I'm Gretchen Rubin, and this is a little happier. An idiosyncratic thing about my family is that we all do high

intensity weight training. I was the first to try it, and then my mother-in-law started,

then my husband Jamie, my sister Elizabeth, my parents, and my father-in-law. We've all been doing it for well more than a

decade very consistently. In fact, not long before he died, my father's poor performance during

a weight training session was one of the first signs that his health had taken a sharp turn

for the worse. I've also convinced about 50 of my friends to do it.

I am such a fan of this highly efficient, effective form of exercise. So anyway, we're a little bit

bonkers about weight training and in my family. So maybe it's understandable that we'd push our

daughters, Eliza and Eleanor to do it too. We wanted Eleanor to start doing it when she was just

eight years old. Don't worry. We made sure that she did it in a way that was safe for a young child.

Back then, as I was explaining to Eleanor what this kind of exercise was

and why we all did it and why we wanted her to do it, she said something that I never forgot.

She wasn't very enthusiastic about the prospect, especially when I described the main feature of this kind of training.

You lift a very heavy weight, one at the outer limit of your capacity, and do repetitions until you can't do any more, which is about 8 to 15 repetitions.

This approach is called working to failure, and it's very challenging.

She listened to me.

Then she said in a resigned, self-encouraging, eight-year-old way,

it will be hard, but after a while, it will get easier.

And I had to say to her, no, honey, it's always as hard as it can possibly be.

The point of this kind of exercise is it never gets easier.

But you get stronger.

And I've realized that many things in life are this way.

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