Working out is a core part of who I am and what I do. I’ve done some version of almost every workout you can imagine, and I’ve worked out all over the world. I recently spent an evening boxing with a bunch of teenagers in Belgium, and I’m delighted to say I was pulled to the front of the class! (That showed them. Actually, I’m pretty sure they didn’t care, but I was extremely impressed with myself.)

So when I was asked recently to recall my favorite workout ever, I took the question very, very seriously. But it didn’t take long for me to come up with the answer.

I could actually visualize the day, the performance boot camp, at a training studio near my home.

I could see in my mind’s eye the instructor, a physical therapist with a buzz cut, military straight posture, and a mischievous grin that spread across his face as he stood before the ten of us participants and announced the theme of the day’s workout:

“The Construction and Destruction of Civilization.”

“Oh boy,” I whispered under my breath, with equal parts excitement and concern.

The instructor, Brian, briefed us on each station of the circuit as he walked around the former bank parking lot that had been retrofitted with monkey bars, 30 pound sandbags, kettlebells and a tractor tire. “At station one,” he said, “you’ll haul each of these sandbags up this set of stairs. At station two, you’ll continue ‘construction’ by doing the Turkish getup with the kettlebell,” he went on, referring to a crowd-pleasing exercise in which a single repetition involves 13 or 14 steps, depending on who you ask.

“Then, you’ll cross the timeline of history on the monkey bars, at the next station. And at station four, you’ll continue that journey by doing walking lunges with the kettlebell weight of your choice. You following me, guys? Great! The next station will be a run from here to the rainbow sherbet colored house at the end of the block and back. And then the final two stations will destroy civilization, with sledgehammer swings to the tire, first on the right side, then on the left.”

“Hey Brian,” I shouted out, trying to figure out which mental strategy I’d need to use to do my best on this drill, “how long will we spend at each station?”

“That’s the best part!” he replied, eyes gleaming. “These stations are not for time. The person who runs to the rainbow sherbet house is your time limiting factor. Everyone else will keep doing what they’re doing until that person runs down and back.”

At this, a murmur passed through our ranks – a former college track star, a current pro basketball player, two zero bodyfat soccer Mom types, a couple recovering Crossfitters and me, a marketing consultant – as we gave each other looks of encouragement and, well, threat.

The Power of Understanding Your Limiting Factor

Now, you might not be familiar with the concept of a “limiting factor”, so let’s pause here for just a moment. In any scientific discipline, the limiting factor is the single variable that most limits, slows or constrains an organism’s growth or a system’s other activities. For example, until the Agricultural Revolution, food was the limiting factor on human population growth.

You can think of the limiting factor as that thing which most constrains or slows something down. So in our boot camp, the rate of that one person’s run would keep everyone else climbing the stairs, lunging, or swinging the sledgehammer until they made it to the sherbet house and back. The runner’s pace, then, would be the limiting factor for the time each station would last, for all of us.

At a glance, it seems like the limiting factor of any system would be its weakness, its most vulnerable point. But the truth is that there is great strength hidden within the knowledge of any system’s limiting factor. If you can pinpoint the limiting factor of any system, then you can focus on understanding and solving for that constraint, unlocking or expanding it.

If you want to increase the capacity of any organism, system, business or even person to grow, you must find its limiting factor and unconstrain it. Therein lies the key to unlimiting anything.

The challenge is that the more moving parts there are to a system, the less obvious it is which of them is the true limiting factor. The easier it is to get distracted and focus on the wrong thing.

For example, on that Construction/Destruction boot camp course, most people assumed that the speed of the runner was the limiting factor, and that there’s not much any of us could change about that. But I’d worked out with Brian many times, and I knew better. Just the preceding week, in fact, we non-runners had worked ourselves to exhaustion waiting on a newbie boot camper who, it turned out, had run to the wrong house: a house a mile away, vs. the quarter-mile distance to and from the legitimate sherbet house.

So that day, I pulled out my secret weapon and shared it with my colleagues: the street number of the house we were supposed to be running to and from.

Understand the true limiting factor of a system, and you can un-limit anything.

The more I grow and experience in this life, the more I choose to invest my time, money and energy into things that remove limiting factors off my life, myself as a person, my companies, my finances, my skills and my relationships. Find the limitation, remove it. Find it, remove it.

Doing this systematically, over and over again, increases our capacity for life, for living, for fulfillment and for joy. It creates growth and expands possibilities. If and when you do it right, this becomes a game. It’s still hard, but this is a fun way to grow, because you’re not so fixated on a specific factual outcome. Building capacity and removing limits becomes the sport of the day. It’s not hard and cranky and struggle and grindy. The name of the game is remove limits, increase capacity and see what’s next, then make that the sport of the day.

The thing is, you have to make sure you’re focused on the true limiting factors. A lot of times we think our limitations are our circumstances: the boss that won’t pay us what we deserve, our bills, our lack of savings, our medical condition, or the fact that we have kids or an underwater house that keeps us in a place we’d rather not be. I’ve found that our circumstances are almost never our true limiting factors. Our real limitations are most often our outlook, skills,  mindset, or inability to tune in, with clarity, to what we’re really here to do.

At times I’ve focused on healing my emotional wounds, because I saw the fact that I was often triggered and tended to isolate myself as my biggest limits. Once, I had to focus on my claustrophobia, as it was stopping me from doing things in my life I wanted and needed to do. At other times, I’ve focused on consistency as the limiting factor I needed to remove. I’ve working on eliminating relationship patterns like not asking for what I need, being overly self-reliant or trying to save the world, when they were limiting my love and ease and joy.

Other times, my limiting factor has been much more concrete: my foot speed, my ability to get a full night’s sleep, or my acid reflux. Focus on it, remove and release it. Move right on along.

Sometimes I’ve worked on my strategy skills, or on the way I communicate or on thickening my skin to some things and becoming more transparent about others. I find that the limiting factors tend to show up in the form of themes in the feedback that I hear from others or the things I want to do or build that don’t work, over and over again, until I opt-out of that limiting factor. And sometimes that opt-out is instant. Other times, it takes years.

You know by now that I see my two dogs as my teachers. I’ll close with a lesson I learned from them years ago, when they were tiny baby puppies, small enough to hold them both in my two palms. I got the girls when they were six weeks old and had them potty trained in another two weeks, after an intense program I’d cobbled together from my online research. As soon as they ate, they went outside, and didn’t come back in until I’d counted two #1s and two #2s.

I noticed that when the girls started walking about in little manic circles, it was a sign they needed to and were about to go #2. This was a life lesson to me: when you get stuck or feel like you’re going around in circles, it might be time to eliminate something. In my experience, what you’re ready to eliminate in those stuck-circling times is often your limiting factor. Have fun!