Triumph In Blog

Is Pilk good for you?

I am unemployed. I have mentioned this before, but some people may not necessarily understand what that means. You might jump to conclusions about my daily routine, some of which would be correct some of which would be wrong, but one part of the routine in particular may shock you to know. As a matter of fact, for the last couple years–this started when I was employed–I have been going to the gym to lift weights about 4 or 5 times a week, for various and sundry reasons.

I’ve sort of been lifting weights since I was a teenager, but never super seriously. As a man, it’s sort of just ambiently always been in the back of my mind that it’s something I should be doing, and I often have run-ins with hating the way that I look, but it was never really all that serious. For the most part, I was just physically out of shape, and weak, and felt tired and slept badly all the time, and it just sucked. By the time puberty stopped slowing down around 18 or so, it was really affecting my health. I’m not a gym rat by any means, or much of a health nut, so through my college life my method for fixing my poor fitness was to just barely eat, and occasionally do some random shit with dumbbells if I felt like it. This eventually proved to not be doing enough, if anything, so once I had a steady job, I just paid for a gym membership.

This wasn’t a huge leap for me. I’ve always been passingly interested in and knowledgeable about bodybuilding to an extent, I was just too lazy to get serious. It became easier to visualize spending time in a real gym every day when I realized I was going to be at work all day anyway, so if I have no life as a commuter office drone, I may as well be getting something out of it. Plus, some other people wanted to make a gentlemen’s agreement to go the gym with me, so there was extra commitment on the line. Thus, february of 2024, I finally began to actually, consistently go to a real gym 4 or 5 times a week. Ideally it should always be 5, and if I really cared about seeing results quickly I would be doing cardio at least every day.

But it’s strange: after a year and a half of pretty consistent work (I have taken a handful small gaps to be sick and/or travel) , I still don’t really feel like making that much commitment. I have gotten results obviously, and I’ve spent a lot of time refining my process–my weight has stabilized, I have added like 15lbs of muscle, I’ve gone up on all the big compound lifts, I can actually do 30 minutes of cardio without seeing god, things like that. But I still just don’t…like it. Which I didn’t anticipate being the case. If you know anyone who is a gym rat or you’ve ever met them or seen them online, you’ve certainly heard the line that “once you stick with it for a while, you’ll learn to love it.” I am 100% prepared to say that that is a completely false (or at least misguided) sentiment.

I’ve adapted a lot of my daily life to be optimized for working out; I’ve changed the times that I eat and completely altered my diet and metabolism, I count calories, I use some supplements, I spend a pretty significant amount of time in the gym when I’m there, I stretch a lot more, I sleep better, and in general I’ve done about everything there is to do and tried everything there is to try. It has kinda paid off, I feel better and look a little better, but really? I don’t love it. I still do it, because now that I’m in it, I feel kinda lousy and physically ill if I skip for too long. It’s still kind of a chore to go do though, and it does often leave me feeling sore all the time, and sweaty and disgusting, and all that. I like the progress and I like to be a nerd about it, but actually getting in the gym and doing the work still kinda sucks. I don’t really look forward to it, and I certainly have no interest in altering any more of my life than I already have to be more “fitness” oriented.

And yet those are the people you see all the time. I don’t want to take anything away from them; if you want to be the guy who cycles for 3 hours a day and wears breathable clothes everywhere and lives off of KIND bars, you do you. At least you’ll be healthy for the most part, and you will look better. To me, though, I sort of understand now that I have no interest in pursuing the “active lifestyle,” and I still love spending my non-gym time sitting in a dim room playing video games and making music. It’s just the way I am, and that’s the kind of thing I love. It’s not explicitly wrong or right, but I just am not in a place where I feel like I need to channel myself into fitness as a way of saving myself from something else.

At the end of the day, I believe that’s where the belief in fitness comes from. It’s no secret that not everything in the gym pertains to being “healthy,” but a lot of people love it and do it anyway, and try to proselytize. To people who really love the gym, it’s their passion, and it’s their calling. They have nothing else in their life, or perhaps they have a life they don’t like, so they put themselves on the line and dedicate to some kind of fitness or sport as a way to apply themselves, and have a reason to fucking live. There’s nothing wrong with that! But for some reason, a lot of them don’t seem to understand that not everyone shares their passion, and we end up with a strange, social perception of the gym as some kind of cure-all for mental and physical ailments.

I got thinking about this when I walked into my gym the other day. Now, I’ve had a short but arduous journey with the gym myself, and I’ve gone through all the beginner’s traps already. Dirty bulks, sets of 3×3, you name it. At this point however, I feel like I look at least like I’ve been in the gym before, and this particular gym is one I’ve been going to literally since it opened a few months ago. This day in question, I was accosted by one of their personal trainers, a turbo manlet with Drake-style facial hair and some horrible piercings, who was trying to get me to sign up for one of their weekend classes, to justify the personal trainers continuing to be employed. Harmless, and I wasn’t offended, but my answer was obviously gonna be a “no.”

I don’t usually go in on weekends anyway, and I don’t have any need for community or friendship or human interaction at the gym. My approach is clinical, and I want to come in, cross off the motions I’m aiming for on my phone as I do them, and then leave without being spoken to, ideally. I spoke to him though, because I’m not so antisocial that I can’t at least be friendly to people going about their daily business, and I let him spit some of his proverbial game at me. He asked me what I was doing that day, I said “legs and cardio” in so many words, and he lit up, telling me he had a killer leg program, and that he could help me go bigger on that or any muscle group I wanted to improve on. It occurred to me then that I just didn’t really have the same thoughts as most people would, coming to the gym as often as I do. He didn’t really even ask me about my routine or my personal goals; to him it was just inherent that the goal was to pick a muscle group and make it as big as possible. Bodybuilding, in the typical sense, but he was just posing it to me like that was the thing to do, and it was obvious.

This is obviously a case of me being autistic and reading too deeply into a banal social interaction, and I don’t think this guy was stupid or wrong or anything. He clearly was a bodybuilder, and he looked like he knew his way around it. I wort of weirded myself out, realizing that my only way out of this conversation I didn’t want to be having would be to explain that I just didn’t really care about being that serious about bodybuilding, and that feels bad to say as a gymgoer to another, bigger gymgoer. Not only because he would, predictably, rib me about it, but because it’s sort of just the expectation that going to the gym a lot does mean to me and to basically everyone that you would be going to put in as much effort as possible and get as big as possible. Unless you’re fat, then people assume you’re trying to lose weight I guess.

Like I explained, I’ve realized now that bodybuilding on that level is more trouble than it’s worth to me, and my passion doesn’t lie in it the way most people’s would. I suppose I feel bad understanding that now, which is why I’m writing this, because all the time I’ve spent working myself up to getting to this point, getting into shape and regularly lifting weights, I sort of expected that I would like it better, and care more about bodybuilding. The epiphany that I’ve come to, that fitness is just another interest or art form that doesn’t call to everyone, is a little discouraging, and I’m not just saying that because fitness supplements are expensive. I’m saying it because it all makes me feel a little stuck, because now my options are to stop doing it entirely, and go back to being skinnyfat and feeling bad but at least having more free time, or to just continue on this plateau.

I suppose it isn’t really a plateau. I am nearly at squatting 3 plates, which my teenage self definitely couldn’t do, for all the time he spent lurking on /fit/, and I am obviously in better shape, and slowly getting stronger with each week. I still have weak points–I hate hitting arms and kinda chest too, which is funny because most guys obsess over those–but I’ve made a lot of progress that isn’t necessarily stopping. It just doesn’t look or feel to me like I have any ability or desire to hit the point I thought I would at the start of all this. That sucks.

I think there’s an element of freedom to it though, which I’m hoping is the silver lining that I continue to see into the future. Knowing now that scrutinizing my routine and optimizing all the weak points out, and hitting every single possible muscle twice a week, and spending 2 and a half hours in the gym every time, and tracking the weight every time, it’s all sort of in service of nothing? That’s liberating in a way, because I am aware that I can sort of focus on cardio and the big compound lifts, and still make progress without wasting time. I’m trying to avoid retreating into bro splits and only hitting muscle groups once a week, but really just making sure I hit squat, hip thrust, lat pull, shoulder press, and curls all twice a week if I can, and keeping cardio up? I still feel like I’m moving up on strength quite a bit and feeling much better, without losing a whole lot of detail.

The moral of this story is that the gym can be serious, but it can also not be serious, and it doesn’t make me or anyone else lesser for not giving their whole lives to it. If you’re reading this, I’m here to tell you no, going to the gym probably won’t fix your depression, or give your life meaning, or save your life or anything if you feel like you need that. It could, but giving yourself to any interest or lifestyle could do that, and I personally preach that there are many, many things to try that don’t have any association with the gamersupps hentai girl bumper stickers. I found that the gym didn’t save me, and I didn’t learn to love it, but it has improved my life in a lot of ways, and I think I’ll stick with it. But it’s not what it cracked up to be.

On top of all the vapid, annoying aspects of our cultural perception of “fitness,” I believe the most dishonest and misleading is the misunderstanding that since everyone wants to be healthy, that serious gymgoing is for everyone, or at least everyone will inevitably get there if they start going to the gym. Wrong! As soon as I publish this post, I’m gonna go hit shoulders and chest, and I’m gonna struggle with not quite 2 plates on bench, and I’m gonna hate it, and the gods of the temple of iron will shake their heads. But it’s meant to be, anyway! I will never be afraid to half-ass things, and nobody can stop me!