How to Own The Gym
“We go to gyms in large part to maintain a little goddamned self-respect, and to blow off steam, and to insist, against all odds, that we do remain fiercely vital physical beings.
… but if you just stick to a basic strength-training program, you can expect a certain wonderment about what the hell you were doing all those years, why nobody told you it was this simple before, and why nobody else in the gym appears to have heard the good news.
…You’ll be on a journey, at long last, learning how to own the gym, how to make your thrice-weekly health-club sessions into a confident, focused process invulnerable to bullshit. You’ll begin walking right past all the muscle-isolation weight machines, feeling a little sorry for all the guys who still think those are a good use of their time. You’ll start heading right back to the barbells instead, back in the gym’s darkest distant corner, and seeing them only as tools for your own ends, your own sports and goals.”
If you’re a human in a body I really really recommend reading this. I wasn’t expecting to read through this thing. Yet, here I am quoting from the very end of it.
The article perfectly sums up my experience with the gym over the past year. I can’t over-emphasize how much this stuff has meant to me as a man, how much feeling competent, earnest and strong changes things.
