Ever since my diet began a couple months ago, my strength has dropped approximately 5% to 10% on all my lifts. My motivation has also tanked by a good 60% from being in a 500 calorie per day deficit compared to surplus pretty much all year. Last weekend at the gym, I was doing Incline Bench Press and I always monitor my gym notes for every lift. I look both at the recent trends (the past 2-3 performances of that lift) as well as all-time-highs.

My 1RM is 185lbs (84kg) and my 10RM is a tiny bit more than 135lbs (61kg), both occurring about 3 months ago. But for the last couple months, this particular lift has dropped the most and even getting 4 reps is the least I can always count on, and the reps are always "grindy" which I always chalked up to it being a heavier lift, that the 60% drop in motivation would therefore affect it more than a lighter weight exercise such as Lateral Raises or Forearm Curls. Then last weekend out of nowhere, I had an "outlier" set on my 2nd set of Incline Bench Press where the weight felt extremely easy, when doing 135lbs. I was able to get 8 smooth, clean reps with at least 3RIR which I immediately noted as paradoxical and set 3 reminders on my phone to investigate further. (I have learned that if I don't note the paradox at the gym immediately when it happens, my brain will tell me the next day I must have loaded the barbell wrong or counted the reps incorrectly or some other cognitive process where a person makes up a logical-sounding reason to justify or dismiss a decision, behavior, or observation after they have already decided or observed something) My favorite Veritasium youtube video of all time calls this phenomenon "cognitive ease" whereby our brains are lazy by default and our brain would rather preserve our preexisting narrative of reality and dismiss outliers or contradictory facts than to have to change our narrative of reality by even a tiny fraction of 1%.

So the next day, 3 alarms spaced a few hours apart (in case I ignored the first 2) forced me to re-acknowledge and re-accept what had happened and I began investigating it through a different lens. I reframed my question as follows:

Given the fact that it absolutely 100% happened, what are the top 3 explanations which make the most sense?

Obviously anyone with more than a year or two of weightlifting experience knows that beginners do exercises incorrectly and (spoilers, obviously) that is exactly what happened. Earlier this year when I was "climbing through the beginner ranks" and swiftly moving up on all my lifts as per "beginner gains" entitles me to, I would actually bring a youtube playlist that had 3 different videos for every planned exercise at the gym. I would search (at home) how to for example and I would watch it before and immediately after my first working set, for ALL my exercises. So when I went to the gym yesterday, I had watched close to 20 videos on form cues with Scott Herman's videos being the most helpful:

Another thing I did before the gym yesterday was I practiced several times throughout the morning a relatively unfamiliar form cue (called "packing your shoulders") which itself is a combo of 2 form cues:

Pull your shoulder blades down → scapular depression (towards your pelvis)
Pull your shoulder blades back/together → scapular retraction (toward your spine)

So basically yesterday, I learned that somehow if you use 1 new form cue that "absorbs" 2 different form cues, your mind somehow makes it easier and compiles all that information into a single concept. In other words, remembering to do 2 separate form cues is infinitely harder (for a beginner at least) than to merge the 2 separate form cues into a single composite form cue, and focus on doing that new composite form cue instead. Somehow it is indeed possible to trick your brain into thinking 1 + 1 = 1.

Am I the only person fascinated by form cues and believe they make no sense from a purely theoretical perspective? I am very appreciative that there are dozens/hundreds of knowledgeable youtubers with great advice that I personally would automatically dismiss if I heard it from a personal trainer or from a gym-bro because my worldview automatically dismisses things which sound illogical. Have the other intermediate or advanced lifters go through the same discovery process as me after leaving the beginner phase of weightlifting? Or am I just over-thinking form cues and that they're really not all that interesting as a concept?