The gym makes you stronger, but not just for lifting

Since starting at the gym I've become much stronger than I was before I started. Sure, I can lift more weight than I did but I can also see more strength in my life outside of the gym.

Delayed Gratification

In a world that is become faster and faster we no longer have to wait for anything. Jeff Bezos has made it possible to have purchases delivered to your door in less than 12 hours, payday lenders have made it possible to purchase things you can't afford at the moment, and social media/technology make communication possible with people from all over the world, we no longer need to wait to meet in person to catch up on life's events.

While there are immediate effects from going to the gym (increased heart rate, muscle "pump", increased dopamine), the vast majority of the benefits that people initially go to the gym for are more long term. You aren't going to lower your body fat percentage or significantly increase muscle size overnight, these goals require long term, consistent behaviours. Training with this in mind helps you to see the benefit of consistency and discipline within other domains of your life. You are suddenly able to understand where small, positive changes can have a big impact over a long time period. Training has a more tangible progress check built into it in the guise of the "post gym pump". After a workout it is common to look in the mirror and see that your muscles appear larger than before the workout began. This is mainly caused by increased blood flow in the muscles worked and those effects do wear off over time but while they're there they give you a sense of what is to come if you keep working in a consistent fashion. There aren't too many comparisons that can be made in other areas of your life where this is the case, most of the time you have to keep working without any knowledge/reassurance that the work is going to pay off.

Put yourself under pressure, you might just surprise yourself

For anyone who has been training for more than 2 months, the idea of Progressive Overload shouldn't be new to you. The idea is that in order to keep getting better you have to continue to give your body more and more stimulus over time. In the gym this presents as more reps, more weight, more sets, less rest time, more sessions per week. It is only by having one or more of these things in your plan regularly that allows your body to continue to improve over time.

Outside of the gym, we have to go through the same style of progression. Let's take public speaking as an example. If you want to become a better public speaker (or in other words, improve on the skill of public speaking), you may start by talking to one person or recording yourself presenting. Over time, this provides less and less "stress" (in the form of anxiety, pressure etc) and you notice that you don't really learn as fast as you used to, so you move on to talking to small groups (5-6 people). That's a big jump from speaking in front of one person (in fact its a 5 times or 6 times step), there's a lot more stress while doing the thing, but you notice that after a couple of times you feel a lot easier about it and now talking to one person feels easier than ever. Soon, you can increase the size of the group you are presenting to and step onto the next level of "public speaking". This progression follows exactly the same route as progressive overload in the gym. You increase the weight of the stimulus (by having more people), or increase the number of times per week you present (increase the reps).

Each time you step out of your comfort zone and put more pressure on yourself you gain another "skill point" to be assigned to your life character.

Your mind is much stronger than your body, and you can control your mind
Not every day is going to be played on easy mode. Some days you will wake up and not feel 100%. Some days you'll have had less sleep, less to eat, less to drink. All of these things affect your ability to interact effectively with the world. The biggest effect I notice when I'm training is if I'm tired I don't have the same mental fortitude as if I'm well rested. What I mean by this is if I'm tired when I go to the gym, it becomes incredibly easy to give up mid set. See the very nature of training in a gym means you put your body under strain and stress and sometimes I just don't want to do it anymore. In my fatigued state my brain is giving me every reason in the book to stop; "you don't have to do this", "you can put this off until tomorrow", "just lift a lower weight, no one is going to notice". In these moments you have a choice, and anyone who has been training for a while can almost detach themselves from the exercise in the moment to intentionally make the choice: "do I continue or do I give up?"

The body is a very strong unit, it is very rare that it will let you down (in terms of strength) before your mind does. Your mind wants the easy way out. But you can override it, you can silence that voice and carry on despite what it is saying. If you speak to anyone who has been training for a while, it is common to hear them talk about the "dark places" the mind goes to while training. As sinister as this sounds, in essence all it means is that each person finds a way to continue training even when their mind is telling them to give up. There are lots of different approaches to this ranging from self deprecation to imagining loved ones being injured and you having to lift the weight from them (this was the method used by Eddie Hall when he broke the world record for deadlifting).

Ultimately, what I'm getting at is that your body can push a lot further than your mind. Taking this outside of the gym and you can see where this may be mirrored elsewhere in life. At work, your mind might be telling you that you're not good enough to get a new job, but you have the choice to go for it anyway. After a breakup your mind might be telling you that it's easier to be alone and you shouldn't try for another relationship, but in truth you really want to feel loved again so, after some time, you re-enter the dating scene.
Once you become aware of when your mind is telling you to give up or take the easy route, it's empowering to be able to push it to one side and continue in spite of it.

Motivation vs. Discipline

I go to the gym most mornings (6 out of 7 to be precise) but if I only went to the gym on days I really felt good about going to the gym then some weeks I'd go 5 times a week, sometimes I'd go once a week. The ability to show up, even when you don't feel like it, is a powerful habit to build.

For a lot of things in life, even things you love doing, there will be occasions when you don't feel like getting on with it. The people who achieve the most in life are those who continue to make the right steps despite not feeling motivated. See, motivation comes and goes but if you are able to stay disciplined then it doesn't matter how you felt about doing the thing before starting, all that matters is that you did start. Sometimes we need to make a start and see some progress before we get motivation. James Clear talks about this in Atomic Habits where he says that "Whenever you predict that an opportunity will be rewarding, your levels of dopamine spike in anticipation. And whenever dopamine rises, so does your motivation to act." As mentioned earlier in the Delayed Gratification section, the gym allows you to see some progress in the form of muscle pump, which can provide motivation for future sessions.

Sometimes motivation isn't there because you're more motivated to do other things. In the context of the gym this could be to stay in bed another hour, or to go to the pub instead of the gym. Noticing and understanding these feelings and emotions in the moment can help you to be more aware of them in a non-gym context for example when you're more interested in scrolling Tik Tok than completing your A level revision.

Growth isn’t linear

For the last few months I have been training Squats, Bench Press and Deadlifts to improve overall strength in these movements and increase my 1 rep maxes. Throughout the training period there have been sessions where I've felt weaker but the first time I really hit a wall was when I retested my Deadlift. Previously I'd hit 130kg for 2 reps and about 8 weeks on I was hoping to get 140kg for 1 rep. I started my warm up sets and the weight felt heavy... this didn't bode well. But I continued anyway. As the weight increased, my belief in hitting the 140kg target started depleting. As I went to lift the 140kg weight I reminded myself that if it doesn't move smoothly, or with reasonable speed, I should drop it and avoid injuries. I took my stance, set myself up and took a big in breath to brace my core. As I attempted to push the floor away, using my hands to hook the bar, it didn't move. At all. I stopped, took a rest and regathered myself. Attempt 2, set my stance, took a big in breath, took the slack from the bar and pushed. It came off the ground, but only enough for a small insect to crawl under. It became clear I wouldn't hit 140kg today.

After some time doing other exercises I was able to view the "failure" with more of a holistic view; my sleep the night before was terrible, I'd hardly eaten anything and felt dehydrated and when I looked back on my training I hadn't really pushed myself hard enough in the preparation. All these factors combined made a pretty good case for why the bar didn't move when I'd been repping 130kg easily the week before.

This story is evidence that tomorrow isn't always going to be better than today. Sometimes your progress won't go in a straight line of improvement. There will be slow days, but there will also be faster days. The key is to ignore the specific improvement markers on a day by day basis and instead look at a longer time frame and analyse the directional trends. As an example, on that retesting day it would be very easy to say that my deadlift hasn't improved at all since the first test, but actually looking back at the sessions before the retesting day, I could see a marked improvement over time. Whether that was a bad day at the office or a sign of misplaced training will become clearer after I attempt my deadlift 1 rep max tests again in the coming weeks but the evidence suggests that it was an off day.