Physiological Variability.

My Exercise Physiology professor is made of awesome. I’ll share one concept he explained tonight. Let’s suppose you have a bunch of kids and you want to teach them to jump. So you have two people hold rope at a certain height, and have all the kids jump over it. Then they raise the height. If you touch the rope, you sit out. Professor happened to observe this once and rather obviously noted that those that were good at jumping were jumping more, whereas those that were not good at jumping were sitting out. It would be like giving a student good at math more math problems, while telling a bad math student, “You’re bad at math, sit in the corner!”

The solution is to hold the rope at a slant. You’ll observe kids gauging where they should jump, jumping, then moving over slightly to a higher level. Others will stay near the low end when it’s obvious they can do more. And others will constantly try to jump over the high end, failing but still striving. As he pointed out to his peers, you learn far more about the kids this way, and nobody sits out.

He obviously implied this as a metaphor for life in general. Some of us are more gifted than others and can jump higher. Some of us strive higher than we should. And some of us don’t strive high enough at all. Not really “deep and stuff” to me, I already know this. But I thought it was a cute story, so I wrote it out.