Why are you going to the gym? This answer is usually based on one or more of several reasons: Your doctor said you will die before your daughter’s wedding if you don’t start exercising regularly and lose weight. Or maybe you’re a soccer mom of three and are intent on regaining your once toned physique. Or you’re a sports-minded weekend warrior, a hardcore bodybuilder, an old-school weightlifter who defies Father Time, or you’re 12 years old and think muscles are cool. In any one of these, or a combination thereof, we all have one thing exactly the same: we are trying to do something to our muscles – refine them, define them, make them more efficient and functional for our demands, or whatever you want to call it. Even CrossFit. All it takes is for your body to repair and build muscle. There are no two sides in this.
You Can’t Flex Fat: The Real Purpose of Strength Training
If you want to call it toning, sculpting, tightening, contouring, whatever, ultimately, you are asking your body to build and repair muscle tissue.
Whether or not you actually see results from tightening, toning, sculpting, whatever, depends on how much fat you have covering the muscles. Have you ever heard the expression, “You can’t flex fat?” Well, you can’t. Only muscles are flexible. How much definition you see when a muscle flexes is directly related to how thick a layer of fat your body has covering the muscle.
So, before you embark on this path, for whatever reason, you must agree that the reason you are going to the gym is to somehow, repetitively, progressively and consistently improve your fitness and well-being by overcoming gravity, and then allowing yourself to recover from the excitement. So, in other words, you’re there to build muscle. Duration. End of story.
Now, once you cross that hurdle you have to accept the fact that even though you may want 20 inch hands, nature doesn’t want that. Anything beyond lifting a fork to your mouth is, to her, a waste of metabolically active tissue and she doesn’t want you to have it. So, you have to convince him that the 12 inches of hand he gave you is insufficient for the constant gravitational tension you are applying to him. Maintain that tension and progressively increase it and the muscles will grow because you are forcing nature to adapt. But leave that stress on for too long and nature will start to take back what you created.
If you have any doubts, stick a 20-inch arm in a mold for eight weeks. Do you feel like you are pulling the 20 inch arm back? PSST… I have news for you.
The matter is simple. You either use it or lose it. Weight training that supports any kind of visible, measurable results is a long-term, almost daily commitment. If there’s anywhere in life where you can expect the most delayed gratification, it’s in trying to make and maintain notable positive changes in your body and fitness.
And that leads us to two things that no one thinks about before they start.
First: it’s forever
The biggest mistake beginners make is believing that fitness is a temporary task. Lose twenty pounds, get ready for the beach, add a little muscle, gear up for summer, then somehow maintain it while occasionally glancing at dumbbells from across the room. It doesn’t work that way. The body retains only what it believes it needs to survive. Stop training, stop creating demand, and the body immediately begins to destroy the expensive tissue you have worked so hard to build. This is not a six week project. It’s a lifestyle contract you’re signing yourself, and the fine print says it’s for life.
Second: Nutrition matters more than you think
You can stimulate muscle growth all day long, but if the raw materials to repair and rebuild tissues are not available, nothing happens. You are actually damaging muscle fibers in the gym and hoping that your body will make them bigger and stronger afterward. That process requires protein, calories, hydration, micronutrients, and recovery. Jim is just the trigger. Real progress happens outside the gym, usually in your kitchen and in your bed while you sleep. Ignore this fact and you’ll spend years wondering why your body never changes despite all your hard work.
So before you start, understand what you’re really signing up for.
Is fitness a lifelong commitment?
You are making a long-term compromise with biology itself. You’re going to repeatedly stress your body in ways it doesn’t particularly enjoy, force it to adapt against its energy-conserving instincts, feed it what it needs to recover, and then do it all again tomorrow.
And the day after that.
And the day after that.
Iron doesn’t care what your goals are. It doesn’t care about your excuses. It simply reacts on a continuum over time.
Before you start, make sure you understand this.
Because once you start…
There is no finish line.
