When I first started going to the gym, it felt more like necessarily evil than love at first sight. My friends and I spent most of our workouts between finding excuses not to do something and counting the minutes until we could bolt the fuck out of the bright-lighted, ammonia-scented basement of misery.
It wasn’t so much that I didn’t know what to do because, as a 16-year-old, I thought I already knew everything (I didn’t. Shocking.) No, I didn’t like training because I found the repetitive nature about as enjoyable as the idea of opening a tin of tomatoes with my eyelids. That, and I was dealt with pretty average genetics for training, which meant that results came in sloooooooooooooooow.
When I’d finish a workout, I was uncomfortably relieved I didn’t have to do it again for another day or two. I think we all were.
But for reasons I lack the imagination to understand, I kept at it somewhat regularly for the next seven years. If not entirely hating it, tolerating it just enough to keep showing up.
It wasn’t until my early 20s that I started to enjoy training. Maybe it just wore me out, and I gave in. (And then I went too deep the other way, but that’s a different story.)
To this day, along with learning to read and not being an asshole (most of the time), training is one of the most important skills I’ve ever learned.
Today, twenty-something years later, training is integral to my life. One of the few things that keeps me sane. Even if my current training ambitions and the time I can commit to them are a shadow of what they used to be.
Maybe those are the very reasons I enjoy it so much. Or perhaps it’s because my goals are more internal vs external. Or because I am able to train at home.
Anyway. Just because you don’t like strength training now doesn’t mean that you won’t in the future. I can think of many current and past clients who stuck with it and now enjoy the process and its benefits. Which now makes me realise how I should’ve written this post about one of them instead of myself. But there is zero chance of me starting this again, so we’re all stuck with what I’ve already written.
Here’s where it’s at.
Eventually, we can learn to tolerate, even gasp! horror! blasphemy! love the things we loathe.
I mean, none of us always loved cauliflower, either.
-J