Fitness Translates to Academic Success. My academic journey so far has been a continuous, strenuous grind in a particular direction, characterized by finding new perspectives on that grind each time I failed. Almost like squeezing water from a rock. You begin to learn that failure is part of the process, and the harder you work, the more it pays off when it counts—during tests and examinations, when your ability to apply the knowledge you’ve studied is truly assessed. Tips and tricks may help in the short term, but there’s no way to teach the grind.
Where did I learn this? Underneath a bar loaded with double mybodyweight, itcrash-landed onto my chest. I remember it like it was yesterday. Rugby preseason training. I was training with quite a large squad every other day, completing various lifts and targeting different muscle groups. It was gruelling. Intense. But we all had a common goal: to become the best rugby players we could be and earn a place on the 1st XV team—for the pride of our school .One Wednesday, I had written a maths test during the last two periods of the day. I wasn’t sure how the paper had gone, but I knew one thing for certain: I had no energy left for training. Still, I reluctantly dragged my feet to the gym and joined the team around the whiteboard to check out the program .Chest day. Not too shabby. My teammates—other adolescents like me—swarmed around the bench press like flies. Meanwhile, I was outside doing shoulder presses or some other exercise I didn’t feel like doing. Finally, a bench opened up. I partnered with someone and rotated between the bench press and another lift I wasn’t exactly thrilled about.
But we pushed through, and eventually, we loaded the bar with over 120kg.I sat under the bench, facing upward. Li scrambled out of my lungs as the bar pinned itself to my chest. Luckily, my trusty spotter lifted it back onto the rack and grunted, “More reps. Lower weight.”Suddenly, I learned that failure isn’t a setback—it’s an opportunity. An opportunity to do something different. To do more. Better. Faster. Take a break. Reassess. Reflect.Sometimes, you just need to do more reps.
