For the Love of Muscles

Gym has been one of the few places where I have been able to relieve anxiety consistently and get back to a healthy (enough) mental state. But, in the last couple of months, it has failed me, and along with it my mental health took a deep dive. Something wasn’t working anymore, and I even stopped feeling like I wanted to go to the gym. And I am not talking the “just 5 more minutes in bed“ don’t want to go to the gym right now, but at all. I didn’t like where that was going, as over the last two years the gym has been essential to my mental health. Some people meditate, I lift weights. So, I had to take a few steps back and, with the help of friends, I realised what has been going wrong.

So What’s Up?

Well, I have been training with a PT for a while now, and to be honest it was great at the beginning. I had to lower my weights, especially for the deadlift where I had to give up my mixed grip, but I was getting more confident with my form and with that the certainty that I would not hurt myself. So, I trusted the process. Lower the weights, get the form right and then increase the weights. But, the increase did not come, and my body was just getting more and more tired. At some point, he started looking at my nutrition, which fair enough, maybe I wasn’t eating enough to recover properly. And then at my every workout.

Suddenly my place of relaxation became another arena where I was judged and had to perform at my best, constantly. Slowly, I lost track of my own goals.

My turning point was a call with a friend where I ordered some fried chicken. I sent the photo of my food, as I would do, with an apology, and she pointed out “how catholic“ of me it was. And she was right. My eating had become disordered. I was tracking every calorie, feeling bad when my PT disapproved of my choices. I lost weight despite it not being my goal, but it felt good when he approved.

That was the moment I realised I had lost track of my own goals. So, I stopped sending pictures of my food, but that was just one necessary step to gain back my agency of the gym. Because after a while I realised it wasn’t just the food. It was everything.

Going Back to the Roots

So, while I may have lost track of why I love the gym, it’s time to remind myself of the reason. Because the reason hasn’t changed and likely never will.

The reason is: muscles. I love muscles. To see, to touch, to feel, to control. I love the feeling when I do an isolated muscle exercise and I can feel the tension, how the specific muscle moves, contracts and relaxes. I love to feel the pump after I pushed a muscle to failure. I love to see the movement of the muscle as it tenses under strain. And I love to see muscles in general. The valley between the delt and the triceps is one of the most beautiful curves in nature. The way the deltoids connect to the rhomboids is a poetic feat of engineering. And, while I have only caught glances of this in other people at the gym, being able to see why a tricep is called a TRIcep is absolute awe. There’s a reasons painters generation after generation studied the human body.

If others go to the museum to see art, I go to the gym. There’s this trainer at my gym whose squat is pure elegance, for lack of a better word. It is art in motion. Every muscle under complete control, each movement smooth and following the exact same perfect path up and down. A squat so good you cannot tell if it’s heavy or not by just looking at his movements.

When I am not creepily watching men lift at the gym in between sets, I watch my own muscles working on the movement, and those I can’t see I focus on the feeling. I like large weights because the muscles feel more vividly. That, and that I can go back to my life and lift heavy shit and be my own hyper independent woman, and that feels cool as hell. Muscles are pure joy. At home when I am feeling a bit down, I can feel my bicep, in a maybe weird but not like creepy way, and feel a bit better. That is how muscles make me feel. Muscles are as beautiful as they are strong, that is the goal. Muscles for the sake of muscles, consistently, always.

Yet, at some point, just like I started chasing numbers on the InBody machine, I also stopped letting myself enjoy and trust the feel of my own muscles. I started looking at the mirror instead to see if I was doing the movement as I was told. The beauty remained, but diminished from what it used to be. It became superficial, still there, but hollow, divorced from what it used to be, like a sculpture of a Greek god made from porcelain, too fragile to survive the world.

Escape Back to Freedom

I got there by giving up a lot of my agency to someone else about my body. How I work out, what I eat, how much I eat, how much I work out. The gym became another constraint of my day and my life, instead of being something that I did because it brought joy to it. I know why it ended up that way. When everything was so overwhelming in my life, it was easier to trust someone else to get me to become “better” without having to worry about it myself. A source of approval I didn’t otherwise have in my life. But beneficial teaching soon became a benevolent authority. From dictating how I eat to what shoes to wear at the gym.

It’s time to regain my agency, or to paraphrase a Fromm book, escape back to freedom. Because I have lost it, and everything I have been doing in the last 2 years has been to gain this freedom, betraying myself here would be failure, and not the good kind.

For the last months I have been setting boundaries with my PT, especially around food. While that worked and held strong, they have been tested over and over again. I tried to make it more of a collaborative process, bring back my own feeling of my muscles into the sessions, but that just created tension, and with it anxiety over going to the gym. So, step one, end the PT sessions, and then a reset.

Time to go at it on my own for a while. If I still feel judged while at the gym, something I didn’t use to feel, it may be time to find another gym, one where I am just a member whose name nobody knows, and doesn’t really notice.

It may also mean going a bit rogue for a while. I may not gym as much, if that’s what it takes, and instead try other sports. There’s some I have always wanted to try, even if I end up being spectacularly bad at them. I will stop tracking everything but the highest lift of the big 4⁰, which is how I used to do my tracking. I won’t count for tracking anymore, but to bring back my way of meditating. Breath in, lift, hold, put down, breathe out. Repeat. This was my meditation, me, my breath, full awareness of my body and the weight. But it’s not anymore.

Exercise to Enhance my Life not Limit it

Ultimately exercising is there to enhance my life, not limit it. But, I will have to admit that recently it has become a negative influence. I have cancelled hiking plans because I was too sore. I didn’t return to an otherwise fun dancing class because it negatively impacted my lifts the next day. I have stopped looking for fun physical activities and challenges to try, because I would be too physically tired... this is the definition of diminishing my life.

But here’s the thing. While I was in London I was perfectly capable of doing lifting 6 out of 8 days, while also doing at least 3 days a week of Krav Maga all while trying other sports like pilates, dancing, etc..., and the kicker, I was still seeing progress in my lifts. So, it may not be an issue with my over-exercise, but with my current programming. And I definitely lost control of my own programming.

There are so many things that I want to try, and I lost track of that. For example, where better than Korea to try fencing? Something I wanted to try all my life. Honestly any martial art is going to be pretty cool over here. And while I am absolutely terrible at dancing, that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t want to find a place where I felt comfortable being terrible while enjoying it often¹. My exercise needs to enable the life I want to live, especially now when I have the time to do all of these things. Which will change in the future.

I write this post to clear my thoughts on this as well as to keep myself accountable. Because consistent exercise was always the goal. And muscles the motivation. The increase in weight as well as the size of my muscles was only a metric. And you know what they say... a measure should never become a target. It’s just there to check for progress as long as it’s not used as a goal. Not like it would make a good goal in the first place if you ask me. A few weeks ago I saw a guy carrying 130kgs of water up Gwanak mountain. He looked like a stick, not some beefy gym bro. Now, that was impressive.

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⁰ Bench, squat, deadlift, OHP.

¹ Ok, that’s pretty difficult to achieve, I’ll admit. Especially in a country that, by all accounts, is quite perfectionistic.