You constantly make great points. Iāve mentioned this to my husband before; we always appreciate your thoughts!
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Thank you! I truly, genuinely appreciate that. I might have to needlepoint it and hang it in my kidsā roomsā¦ Who are we kidding? My wifeās side of the room, too.
Maybe a better analogy is counting calories. Youāll do it if youāre about to get on stage, or you had a health scare and need a kickstart. Most of us arenāt going to do it consistently for 10 years, though. You still care about being fit and lean, so you eat like a grownup, and are still able to stay photo shoot lean (weāve transitioned to a specific āyouā here) without it, so thatās the right answer. Thatās not weird to anyone, because we all āknowā eating.
With training itās a little different. We feel like weāre supposed to do it the ārightā way or donāt do it at all. Thatās crazy to think weāll just grind away at some metric that isnāt important to us, consistently, for 10 years, but we still feel guilty. I think having everyone kind of āget itā together is less likely because weāre on different stages of our journey - so a lot of the āguilt tripā stuff you mentioned you see on the internet might not be coming from someone that has the years in the gym or athletic background you do.
I recognize this has become a bit of a ramble!
This actually clarifies way more than my original post! And I feel like I just got a really great therapy session. 
I couldnāt pinpoint why it seemed crazy, but you nailed it. And I canāt be the only one who feels guilt tripped into striving for things that arenāt personally compelling.
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Absolutely not! Check out folks in their career: Iāll see sales reps all the time, who are awesome at their jobs, love it, and making tons of money. They feel like theyāre āsupposedā to advance, go after manager roles, and either feel rejected if they donāt get it or, worse, get it and quit because they hate it.
Itās super hard for us to separate our expectations from our perception of societal expectations.
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I think that most people join the gym to āput on a bit of muscleā or āto feel healthierā. For dedicated lifters, those gameplans can often go out of the window. Anything someone has a passion for has a habit to develop into something, be that a competitive mindset, the numbers on the bar, or a bit of muscle becoming a lot of muscle. Iāve lost count of how many powerlifters Iāve read about that feel like shit 90% of the time. Maybe they feel like fat slobs, maybe eating a gazillion calories a day has destroyed their digestion, maybe a walk to the shop at the end of their street feels like HIIT training, but who cares? They added 5lbs to their squat.
Dylan Hellriegal went from a 1000lb+ squat to just repping 225lb due to severe digestive problems (although I donāt know the full story, an obscene amount of calories and taking orals definitely wouldnāt have helped that). Sure itās a sad story but I bet he feels a million percent better in his day-to-day life physically.
I understand you may have worded your thoughts incorrectly, and I agree 100% with the post you made clarifying what you meant. I still wanted to pick up on this quote to make the point that my reward is how my brain feels. My reward is the brain chemical rewards. On a deload or during times of inconsistancy; my mood, my attitude, my discipline in other areas and perhaps most importantly, my lifeās contentment savagely decreases. For this reason, I have to check myself now and again to remember why Iām going in the first place. Why do I need to compromise my health in this joint to grind out a PR that nobody but me really cares about? Why have I fallen asleep early on the sofa, woke up at 2am, realized Iām 800 calories short, forced down a pint of milk and 4 big tablespoons of peanut butter, compounded my already poor digestion and led flat in bed straight after causing heartburn all night?
Sometimes the sacrifice can be the right thing to do, but often times? We must always ask ourselves āWhy?ā
If the answers you give yourself require you to keep doing these things then there is no right or wrong. Only what you perceive it as. There was a time when I was just 125lbs, malnutritioned and passing out drunk 4-5 nights a week. In those moments force feeding myself WAS the right thing to do. Is it the right thing right now? Probably not.
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I have asked myself these questions many times. Why should I train to achieve certain numbers on the barbell? And when I achieve them what will happen, what benefit will I get. I donāt have a goal of going to competitions or getting very strong. I can combat sarcopenia and get all the other health benefits of weight training just by doing regular weight training. I just have to make an effort and not take it easy when I go to the gym.
I think when youāre chasing numbers on the bar I have some incentive to train. But as already commented in the thread, my incentive is the sheer pleasure of weight training. And my workout preferences are constantly changing. Today I want to do 10x1 EMOM, tomorrow I want to do 3x5, then I want to do 6x6 with 15 seconds rest Gironda style. I personally cannot follow a certain program for a long time. I have tried repeatedly over the past 6 years. It does not work for me.
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Iāll chime in and agree with pretty much everybody: it depends on your goals.
For me personally, if I wasnāt training to continue getting measurably stronger, Iād lose interest and be done, most likely. āHealthā would be a silly goal for me. I also donāt care about competing. Or honestly how much I put on the bar. I have some overly dramatic reasons I started training for strength, but I need to continue getting stronger so if something falls on somebody I can lift it off of them. Or if someone/something needs picked up and carried, I can do it. Increasing the weight on the barbell helps me get there. I never again want to be in a situation and feel helpless. It may happen, but at least Iām taking steps to prevent it.
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This is exactly me. If Iām not progressing somewhere, I feel like Iām stagnant; and if Iām stagnant in an evolving world - Iām going backwards.
Making progress in something keeps me sane. I often tell co-workers that I only lift weights to keep the voices at bay, but this is more true than not - if Iām being honestā¦ I get a bit depressed when not making progress. Iām sure I will have some maturing to do as I get older.
To be even more honest, I fear old age as I know I wonāt be able to make progress in strength and body composition for too much longer - and I donāt know what I would substitute into my daily life that could give me this same feeling.
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My elderly next door neighbor jokes about this kind of stuff all the time. She says " if thereās a massive car crash outside will you be able to lift the one car and break the others car door saving the mother from proceeding fire?"
Itās been observed that itās the journey that creates the dopamine, not the reward at the end. I touched on this in another thread a while back but yeah, pretty much everyoneās like this but may not realize it. Falling in love with the process is incredibly important, but that is not to say that goal-setting isnāt intertwined with that process. You will just need to find something else you can progress in despite your old age, whether thatās a different training style you can still grow in or knitting us all T-Nation scarfs.
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Great post!
Iām pursuing some very arbitrary numbers goals. Theyāre loosely based on the idea that if I reach them, that will correlate with something even harder to measure, ānot looking like a victimā.
If my goals were based specifically on how I look, I think they would be even more arbitrary and less useful!
For me, embarrassingly in the strong company of this forum, those arbitrary goals are:
135lb strict press - way past that now
225 bench - past that, never expect to go much further
315 squat - not there yet
405 deadlift - not there, but donāt expect it to be nearly so hard as the squat goal
These are starting numbers for lots of people with different body types than me. Iām in my 30s and have been training for years.
Thatās OK, because we arenāt all the same.
Once I hit these arbitrary numbers I fully expect to shift my training to be more like yours. Not numbers focused, but a good effort on things that will make my good-looking muscles look good.
In fact I canāt wait to crush my last two goal number so I can finally BE DONE with the really hard stuff. But Iām going to reach them, even though they are arbitrary.
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So true, and this seems to be the case in multiple aspects of life.
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This is gold. I wonder how many lifters get honest with themselves this way.
The why for a fitness professional is obvious: Business. They need to gain traction, be persuasive, walk the walk, gain trust, and make a living. So having continually high expectations and standards for themselves makes sense. Itās a strong why.
But for those whose careers donāt depend on their fitness accomplishments, the why will need to evolve over time if they want to be consistent for the rest of their lives.
Also, thank you for sharing part of your story! Itās awesome how far youāve come.
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If you mean land-whales where none of those lifts are even 1xBW, yes. Otherwise, those are perfectly respectable liftsā¦ even moreso if you take into account relative strength vs absolute strength.
Pulling 1000lbs at 440lb BW (calling out Eddie Hall) is not as impressive as pulling 800lbs at 200lb BW, in my humble opinion.
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Itās so good that you know this about yourself. And whatās awesome is your goals and progress can rotate. It doesnāt have to always be weight on the bar, it can be the mastery of new skills. So I totally get and support your perspective.
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The pursuit of functional strength is awesome! Is there a point at which youāll feel like youāre strong enough for any of those occasions?
And by the way, I love that you have dramatic (what if) scenarios in your head. Those are what are in my head when I take defensive life skills classes and do tactical training at the shooting range.
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Sounds like weāre on the same page!
I keep making friends at the gym who are in their 70s and up, and several things stand out about them: theyāre consistent, they have lives outside the gym, theyāre friendly as heck, theyāre always happy, theyāre never complaining about their body fat, and theyāre never worried about a number on the barbell. Heck, they donāt even use barbells. LOL.
So would their lives be significantly better if they were focusing on their āgainzā or their 1RMs? I canāt say for sure, but it doesnāt seem likely. They already have beautiful lives.
This is such a good point. When sports ended for me, I had the army - no drop-off in training. When I got out of the army I hadā¦ travel and a computer. I gained over 30 lbs and stopped any form of training completely because it didnāt matter for my job. Then I was also crankier, lazier, less engaged, etc. That why had shifted, as you point out, but hadnāt disappeared; I just had to go find it again.
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Thatās HUGE. Finding a compelling reason is like hacking your own mindset.
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I connect to 70+ people better than I do with people my own age (33) these days. If I were to name the 20 most important people in my life, a good third of them are over 70 and not related in any way. For a while I thought maybe something was wrong with me but I figured I just enjoyed not having to deal with any bravado. They have more stuff figured out. I am so inspired by the older generation, I open up to and trust these guys more than I would some family members. The elderly woman I mentioned earlier is 81 and my 10 minute pop-ins often become 2 hour talks about anything from her discovering a new Netflix show to philosophy and how things have changed. I love it. We both learn so much.
I donāt know what that has to do with weight training but just a big thumbs up for the guys who came before us. Iāll never forget running around my Grandads garden on a hot summers day and discovering one of these old pieces of gym equipment.
ā¦and me crying because all the springs pinched my chest.
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Off topic but i am the same way. Same age as you, and my mentors are much older. Always been that way.
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