Why train?

I’m a high school teacher now. Watching my students go through a phase of life that was so marking to me is very interesting. It makes me reminisce about what made me be the way I am and also makes the contrast between my life now and my life then much more evident. When you are still at school, you have most things already taken care of for you. In adult life, this changes.

One of the things that school takes care of for children, and one that may pass by unnoticed, is physical exercise. Every kid, regardless of how lazy they are, how little they care about these things, will at least jog once a week.

Not only that, but it is much more fun to do sports at this age. Regardless of what you say, group sports are the most fun sports there are. You may prefer individual sports (I generally do), but even then, you must admit that you just prefer something a little more boring. You’ll never get the joy of scoring a goal in football and celebrating with your mates going to the gym or rock climbing. A good sparring session might be a close second (although this is not really individual, but dual — shadowboxing and katas though, not that fun).

And when you are young, group sports are encouraged. You already have everyone there ready to join — and even when they don’t want to join, they will be made to. This changes when you’re a grown up. Good luck trying to schedule a weekly football game with your friends. It’s very hard to find people who are willing, and even then, most of them can’t go most times. To actually get a group of 10 people to attend regularly is a miracle of event planning, in my opinion. It takes money and time to do that. Most people aren’t willing.

Contrary to the school environment, which is much more community based, the work world of adults is individualistic. It almost penalizes you for wanting to be with others. It makes very evident that, if you really want to get together, there will be a price for that. In other words, our society is not made for these things to happen. It is made for adults to work. This is easy — almost unavoidable. Having friends, playing group sports, not so much.

So we are very much incentivized to practice individual sports. It is much more convenient — we control the hours, we don’t have to be constrained by other people’s shedules. It is low effort. Most people don’t want to put a lot of effort into exercising — and understandably so. They have other priorities.

In fact, often times, exercising is subsurvient to productivity at work — as our society is directed towards working, people often exercise just to keep in shape and be more productive at work. It turns out that sedentary people are not as productive.

The Gym is the perfect solution for that. It is often much cheaper than other exercising options available for adults. It is the most time flexible — gyms are open 24h sometimes. It is accessible in terms of requirements: almost anyone can get into the gym and start lifting weights (and even for people lazy enough to not want to think about what to do, personal trainers abound with “special training plans” with fake complex exercises to make people believe they are doing something fancier than they really are).

The gym is the lowest common denominator of physical exercise. This is the main reason for its popularity, I believe. But even to actually “be consistent” in the gym, you must “make the effort” to get in, time and time again. Otherwise, there is no progress. In other words: even when you make exercise as convenient as possible, it is still relatively inconvenient. It is a bother. It actually sucks to get out of the house and fit in an hour at the gym when you would rather just be at home.

The same mindset behind trying to make exercise convenient, which is what makes the gym popular, is what also makes the gym kind of suck. The problem is that you just don’t like to exercise. But you think you have to, so you try to find a low effort solution. But then even this solution is not as low effort as you would have hoped. So you remain perenially inconsistent and never “make the gains” you thought you would.

A lot of people are fooled into thinking that exercising means going to the gym and doing a bunch of sets and reps like a weekly chore. Don’t get me wrong: some people love this. Some people thrive in this. In the same way some people love house cleaning. But people who love this, I believe, will be the first to admit: they love boring shit.

But this is just the case of those who think that they must exercise “for health reasons” or “to be more productive”. But there is a great other factor behind the whole gym culture. Most people who actually stick to the gym see beyond the everyday chores, towards progress, towards a golden ideal they want to achieve. They want to sculpt their body. And why is that, you ask? Vanity.

Few things seduce you more than the prospect of being respected and admired, envied and maybe even secretly cursed for how beautiful you are. The mythos of the gym is that, even for those without much “natural beauty”, you can get ahead through “hard work”. You can groom your face, you can have a sense of style, you can have a well toned body. And the main reason behind all this is simply vanity. You want people to find you beautiful.

To some degree, there is nothing wrong with that. The problem comes when you forget the difference between the appearance of worth and actual worth. It comes when you forget that being beautiful is, first and foremost, an inner thing. The tendency for people who want to “sculpt” they’re bodies is, naturally, to objectify themselves. They transpose their identity to a mask — to what people see. No wonder gyms are the most mirror-filled places ever. It’s all about appearances, reflections, superficial improvements.

To want that, again, is not bad in and of itself. The problem is when that is your only reason. If it weren’t for your appearance, what would you be doing? If your answer is “Watching Netflix all day”, you’re not in a good place. It means vanity is your reason to live, basically. If it’s not to be seen, it’s not worth it.

I never really bought that. The whole vanity fair you see in gyms made me cringe since I was old enough to know what a gym was. I found that ridiculous and sad. So, after school, I basically stopped exercising. I became sedentary. I was not about to become a tool and work out to be more productive (towards what?), neither was I about to become a slave to my public image. I just did my thing — individually, isolated, not resisting much.

Eventually, though, I started to feel weak. I felt lethargic. I had no energy. Walking a few flights of stairs left me breathing more heaviliy than I would have liked to admit. I felt in decay. That’s no good. So I decided to do a few push ups every day. Just not to start rotting at 19 years of age.

Quickly, and I don’t really remember how or why, I found out about calisthenics. The whole Chris Heria thing about “not just looking strong, but actually being strong” spoke to me deeply. It turns out you don’t have to be a closet-sized person to be strong. In fact, you can be much stronger than these guys without looking like it. It was the ultimate anti-vanity exercise. You can be strong, know you are strong, be fit and functional, without falling for the traps of appearances. And, also importantly, without being confused with people who do.

So I really went in on calisthenics. I gained about 10kgs of lean muscle in about 7 months of training. I learned a bunch of impressive moves and felt stronger than ever. I would look at people and go “I’m stronger than this guy, this guy, this guy, etc.” I would look at some guy who clearly went to the gym and was bigger than me and relish in thinking that, despite his bravado and big boy posture, I was, most likely, stronger than him and could lift more than him in the gym as well. And all of that without looking weird — I looked like a normal guy.

But I started to feel stiff. All of that muscle was weighing on my body and I started having trouble joining my arms behind my back. So I decided to stop training calisthenics for a while.

At the same time, I had another realization. Despite being very strong and all, gym guys, due to their unathletic bodies, would often lose fights against trained people much lighter than them. All that size wouldn’t count for much against someone with skills. Even I, with my strenght, would probably lose a fight against someone who knew how to fight. Especially now, that I started to feel the consequences of gaining too much muscle.

So the decision was easy: I started to train Muay Thai. I did that for about 8 months, and I felt like I was unbeatable. Very strong and now getting my athleticism back, gaining skills, agility, balance, flexibility and so on. I only did it for 8 months because the pandemic hit. I tried to get back to calisthenics, but it wasn’t the same. I felt I already was very strong, and now, being aware of all the dimensions of athletic capability, I couldn’t go on specializing only in strenght.

So I decided to train parkour by myself. The streets were all empty anyway, there was no one to watch me make a fool of myself. And watching parkour videos, it became evident to me that those athletes were the pinnacle of athletic performance. Strong, flexible, agile, full of endurance, balance and coordination. Not only that, but parkour is the ultimate functional sport. The moves you learn are designed to free your movement through urban space: to turn walls into obstacles.

Then it dawned on me that in fact, parkour is likely to be much more useful to self-defense than fighting: most times, the best thing to do is escape. And if you can climb a wall quick, you won’t be chased. No wonder parkour was born as a training method for an elite squad of special operations from the French army. So I trained parkour for about 2 years, learning the art of effective movement through the environment.

The pandemic ended and I felt very athletic. I was fully developed. Of course, there were still lots of holes in my game, so to speak. Many things to still learn, develop, gaps to fill, and so on. I had really gamified the journey towards full athletic development.

So, now that I could train again, I decided to go back to martial arts and train MMA — the most complete form of martial arts training, I thought. I had little time on it before I tore my ACL. This came as a brutal reality check, a bath of cold water. My body made clear to me that, regardless of my dreams of ultimate performance, it has limits.

The year and a half I had to spend away from sports and doing physiotherapy were a good oportunity to reflect. I realized how much my whole “fitness journey” was fueled by vanity, despite my criticisms of gym culture. I just redefined what it meant to have a good appearance and chased that. Instead of actually chasing worth, I chased a counterculture of appearance.

While gym rats may look at a scrawny kid and go “look at that guy, I’m so much bigger, he should be ashamed”; a calisthenics person might look at the gym guy and go “look at that guy, I’m so much stronger and more functional, he should be ashamed”; and a scrawny kid from BJJ might look at both and go “look at these fools, wasting their energy thinking they are so hot, but once I take them down, they’re cooked. They should be ashamed”.

It’s vanity all the same. Either it’s about being big or sculpted, or about being strong, or about winning a fight. And then, of course, we might simply wonder wether any of these would have any chances against a twelve year old with a loaded gun… These things are worth very little in an actual fight, it’s just posing.

And even if you want to be an athlete, reach peak performance in all aspects of performance, why would you do that? If it’s not to fight someone, if it’s not to feel superior to others, if it’s not for self defense (that old myth)… What is it for? It turns out I was at that sad place.

I tried doing yoga for a while, just for the sake of my health, but I couldn’t stick to it — too boring. Who would have thought?! Stretching is not very fun. Also, I don’t like “relaxing” and “accepting myself”, but those are topics for another day.

And the question remains… Why exercise at all? Maybe health is a good thing, a good reason. I considered doing a few push ups and squats everyday. Simple and plain, methodical, ritualistic, almost monk-like. Very bare-bones. And probably enough to keep me okay.

But that doesn’t target the back… would it not be an incomplete training regime? Well, but how complete do I want it to be? The thing is, when you have payed as much attention as I have to the body, you realize how much work it would actually take to have a “complete” training regime. Maybe I should be targeting my neck muscles somehow… What about shoulder rotator cuffs? And the often neglected muscle groups in the glutes responsible for internal and external rotation of the knee? Not to mention all the intricacies of the hip joint…

Having a complete training regime is a lifelong project. It would probably have to be the priority in my life for me to actually do it, if it is even possible. If you are training for health, you don’t need to go that far. The very desire to go that far is actually a fairly recent cultural phenomenon, dating to the 19th century, when the “Physical Culture” movement was born in the US, UK and Germany.

This movement came in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution and reflected a desire to treat the human body in the same way every industry was being treated: with machine-like efficiency. How far can we push the limits of the output of this machine? The problem is, as I found out, that just like machines, if pushed too far, our body brakes.

The impetus to know the inner workings of every single muscle and dominate muscle activation in every fiber, manipulating it to the greatest effect, comes from the objectification of our bodies, which we begin to treat like machines, like clocks we can take apart and rework the cogs. But i must reiterate: Why do this?

It is funny because, in a way, this seems like almost a non-question. “Why do anything, then?”, one might wonder. This reveals the assumption that, if anything is worth is, better performance is worth it. Growth for the sake of growth. If you don’t know why you would want to sprint faster, get stronger and jump higher, then I don’t know what to tell you.

But, unless you are a soldier or an athlete (soldiers of peace-time), I feel like there really is no reason why anyone would want that for it’s own sake. I am not a machine. My body is not a machine and I don’t intend on treating it like one — not anymore. I exercise to be healthy, not the other way around. It makes no sense risking health for physical performance, let alone sacrificing it (as some do with anabolic steroids).

But again, exercising just to be healthy seems to run into the same problem. We are healthy in order to live. Someone who lives in order to be healthy, who sacrifices his joy in life to be healthy, is doing something wrong. And also will likely end up neither healthy nor alive.

I guess my problem is that doing things alone is just not that fun. And when you have no fun, all these existential questions come up.