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I remember noticing in grade 8 that my arms were smooth and fat, and the other boys had forearms that would ripple. That's when I started lifting weights.
In the beginning, I would listen to Megadeth or watch Star Trek while flexing blue plastic York dumbbells, or, later, doing bench presses and leg extensions on the compound bench that my parents must have bought for me at Canadian Tire. (I recorded the pilot episode of Voyager on VHS this way. I haven't watched it since.)
Later in life, I would enter fitness competitions, compete in powerlifting. My competition lifts were 245lbs bench / 375lb squat / 415 lbs deadlift. I lifted much more in practice, until I herniated two discs and had to quit. I prioritized intensity over longevity, and that's what it got me. I didn't just lose out on a hobby; I lost many friends. The folks I lifted with were terrific people and good friends, but once I stopped lifting, it felt strange for everyone to have me in the gym.
One night in my 20s, after weeks of Hydroxycut, I woke up at 3am on a bridge a kilometre away from my apartment, having no memory of how I got there. I was still in the shorts and t-shirt I wore to bed.
Hydroxycut supplement main website
As you might have noticed, I haven't had the healthiest relationship with fitness. I mostly exercised to feel superior to other people (hence the competitions) or because I felt ashamed enough of how I looked that I felt the need to be super fit to compensate.
One thing remained constant, though: Workout regimes always exhausted me. Whenever anyone cited exercise as "energizing", I would nod, but really I had no idea what they were talking about. Whether it was weightlifting, running, swimming, cycling -- usually whatever program I was running meant that I'd be foggy and exhausted for the last half of each day.
I twisted my mornings into torturous productivity drills because I needed to get everything done before noon, when I knew I would become useless. I abused caffeine to compensate; when I wasn't taking caffeine pills, I could drink 8 espressos a day, despite having tried my first coffee at age 26.
All this to say, exercise has rarely equated to energy for me, until recently.
After living in the Upside Down for most of 2022-2023, I let things slide. I was surprised to be alive, and relearning how to exist, pretty much. (See previous posts for more context on the Upside Down years.)
I wasn't sure if I'd ever have the desire to exercise again, but I figured it would happen if I was ready. I was sedentary, and I gained a lot of weight. I accumulated a Steam backlog and played through most of it. For once I didn't feel bad about being a lazyass.
Gradually, I started to move around more. After months, I worked some old kettlebells into my routine. After messing around with them for a while, I started to feel in my body that I wanted more of a challenge. I did some beginner kettlebell circuits I found on YouTube.
Once again, I was exhausted. But this association of exercise and exhaustion was so familiar to me that I accepted it. I spaced those circuits out so I'd only do them when I felt ready to be tired for a long while.
Anyways, once those became easy, I got bored again. I was poking around on the web, when I stumbled across a program called "Simple and Sinister" by Pavel Tsatsouline, a blast from my weightlifing past.
Pavel Tsatsouline Wikipedia biography
I won't go into the details, but the program is basically:
I don't know why, but this program has energized me like nothing before. The Simple and Sinister book indicates that this is by design; Pavel writes the the word for "workout" in Russian is "recharge", because that's what it supposed to do for you. I don't know what it does for other people, but it works for me. Chalk up a miracle for the common man.
I've had sufficient energy to do some other lifts at other parts of the day. A few days ago, I was doing some floor presses, and as I pressed the bells over my head, I felt this sense of full-body wonder. I was actually in awe that I could do this. Less than two years prior, I had been shuffling about that same room, occupying my tortured nervous system by trying to clean the house one room at a time. I would sit on the couch and take breaks every 30 minutes; I hadn't slept in days, and light house-cleaning took everything I had. Now, here I am, feeling healthier than I can pretty much ever remember.
Someone who has made great progress with health issues told me the other day about their meditation practice, and how they wanted to start meditating to put themselves in the mindset that they were already all the things they wanted to be, right now. Part of the mindset they were adopting was to have enough energy to set up a morning routine of mindfulness and exercise, so they could have a super productive day.
I had a visceral negative reaction to this. I thought about why, and all these things came tumbling out.
In the end, I think meditating with intention is good, and my overreaction was a combination of my personal experience and my own belief system. (I say "my own" because there are many aspects of my faith practice which I don't quite jive with, and most of them have to do with "magical thinking." But this sort of thinking helps a lot of people, and their outcomes are good.)
But for all those people who feel like their nervous systems are ill at ease, like they can't settle down or feel at rest, like they don't have enough energy to live -- I know so many of them will try to punish themselves into feeling better, often through exercise. I wish more people could have the opportunity to learn how to ease into it. For me, it was a combination of suffering and luck that gave me this gift of energy. It feels wonderful.