Actually there is not much to the theory, I can probably fit it all into a 2nd reply.
Treat strength as a skill. Practice makes stronger.
Weight training is a deliberate stress to the body. It responds by overcompensating. You get stronger. Most people who are not juicing require a day off after a good session.
Free weights and body weight are safest and most effective. Pulley systems come second. There is no third.
Learn the big six full body compound moves and their dimensions. Deadlift is a lower body pull - weight is pulled towards you. Squat is a lower body push - you are pushing the weight up. Bench press is horizontal push, barbell row is horizontal pull. Standing press and pull-ups are the vertical push and pull. You will do these forever.
Injuries are rarely dramatic or instantaneous. Most injuries are in the joints and build gradually. They are caused by bad form. You spend your entire life improving form.
Bodybuilder moves are not strength training. Bicep Curtis and other isolation moves are of no use to us. Neither are high deep sets where you "feel the burn".
A personal trainer who is not a power lifter will never let you lift enough to get strong. A personal trainer who is a power lifter will get you injured - but not badly. I prefer the latter.
"Push through the pain" refers to the voice screaming in your head to quit. Push through that. Never push through physical pain in the muscles or joints.
Strength gains are gains in the musculo-skeletal system and the nervous system. Bones get stronger, muscles get stronger, and more connections are wired up from your brain to the muscle.
Very heavy lifts, that you can hit only one or two reps, drain your nervous system. It is restored by sleep. You will eventually get strong enough to lift enough weight to need 2 or 3 good nights sleep before lifting heavy again.
For much more on the beginner stuff, "starting strength" by Mark Rippetoe. The author is, in my opinion, a bit biased towards athletes so he offers a few opinions as facts. But these are harmless early in training.
After you've finished stronglifts 5x5 which will take a few months, buy "5/3/1" by Jim Wendler. IMHO the perfect training program, for a lifetime.
The website t-nation.com has surprisingly high quality considering it exists to sell useless dietary supplements. It's a "tips and tricks" site so you've got to read hundreds of articles before you can tell the wheat from the chaff.
Overall, everything you need to know is on the web. It's just that the signal to noise ratio is so freaking low. Learn to recognize the methods that are for "juicers" - the guys lifting better through chemistry. Stay away from those.
I think the problem is that the 15-17k pages of the Pali Canon are already hopelessly sectarian. You won't get ChatBuddha, you'll get ChatTheravada.
As an aside, this answers the oft-posed question: how could Ananda possibly have recited the entire canon after Master Gotama's death? Answer: there was a lot less of it then.
More useful is to discard the sectarian suttas, read the rest and do what they say. In my experience it is highly effective. When you realize you must be "a lamp unto yourself" then you're almost there.
The idea is don't tear down the fence until you know why it's there. But a fence across a road - it's so obviously wrong everybody wants to tear it down - not recognizing somebody with a good reason put it there. Big lesson when examining legacy code.
Then there is the Terry Pratchett version, when they move a big piece of furniture to reveal a door with a sign, "under no circumstances should this door ever be opened. " so they open the door and general madcap laughs ensue.
Group together as religions those systems of thought and their institutions that make specific truth claims about
1. Origins of the cosmos and, specifically, homo sapiens
2. Existence (or not) and nature of super-human sentient beings, their character and agency
3. What happens after death
4. Some root cause of all problems faced by individuals, tribes, nations, and humanity
5. Prescribed and proscribed behaviors that eliminate the root cause of problems
This description covers, to my knowledge, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, all in their many varieties.
Inasmuch as I have my own answers to these questions, then by my own definition I'm religious, though I am not backed by a state-spnsored institution :)
My path is best described as Buddhist, without reincarnation or supernatural "devas" that were syncretically added even as Sidhhata Gotoma's dead body was still warm.
My heart goes out to you. My story is similar. Everything in school came easy to me. Later in life I found myself outmatched by "lesser minds" who knew the value of consistent effort. I knew I lacked discipline, was envious of others whose parents had taught them this, but could not figure out what to do.
If and only if you are like me, the actual problem is that you have not mastered yourself. One who does not master himself is mastered by others. Mastery of oneself is the ability to make a wise decision and execute.
To get started, literally from scratch, I determined to commit to one decision professionally and another personally. Then later I would expand.
By the way, none of this involves delayed gratification. Self-mastery is immediately gratifying day by day and hour by hour as we see the small results. What people call delayed gratification I experience more as compound interest.
At work it was simple. I committed to watching closely those I admire (or envied). I studied their behavior carefully and practiced it myself. As Aristotle said, when you imitate a person's behavior, you gradually gain an internal understanding of it. Sometimes you even know why they do things better than they do, as you have come into it deliberately and with objectivity.
On the personal side I committed to pursue something fun that I enjoy - even past the easy and fun part. Deeper pleasure in something we enjoy become possible when we give up being the dilettante and seek to be the master.
Life is amazing, but anything worth doing requires sustained effort. Pick something that is worth the effort - to you - and master it.
I had a vacation home. They wanted to rent. Sent me two cashiers checks for 5000.00 requesting a wire transfer of remainder. I ghosted them and kept the checks as souvenirs.
There is a twist. They sent a dozen or so FedEx letters that somehow were billed to my address and shown to originate from my address. FedEx reversed the charges.
Physics IMHO. It's weight lifting for the mind, teaches you judgement, precision, and abstraction while insisting results be grounded in physical reality. What better skills for the acquisition of wisdom?
Get in some classical philosophy if you can, as Aristotle answered the question beneath your question - how does one become wise? One becomes wise by imitating the actions of a wise person.
Physics and Aristotle provide the escape from modern philosophy which emasculated itself with the phrase "normative statements cannot be derived from empirical observations". More commonly stated as "you cannot derive an ought from an is".
For me it all led to a study and practice of the oldest Buddhist material in the Pali Canon. This is quite different from the semi-digested pap offered up as "mindfulness" these days. Fascinating stuff, sharing the qualities listed above for Physics.
Serious answer: yes but it's not a change of personality. It's about recognizing fear and developing skills.
When I experienced this level of deep self doubt I emerged having learned a few things.
One, I'm not broken and don't need to be fixed. I'm more like some sloppy code that got rushed to production and could use some fixes. I do them one at a time to remove whatever blocker is hindering my happiness at the moment.
Two, I'm much happier when I do things I like. I took up oil painting because I wanted to. I painted a nude and hung it in my living room. I became a private pilot. Full in your own blanks.
Third and most importantly, I learned how to deal with racing thoughts. Racing thoughts feed on the energy we put into fighting them. If you fight them you feed them. Meditation was my method but it's tricky for us. We are told it relaxes you but when we try the racing thoughts give us an experience of failure. The trick is to stop fighting them and let them flow freely, while gently bringing your attention over and over to the meditation object (typically the breath). The first meditative state described in the oldest Buddhist texts "is accompanied by sustained and appplied thought". It's normal for everybody. Sooner or later you learn not to believe everything you think and freedom begins.
Injuries usually build gradually through many repetitions of bad form. While free weights can push joints into unhealthy stretches the bands are more likely to pull the joints into bad form. It requires a firm suppression of ego as regular discipline to avoid this.
Gaining some minimal muscle is likely possible with increasingly heavy bands, so long as the above caution about form is heeded.
In some database apps I can replace all conditionals with loops over sets. If the set is empty nothing happens. The same can be done in other situations which i prefer because it's really robust but it requires such a change in thinking that I don't require it of my team and have not thought about it in a long time.
Thanks for posting. I've been writing up my own experiences so the only thing I will put in here is that I don't consider these experiences mystical. They are mechanical. Push this button and get this effect.
I think the fifth jhana, the base of infinite space, is explained best in the novel Flatland when he visits Pointland. The point beings know nothing but their own existence and their thoughts radiate a continual blissful stream of relishing infinity and unity. I guess if you're a point in space that's how it would feel. The b-o-i-s is, IMHO, a perceptual illusion that occurs when you successfully exclude external sense data, focusing your attention completely on your own body and thoughts. You become for a time a resident of Pointland. It is quite pleasant, but the life changing stuff does not happen there.
Then you calculate your theoretical max for each lift on this site: https://strengthlevel.com/one-rep-max-calculator
Then plug those into 5/3/1. I can't say enough good things about 5/3/1 - it gives you an elegant and consistent approach to PRs.