6 weeks later

I just completed my six weeks of beginner weights training! Oof, quite an experience.

I was chatting over with a girlfriend recently. She’s the best! Eagerly asking about it, keen to hear how I had found it, more interested in the mental/emotional difficulties she anticipated I would have with this degree of physical effort. She never once asked me what weight I’d lifted or any of the measurables. She only cared about me.

Gym culture is almost by definition competitive, even if the competition is only with yourself. This is the reason I’ve avoided it until now, I think. I don’t like competition. It feels like failure in action to me, an ongoing and repeated falling short of some expectation. You’re supposed to keep moving, keep shifting the goalposts, increasing the weights or the reps or decreasing the time taken. And that’s a slippery slope for me. A pathway back towards an earlier narrative of ‘never good enough’ which I’ve spent my adult years trying to rewrite. And in the gym context specifically, it also brings me up close with a whole host of other deep-seated beliefs about my own strength or physical robustness. All that to get around before I do a single rep of anything!

My friend said she was proud of me for the attempt. It reminded me to feel proud of myself too. Thank you, friend!

I truly stepped out of my comfort zone to try this and it was really illuminating about what yoga does and doesn’t offer me, how beneficial it is but also where there might be some limitations. Here’s a (slightly ironic) list of some things which totally messed with my yoga brain while I was in the gym:

• you have to wear trainers! ha ha, no bare feet allowed.
• you use your breath in a whole different way — no calm samavritti pranayama here, effortful grunting is positively encouraged
• movements aren’t supposed to be smooth and even like in vinyasa – “just get it up there any old how” I was always being told when I baulked at lifting something that seemed ridiculously heavy
• physical discomfort is encouraged (even necessary?) and working to the point of failure is a legitimate training strategy
• it’s ok to shout ‘f***’ when something is particularly challenging
• it’s ok to jump back into plank (rather than Caturanga) — hello burpees!
• ‘tuck the tailbone’ is a helpful stabilising action rather than a ‘yoga no no’
• a squat is not the same as Malasana (esp not a ‘suitcase squat’ — I never stopped laughing at that one!)
• training is hungry work and induces completely different cravings than even the most vigorous yoga practice
• there’s no savasana! a minimal stretch and you’re done
• you’re not supposed to end a training session bowing to your personal trainer 🙂

So my yoga habits and behaviours were being constantly challenged. That was hard enough. It’s the bigger lessons I’m still mulling over. Svadhyaya right?! It’ll take time to digest the experience. I’m sure there’s a gym word for self-reflection as well, aside from a functional training log…?

But for now there’s this: it turns out that self-competition can be a more nuanced, interesting place than I previously believed. It’s just training: it’s not meant to be an exposure of personal flaws or personality deficiencies. Some days I felt fierce and fiery, some days I had to dig deep to find any amount of energy or commitment. But there’s no deep significance beyond my ability on that day to lift a weight or keep up with some HIIT exercises. End of story. Walk away. Or hobble, if it was too intense!

Since my supervised training ended I’ve been going to the gym and doing a run once a week on top of my yoga practice. I am more tired! But I feel a bit stronger and I have a clearer sense of my current limitations as well as future capacity. I see change happening, I feel it in my muscles quite literally. The cultivation of a more gritty, ‘get it done’ gym mentality is also a practice for me, massively different to the qualities I cultivate in my yoga. My trainer told me to go away and watch videos of men weightlifting and visualise myself doing this. It was hilariously parallel to my yoga teacher once telling me to find videos of yoga practitioners moving in a way that inspired grace 🙂

Who knows what the coming weeks will look like and if I’ll keep going with this. Grace or grit or some way of combining both…?