My nerdism ahoy! The “true form” trope is so rampant in all things nerdy, but primarily so in video games and anime, areas of which, I’m sure, my regular readers are not at all shocked to discover I am intimately familiar with. I want to first lament that I ended that previous sentence with a preposition, but ALSO educate some of my less cultured readers who spent their high school years being social vs catching up on the latest DragonBallZ episode or spending 14 consecutive hours binging Final Fantasy 7. The “true form” trope is the notion that, whenever the good guys encounter a major level bad guy (most typically the ultimate bad guy/boss/villain), the party soundly gets their butts kicked for a good majority of the fight, only to finally start eeking out and earning the upper hand. Things start to look promising, but then the bad guy begins to chuckle. Then, much to the horror of the heroes, the bad guy reveals “this isn’t even my TRUE form”, before suddenly undergoing a physical transformation and becoming even more menacing and powerful. The implication is easily understood: the good guys are f**ked. They could BARELY squeak by while the bad guy was holding back and fighting them in some sort of lesser state, and NOW here we are at the true form: what’re we going to do now?



Yeah that's about right

That long introduction above paves the way for the discussion today: you need to have your own “true form”, and the way this is done is by NOT finding your max in your training. It is no secret that I am very much an advocate of “build strength, don’t test it” when it comes to training, and there are many reasons why. The first being the physical benefits of such practices. Trainees understand that maxing is tough. It’s taxing on your recovery system. This is why people tend to take breaks after competitions, as they need to give their bodies a chance to recover. Well, if you’re maxing in training, you’re taxing your recovery in training, which means you also have to spend more time recovering: time that COULD be spent training instead. It’s an opportunity cost, and really, the benefits that come from maxing in training are incredibly minor compared to the consequences. If your goal is to BE big and strong, you don’t need to test it when you train: you need to build it. Save the testing for the competition.





However, that’s all far too mundane and average compared to what I really wish to discuss: the PSYCHOLOGICAL benefit to avoiding maxing in training, and the real notion of the “true form”. Going back to the trope in anime and videogames, the real frightening aspect of the whole “this isn’t my true form” rhetoric is the fear of the unknown and its implication. While the good guys fight the bad guy, they have a sense of the power the bad guy has. Even if that very power is crushing them, it’s still finite, defined, quantifiable and understood. If it’s a videogame, you see the damage on the screen. If it’s an anime, you see how hard they get hit. But once the declaration of “this isn’t my true form” is made, suddenly, the fear comes back. Just how powerful IS the bad guy? How much strength are they hiding? What is their REAL capability?



That moment when you're the X-men and you find out the goddamn Juggernuat has been holding back...



YOU possess this same capacity for fear OF yourself: you just have to not RUIN it by testing in your training. As soon as you test yourself in training, you FIND your limits, and now that you know them, you, in turn, limit YOURSELF. That was a lot of capslock: I apologize. But seriously, if you set yourself up optimally one training day, eat the right meal, do the right warm up, wear the right clothes, use the right equipment, hit the right peak leading up to it, and then smash a PR, you get that brief feeling of elation…and then then sudden sinking feeling of realizing that you’ve just discovered your potential. That is it. That is ALL you are capable of doing. You can squat 500lbs, so now you know, if the situation requires a 501lb squat, you can’t do it. You know your true form now, and suddenly the fear of yourself is gone.





But if you keep your true form hidden from yourself? Then that fear of the unknown will always remain and, in turn, your ability to surprise even yourself exists. Suddenly, when the situation arises where you need to really dig in deep, you’ll have no idea where your limits are, which means you approach the situation with the prospect of victory looming. Rather than a literal 0% chance of success, there exists the possibility of success based off the fact that no one, not even yourself, really knows what you are capable of. And you may in fact surpass even your own abilities in this absence of knowledge of your true self. You may, in fact, be something greater than you are.



You never know until you try...

Keeping your true self hidden is an easy task. Don’t max in training. Learn how to train under fatigue. Don’t fully recover between sets. Train supersets and giant sets. Train back to back to back. Train off little food and little sleep. Etc, etc. Always push yourself as hard as you can at that MOMENT: not as hard as your max potential allows for. When you do this, you continue to get stronger, no question, but you never discover just what you are capable of. That only gets discovered when the time is right, when the good guys have suddenly gotten the upperhand and the time has come for you to transform and show your true self.



