TL;DR
The author reflects on their fitness journey, highlighting lessons like evolving goals, respecting individual paths, and the power of consistent commitment. They stress the importance of adapting, avoiding comparisons, and showing up with intentionality in both fitness and life pursuits.
Sometime this year, it will be my fourth anniversary of having physical exercise as a significant part of my life - one year of calisthenics and three as a mini “gym bro”. Of course, there will be no festivities.
I have learned so many life lessons from my random reflections on exercise as an activity that I like to think are transferrable to other aspects of life. These lessons, unfortunately for the reader in search of novelty, are common.
So why restate the obvious?
I believe in the metaphysical experience of truth and its superiority over mere intellectual truth. By that I mean that there are two self-reinforcing dimensions of truth - the intellectual and the experiential - with the latter being unattainable through any objective study of reality. Consequently, I do not share these lessons with the hope that they are in and of themselves discoveries. I do so with the hope that by perceiving them as lived truths in an otherwise unexpected setting, you may seek such an interpretation of your own experiences and reach the strength of conviction about essential truths that will guide your life.
And so, without any further ado, let us get on to our lessons one by one!
One: What got you here won’t get you there.
One day in late 2019, I bowed to pressure from my mother and my curiosity to visit the health centre for my first blood pressure measurement. It was with a couple of friends, and we were all having fun as we gave way to each other until it was my turn. After seeing my measurements, the nurse asked my friends out of the room, closed the door, and what ensued was a gut-wrenching ten-minute lecture on how imperative it was that I change my lifestyle. It was such a pertinent wake-up call that the next day, I was jogging around the football field and cutting down on what was then a very unhealthy coke addiction. From running, I progressed to calisthenics and then to the gym. After some reasonable time and a considerable amount of work, as I got more healthy, I found it hard to stick to the things that made me healthy in the first place. Why did I have to be so intentional about my diet and spend so much time exercising when there was no emergency? I predictably slipped.
Luckily for me, around that same period, I started thinking hard about the fact that our philosophical zeitgeist, which often seems to have answers for about anything, did not particularly have a philosophy of the body, and I was lucky to stumble of Yukio Mishima’s Sun and Steel. What should we do with our bodies? What are they meant for? How best could we use, maintain, and appreciate them? Was “bodily” excellence worth pursuing, and how could we pursue it? Plato, in his Republic, provided answers that seemed appealing, but it was Mishima that stroke a cord, as I could see myself in his own experiences.
And so, under Mishima’s influence, I graduated from a mere attempt at health to the pursuit of a platonic ideal that equally values words and flesh and perceives the body as a vessel for transcending the intellectual and the material.
My backsliding was reversed; more so because of luck than a consequence of discipline. This re-commitment taught me my first lesson; sometimes maintaining the same goals along a path can lead to stagnation. Perhaps I am being prone to hindsight bias in my thinking, but I struggle to think that I should have continued my journey as a mini-gym bro if health was the only goal. I needed to shift the target to stay on the road.
It is often the case that every journey ends when we achieve its goal. What happens when out of compulsion or desire we have to stay on the same path even after achieving our goals? When staying alone is not sufficient and we have to be our best?
If we need to stay at our best at various stages of our journeys, we must recognise phase changes and reassess our motivations. Sometimes, we call it setting New Year’s goals. However, for most of life’s journeys, phases are not a simple function of the Gregorian calendar, and we must be attentive, reflective, and reactive enough to catch the wave, review our motivations and reorient ourselves to maintain our desired levels of engagements.
And sometimes, it is not only the big goal that needs to change for us to stay motivated - the immediate goals and daily motivation, too, can and sometimes must change. For example, in the early years of most gym-bro’s experience, growth is a weekly reality and each day you step into the gym your heart is in it for the games. And then the plateau comes; days and months and you are not seeing as much improvement as previously seen. One stays consistent for the most part to maintain as opposed to grow.
If these phases are not accompanied by a mental paradigm shift, it is very likely that one will relapse. So you need to … once more … be attentive, reflective, and reactive enough to catch the wave, review your motivations, and reorient yourselve to maintain your desired levels of engagements.
What got you there won’t keep you there! While it is not a terrible idea to start for the wrong reason - if any reason can be wrong - once we start any journey, we must start the painful process of self-discovery that culminates in clarity of purpose.
Two: To each his/her own
Our society has a culture of equality (even when it is impossible). Without trying to take a side on that great debate, let me be bold enough to say out of experience that in the gym there is only (sometimes) equality of opportunity but not of outcome.
Alright, not so complicated.
Think of it, everyone can walk up to the rack and stack plates as they please (assuming you didn’t have to stand in some eternal queue and no other bigger person bullies you out of using the rack). Stack as many plates as you please, but not everyone can do what anyone can do. And don’t be misguided, physical appearances and gender cannot functionally determine ability, only longevity and experience can.
Sometime along my journey, I frequented the same gym with a cool and naughty high-schooler. He was a teenager, and understandably, had a point to prove to everyone who was wiling to listen. One day, he walked into the gym with a taller, muscular friend of his. This friend was much taller and muscular than every gym-bro that was present on that day and so (going against my counsel to not judge by appearance), we assumed he was, well, a gym-bro. It turned out that this high-schooler of mine had tried to convince his friend that even though he was smaller and less muscular, he could beat him on the bench press. Well, his bigger-more-muscular friend fell into the same trap, looked at the physiques of whoever was doing the bench press and picked the weight he thought was due his size, and before we knew it we had to save a muscular man with dumbbells crashing into his face. It was such a scary experience that the gym receptionist immediately ordered both friends out for the day.
In the gym, as in life, everyone is on their own journey and while we have been trained to assess things in static or absolute mode, realising that things are a dynamic will save you a lot of envy and sometimes prevent dumbbells crashing into your face; literally and figuratively.
That guy who effortlessly benches 160kg (as I recently witnessed in awe) has been at the gym for over ten years and has watched his diet religiously. That guy who intimidates you with his size does not suddenly become an object of mockery when you figure out that the maximum weight he can squat is 30 kg. (Some times they are healing from a lower back injury and did not ask you to be intimidated).
If you are that pure strand of competitive person, you must be thinking in your mind, “Well, if I trained just as hard and ate carefully, which I will start doing today, I will be like that 160 kg guy.” Well, I am sorry to tell you; it is not as simple.
Consider, for example, that if you walked into any gym and observed critically, almost everyone who squats does so in their own way; with none being absolutely wrong (well, the ego-lifters are always close to such perfection), and none being absolutely right (the bullies always think they are). It turns out that subtle differences in the biology of people’s joints and childhood exercises can influence things such as squat depth and stance. Of course, there are fundamentals about technique and form that cut across. But for the specifics of squatting as of much of life, each of us is on our own and we must experience things for ourselves and pick our truth.
A good way to generalise this lesson is to say that one should strive to think in a dynamic as opposed to a static way; there are so many paths that could have lead anyone to where they are and there are just as many paths to take them to who-knows-where from where they are. For every thing you think you see, there is so much that you do not see and cannot see. Do not let the limitations of your eyes consume your heart with spite.
Three (Last One): Plan to always show up!
I put this in last place because only those who read up to this point deserve to hear this powerful lesson… Okay, just kidding, but seriously, always show up, and it starts with always planning to show up. I have been convinced that nothing has the power to change your life, like the simple practice of showing up. My experiences have taught me that the biggest rewards of showing up are conquering yourself and putting yourself in the path of serendipity.
They say that the heaviest weight at the gym is at the door, and they are right. Only, that is not really a weight in the manner that a dumbbell is a weight. You see, simply showing up is the weight, and it is the difference. I know that sounds very simplistic, but consider that one of the most significant drawbacks to showing up is the fact that you have to make that decision. I’ll explain.
It turns out that the nights on which I sleep with absolute certainty that I will go to the gym in the morning, I am more likely to do so even if the weight of the world is on my shoulders. But you see, even on those cozy Saturday mornings on which the day promises nothing and one has the freedom to have social media breakfast in bed with no guilt, if I had no plan to go to the gym it is ten times harder and more unlikely that I will go.
What you really want to do is to surrender the most important aspects of your life to auto-pilot. I meant it when I said the most important aspects, not all aspects. If your ability to pay rent depends on you showing up at the office everyday, you show up every day. While the fear of sleeping in your landlord’s backyard (assuming your house is not yet already in their backyard and that the backyard is large enough to accommodate a tent in case of eviction) can motivate you to get up and go even when it is raining cats and dogs, to the extent that you are making a decision, you are allowing variables and everything else that can happen to come in the way. So just plan to show up, and show up on auto-pilot. Remove one degree of freedom, and the ensemble is made slightly more stable (Sometimes slightly is all you need). Why did you come? Well, “I don’t know” is as great an answer as you should be able to give.
However, showing up does not mean that you are not engaged. Show up on auto-pilot, but give it the hell of a shot.
I once met this guy at the gym who kept trying to compete on the amount of weight and sets. I liked his company, though. He was an amazing guy and we learned a lot from each other. At some point, he concluded that I could outdo him because I had better genetics. By the way, that is a classic excuse lazy people give. When someone is overweight, we blame genetics, and when that person works hard enough and is really fit, they are fit because they have good genetics; it is always dear old genetics. Okay, back to my story. I disagreed with his assesment, not because I did not believe my genetics had a role to play, but because I watched him train and I could tell why I could outdo him. His routine was simple, walk into the gym dressed like Cbum, shake everyone’s hand, do a single set of 6 sets (he hated odd numbers religiously), and then listen to music and dance for the next 15 minutes before he came for the next set. Don’t be that guy!
Show up on auto-pilot, but then condition yourself to think that if you are already in the room, you might as well give it your best shot; forget about the economist and the sunk cost fallacy and make it work for you in this instance! And not just for the gym, I hope that you can determine the things that are important to you and for which you will want to be consistent, and then leverage every rational and non-rational technique that can allow you to keep doing them as frequently and in-frequently as you please. Just don’t be a pain to others and don’t kill yourself.
Alright, I better stop with the lessons and the stories. I hope that you do things with your mind, and that you see any experience as an opportunity to get convicted by the many good lessons I am sure people in your life have impacted on you. Trust me, life is best lived with conviction, and what more better way to be convicted than of our own accord?
So, whether you’re hitting the gym, pounding the pavement, or pursuing your passions with unwavering determination, remember to do so with introspection. Embrace each moment with enthusiasm and intention, and let the lessons learned along the way guide you towards a life filled with purpose and fulfillment.
(Ends abruptly to go chase the horizon)