I was doing a hangboard session the other day, all pumped up on Katy Perry and Skittles, when a friend texted me looking for some motivation. Amidst the tunnel vision I go into while training I had a comical insight on the nature of training that I had to share it with him. It was amusing enough (to us at least) that I thought I would turn it into this week’s post.

Training is like playing Final Fantasy II— boring as hell a lot of the time, but you have to earn Hit Points if you want to advance to the next level.

To prepare myself for this post, I immersed myself in Internet research on Role Playing Games to better understand how characters advance so that I could make this analogy work. My research consisted of reading the Final Fantasy II Wikipedia page.

Apparently there are different ways characters can advance. I had no idea.

In experience-based leveling, “characters start out fairly weak and untrained.” Tasks start easy, but as your experience develops, so will the difficulty of the tasks, and you slowly progress up through the levels. This is also how we work our way through the increasingly difficult grades in climbing.

But Final Fantasy is different. It uses an activity-based progression. This means that the skills that you use most often to defeat the challenges are the ones that develop (your strengths get stronger). This also makes sense. We all have different strengths and finger positions that we are more comfortable with, and ones that we avoid. We rely heavily on certain ones to defeat our projects, so they develop at a different rate than the ones we avoid.

In order to advance to the next level and defeat my projects I felt that I had to commit to my own activity-based progression in the area of finger strength, and so have committed to hangboard sessions. This is no different than going around FFII fighting monsters so you can get strong enough to beat the game.

It is likely that at some point your training program will feel repetitive, boring and tedious (just like Final Fantasy). So if you are going to stick with it, I recommend that you make a game out of it. You have to harness the same focus and intensity we had as teenagers, when we could spend hours and hours on role-playing video games.

Here’s the exciting part: we’re not spending hours improving some virtual avatar. This is real. We’re trying to improve ourselves. But just because it’s real, doesn’t mean that we can’t play, make it silly, and have a little fun with it. Because honestly, it doesn’t get any sillier than a grown man hanging from two-finger pockets in his garage with 30 pounds of dumb bells dangling between his legs so he looks like the elephant man.

At this point, I can’t think of a better way to pass the winter than nerding out and making a game out of training, measuring strength increases like Hit Points in a videogame and getting strong enough to crush.

Check out this awesome Ted Talk for more insight into the ways that games can make our real lives better.