The subject and the materials of this drawn diagram are issued from the first three episodes of the permanent project Drawing Restraint [3] and are employed to outline an «analogy for the creative process» [4]. Thanks to the principle of encumbrance, Barney establishes «a measure of artistic success that depends upon maximising the scale, quality, and quantity of the artistic activity he generated» [5].

The condition of hypertrophy corresponds to the proliferation of the connective tissue along with the satellite cells which surround the muscle fibres. This process, which increases the muscle’s connective tissue hardness, allows muscles to develop and grow. As Barney describes it, «the principle of resistance training is that you exhaust your muscles, effectively tearing them down, then resting for a period to allow those muscles to heal […]. I always imagined it as an ascending sine curve of growth and recovery» [6]. The fact that the muscle tissue depends on resistance in order to grow led Barney to think «how it might make a case for resistance as a prerequisite for creativity» [7].