"beat ourself" would be taken literally here - real violence. You could use a word like "excel", or "improve" e.g. If you want to excel, a) work hard b) you must work hard In my experience, grammar books usually classify sentences like yours and mine (which use an imperative or some modal verbs) as variations on the first conditional. If it's a true zero conditional sentence, then you can replace "if" with "when"