Education as weightlifting

I’ve found that a surprising number of learning problems become easier to reason about if you translate them into the language of weightlifting.

Weightlifting has two properties that make it an unusually good metaphor:

progress is visible (you can lift more)
the feedback loop is immediate (the bar either moves, or it doesn’t)

Learning is obviously higher-dimensional than lifting a barbell. But some of the same principles show up: you get better when the challenge is calibrated to your current ability, when you can tell whether you’re making progress, and when you have enough support to keep going when you get stuck.

So here’s a thought experiment: take the way mainstream schooling works today, and run a weightlifting system that way. A lot of the failure modes that fall out are so obvious in weightlifting that it becomes hard to unsee the same structure in education.

The “factory model,” translated to a gym

Most schools operate (implicitly) like a factory:

students are grouped by age
the group moves through material at a uniform pace
there’s an expected standard at the end of the line
there are periodic evaluations, but the main control knob is still “keep moving”

Translate that into a gym.

Imagine we decide: “By the end of primary school, you should be able to deadlift 100kg.”

On day one, the whole cohort deadlifts 1kg. Then the curriculum ramps: 2kg, 3kg, 4kg… and so on. The important detail is that the plan is defined for the class, not for the individual. Every day, you show up and lift whatever today’s number is, because that’s what the schedule says.

If you’ve ever lifted, you can already see the problem.

Failure mode #1: the weight is too heavy

In weightlifting, if you hand someone a weight that’s simply too heavy—so heavy they can’t even break it off the floor—they don’t “learn from it.” They just fail, repeatedly.

There’s a range where challenge is productive:

hard enough to demand focus
uncomfortable in the “this is effort” sense
not so hard that the main experience is repeated failure

Push past that range and the experience changes. It stops being “this is hard but doable” and becomes “this is humiliating, scary, and pointless.” In a gym you might literally get injured. In a classroom, the injury is different, but it’s real: the student learns that learning feels bad.

After enough time in that mode, the discomfort generalizes. We go from “math is hard,” to "I am bad at math" to systematically avoiding the topic.

And just like lifting, once someone is far enough behind, the gap becomes structural. Today’s lift assumes you could do yesterday’s lift. Today’s concept assumes yesterday’s concept. The schedule doesn’t pause to rebuild your base; it keeps adding plates.

By the time we notice, we often respond with a late, heavy intervention: remedial tracks, extra support, special programs. That can help. But it’s also an admission that the person has been lifting weights that were wrong for them for a long time.

If you were coaching a lifter, you’d say the obvious thing: the intervention should have happened earlier, at the first signs that the weight was consistently not moving.

The compounding effect (why falling behind is so brutal)

The factory model creates a simple dynamic:

if you’re a little behind and you have a good stretch, you can catch up
if you’re a little behind and you don’t catch up quickly, you fall further behind

In weightlifting, “catching up” could mean a novice phase, a better program, better sleep, a technique cue that suddenly clicks. In education, it might be targeted practice on prerequisites, a different explanation, more time, a tutor, or just finally getting enough feedback to locate the misunderstanding.

But if that doesn’t happen, the system keeps escalating difficulty on schedule. The same student experiences more failure, which creates more avoidance, which reduces practice, which creates more failure. It compounds.

This isn’t about anyone being lazy. It’s the mechanical result of a uniform progression applied to a population with wildly different starting points and learning rates.

Failure mode #2: the weight is too light

The other obvious failure mode is the opposite: the weight is too light.

If you’re strong enough that today’s prescribed lift barely registers, the session stops feeling like training and starts feeling like time-wasting. You go from engaged effort to boredom.

And boredom isn’t neutral. It creates pressure to find stimulation somewhere else.

Here’s the part that’s personal for me: when I’ve been in this situation—both in the gym and in school—I eventually started blaming the teacher.

You know you can lift more. You can feel it in your body. But you’re told: “No, not yet. We’re doing 20kg today.”

In school it’s the same feeling: you can see the pattern, you can already do the exercises, you can predict what the next chapter will say, and you’re told to wait. After a while, it doesn’t just feel boring. It feels disrespectful. And then you respond with disrespect.

You stop listening. You test boundaries. You look for entertainment. Sometimes you become disruptive. Sometimes you become quietly cynical. Either way, you’re no longer training.

This also creates a social dynamic in the classroom: teachers are stuck enforcing the uniform pace, and the student experiences the teacher as the agent of that constraint—even if the teacher is doing their best inside the system.

Who does the factory model serve?

The people served best are the ones whose learning trajectory happens to match the pacing well enough, often enough.

But learning isn’t linear for most of us. It comes in bursts and plateaus. Sometimes you need a deload. Sometimes you need to rebuild technique. Sometimes something clicks and you jump ahead.

Weightlifting coaches know this. They adjust the plan to the lifter.

Which leads to the obvious conclusion.

The real constraint: calibration at scale

A good lifting program is, at its core, an ongoing calibration problem: set the difficulty for the lifter, not for the room.

The moment you can’t do that, predictable problems fall out:

some people get crushed and learn to avoid the activity
some people get bored and learn to disrespect the process
some people drift close enough to the median to look “fine,” but aren’t getting the best they could

The tragic part is that, in education, the causal mechanics are harder to see. In a gym, you can watch the bar speed slow down. You can see form break. You can see the rep fail. The signal is loud.

In a classroom, the signal is quiet. The “weight” is invisible. The task is multi-step. The failure might show up as silence, acting out, compliance, procrastination, or a wrong answer that hides a specific misconception.

And then we ask one teacher to do real-time calibration for 20+ students, across complex topics, while also managing the room, following a curriculum, and meeting standards.

If you translate that back to weightlifting, it’s absurd.

Which is why I think the metaphor is useful: it doesn’t just criticize school. It points at a concrete bottleneck—calibrating difficulty per student—and makes it easier to see how many “student problems” are really system dynamics.