The Gym Is Life’s Training Ground

It always makes my day when I get to have this conversation with others and discuss the finer points of fitness and training.

While I was doing some tricep pulldowns, I must have grimaced from my elbow aching, as the guy training next to me asked if I had an injury, more precisely, if I had tennis elbow and how I got it.

I responded that most of my joints have some pain these days. I broke it down to the fact that I have been training, and often training hard, for a long time now. It catches up to you, takes its toll, and at times different joints cause discomfort. I also explained that there were times when I didn’t really work on recovery well enough or get enough sleep, mistakes he shouldn’t make.

He says he’s only nineteen, at which point I explained that it is precisely then that he needs to start caring about longevity. The older you get, the worse the situation can get.

It took us into a conversation about longevity and pushing yourself, but pushing yourself in the right way. Don’t push yourself too hard for the sake of just showing off or proving a point to others, I explained. Don’t think about those around you. Do it at your own pace, and the only person you have to prove something to, if at all, is yourself. Don’t add weight just for the sake of adding weight.

One of my favourite things to tell guys who are just starting out, if they ask me for advice, is that no matter how hard you try or how big and strong you get, there will always be someone bigger, fitter or stronger. At the same time, after you start, there will always be a new guy who walks in who will be smaller, less fit or less strong than you. So just judge yourself by your own self. Set your own standards.

Understand, push, and break your limitations. Work on your mind and attitude. Don’t just do it for the sake of the person next to you.

Which led me to my favourite point: train for life, not just for the gym.

With the right mindset, the skills you learn and build when training are not just applicable to the gym. They are transferable to life outside the gym. Your strength of character. Your ability to achieve something you first thought you couldn’t as you progress. Your discipline, to name just a few. All of these are priceless when you walk out of the gym as well. In relationships, in business, in life in general.

Self-work and improvement go a long way, but don’t limit it to the four walls of the gym. Take your gains with you.

I explain it as the gym being your training ground, almost like a controlled experiment where you are in control of most of the variables. It is where you get to build a foundation. It’s a controlled environment with less external forces where you get to choose how you proceed.

If you fail, well, it’s not the end of the world. Your progress may not be achieved at that point, or where you wanted it to be. But you get to try again, with little to no impact on other elements of your life.

However, in the big bad world, things have an impact on different elements of your life. Progress comes with more challenges. There can be many external elements and factors that impact your decisions, work, progress, and achievements.

So utilise the controlled environment to fine-tune and hone these skills, and then take them out there into the uncontrolled. It won’t be as simple as it is in the controlled environment, but it will most definitely go a long way towards helping you through it.

If you’ve worked on and developed those skills, you have a great foundation and starting point to fall back on.