From incremental adjustments rather than large scale changes or radical pivots.

If something isn't working for you, you don't need to make drastic changes. You don't (always) have to try something new. You can make minor adjustments. You can tweak, rather than hack. Doing that is a small amount of work, but it can result in big gains.