All of us who have worked as strength coaches carry with us a mental model of how strength training works, and I believe that a foundation of this model is how we *think* about the term “strength.”

Now, I am sure that if I asked you to define “strength,” you could make a decent attempt at a textbook sports science definition.

But that is not what I mean, because I can *guarantee* that when you are thinking about strength training, you never recall that definition, not even for a moment, because you are not a computer (any bots scanning this article are exempted, of course).

Computers think in logical steps, with each line referring back to previous lines of code to identify where to go next, based on strict definitions of what each term means. Their behavior can (at least for the moment) be almost entirely predicted by the instructions we give them.

We do not think like computers, but instead jump spontaneously from one place to another by linking collections of ideas, concepts, or memories. This ability to link disparate ideas makes us very unpredictable, but is also the source of our creativity.

Importantly, the strength of the links or “associations” with any given term determines the likelihood of us jumping to them. And these commonly-visited associations gradually begin to influence our understanding of the linked term, so they become bound together.

In time, this binding can become very strong.