Five years ago, I walked into the small gym in my childhood town for the first time. Aside from a love of sport, there was nothing to my advantage that was to say I would stick at lifting weights consistently. Five years on however, I view weightlifting as a cornerstone habit of my life, with it providing the practice and discipline that I required when it came to starting other good habits. It’s increased my confidence and taught me the value of working at the edge of my capability. Here are some of the lessons that I learned through my development inside the gym, and how this led to benefits outside the gym in an important time in my all-around development.
You learn how to form a habit
My goals were simpler when 14-year-old me entered the gym for the first time. Being a competitive personality, involved in lots of secondary school sports, I simply wanted to be stronger and faster than everyone I came up against. Having a reason for training is important, because when your motivation is low you need a vision to cling to. This vision is what’s going to pull you to the gym that day. After a period of mindfully pushing yourself to work out it becomes easier, to the point where you feel worse if you haven’t been to the gym. It becomes a habit that you don’t have to think about executing. It’s likely that you will even experience a positive feedback loop — the gym makes you feel good, so you actually feel positive about the rest of your day and motivated to work out again the next day.
This discipline to take working out from something you had to put mental effort towards to execute to something that happens subconsciously is the foundation for all habit formation. The experience I had with starting to go to the gym was proof that I could have an effect on my actions, giving me confidence to change other aspects of my life further down the line. This included quitting video games to build a revision habit for A-levels at the start of 2022. Without this habit change I may not have achieved the exam grades I did, which could have cut off many options for my future.
You learn how to work at your edge
If you don’t challenge your abilities, you don’t improve your skills. It’s no different for building strength at the gym. To make the fastest progress you have to reach a flow state — you have to be challenged enough to be engaged, but not overwhelmed. You won’t improve if you never feel the strain of working hard, and I only truly realised this after working for some years in the gym. I learned that performing the same exercises every day will just fatigue your muscles, stopping them from repairing. At the same time I noticed diminishing strength if I slacked off.
With experience you better learn where your limit is, and how to work as close to it as possible. This is a call for you to execute, because real learning can only take place through experience. Weightlifting formed the foundation for my self-improvement through allowing me to realise that I’d make the fastest progress if I just executed. I began to post more YouTube videos, and I started writing regularly (here, on Medium). You’d be surprised how much work you are capable of completing when you execute your tasks with the same mindset that you approach your gym workouts. You know the task must be done, so you don’t waste time doing it.
When working close to your limits you have to quickly come to terms with the reality of failure. You aren’t going to judge everything perfectly, so sometimes you are going to overdo it and crash back down to Earth. The gym proxy for that is failing a rep — perhaps you were sure you were going to be able to lift that weight, but sometimes you just can’t. The gym taught me that failure is sure to happen at one point or another. The people that cope with it the best don’t allow it to affect their mental state and they quickly recover and learn, now armed with a better idea of how hard they have to work to reach their full capacity.
Conclusion
In this article, I share the two primary lessons that five years of hitting the gym has taught me. While these lessons have broad applications across all aspects of life, the specific benefits I’ve reaped extend far beyond that. I’ve noticed enhanced mood, increased confidence, better sleep, and improved physical capability. As such, I encourage all readers to embark on some form of strength training, be it weightlifting, calisthenics, or CrossFit, naming the most popular choices. Beyond tapping into your full potential, you’ll uncover opportunities to grow and excel in multiple areas of your life.