An essay on struggling with personal fitness. And finding a plan that works.
If there’s one thing I’ve consistently failed at, it’s sticking to an exercise plan. In college as a lanky kid when i decided to hit the gym in SWD, it lasted all of 3 days. I took it easy on the first day because hey you’re supposed to take it easy on the first day. On the 2nd day, I was like we’re still getting started. After day 3, the fuel in my motivation tank was too low & the pain in my body too high to hit the gym. That was it. The end.
But i didn’t give up. A couple of years later, I had some free time at work and I thought i’ll give it a try again. I was inspired by Matt Cutts ’30 day challenge’ — the idea that if you could do something for 30 days in a row it’ll form a habit. This time the Gym was 200m from my house. I managed to go a total of 27 days to the gym. 7 days in a row was my longest streak.
I graduated from pushups and dumbell curls to the shoulder press. I read Tim Ferris’s 4 hour body — stories about gaining record amount of weight in record time & felt it was possible. I didn’t agree with Ferris’s approach of taking protein supplements and digestive aids. But after 27 gym days my 2 month subscription had expired and I gave up. Each time I went to the gym, i was surprised by the motivation levels of some members. Going through the routine, day after day, spending close to 2 hours. It was insane.
One of the pitfalls of going to the gym for about a month and stopping was I had beginnings of a paunch. >.<
And to remedy the mildly protruding belly — I had to hit the gym again. :/ This time I had company with two colleagues joining me and it looked like i might finally succeed. But yet again I failed. I would go to the gym for 4 days in a row and skip for the next 3 weeks. The fancy gym requires you to carry different shoes & clothes to the gym(for good reason!). For someone motivated that’s great. But add an overhead of different clothes, commuting to the gym and it seemed a long shot that this method would work. Of the 3 months of my gym membership, I managed to hardly spend 20 days at the gym. It was time to try a new approach.
I decided to go back to the basics and truly understand the dynamics of bodybuilding. That’s when I found Mark Rippetoe’s ‘Basic Barbell Training’. It’s supposed to be the one of the best body building books and for good reason. As an amateur ‘body builder’ 😜 i was doing many exercises at the gym. This meant i couldn’t follow the progress on the any of them well. Mark’s theory is that we don’t need a lot of equipment to train and if we can learn the exercises to be performed, all we need is a basic barbell. But the key is ‘learning to exercise’
When one is performing a range of exercises, we get the illusion that we’re doing work, that we’re putting in the effort. Imagine coming to the gym and just doing 4 exercises every day! According to Mark, to build strength we just need 4 exercises and all of them can be accomplished with the barbell.
“The reason that isolated body-part training on machines doesn’t work is the same reason that barbells work so well, better than any other tools we can use to gain strength. The human body functions as a complete system — it works that way, and it likes to be trained that way. It doesn’t like to be separated into its constituent components and then have those components exercised separately, since the strength obtained from training will not be utilized in this way.” — Mark Rippetoe
The 4 key exercises you can do with a barbell
The Squat:
The bench-press
The deadlift
The Press
Since I moved to the new plan — I’ve done more workouts than when I went to the gym. I can space them out as per my convenience. I also don’t feel any guilt for missing out sometimes. And the best part — getting back on track is easy — it only takes a few mins.
‘the best plans are ones we can stick to’
And sometimes — the best plans are random.
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