My morning gym visit. Today, chest and back.
Bench press (on a machine), lateral pull downs, seated rows, a little abs and back¹. Finishing up with some cardio and stretching.

I recently turned 61 and I have been a regular gym goer since my early twenties.

As I get older my reason for pushing weight up and down has changed radically.
From maintaining the buff², to full mounting³ gravity.
Gravity and entropy.

Yet, looking around, I can see I am not alone in falling into the trap of training at the gym, because I need to…..so I can go to the gym.

I can easily lose track of why exactly I am pushing these heavy rubber disks up and down, or running in place while watching a TV screen trying to convince me I am running up some magnificent alpine mountain track.

Thus, it becomes an empty cycle of over-training gym visits followed by too tired to do anything fun for the rest of the day. A self indulgent loop of denial.

My body is 61. My brain is still re-running episodes of ‘Happy Days’ and ‘MASH.

See….when you first begin training, you notice your strength, your cardio, your butt shape, whatever you are working on, begin to improve. You feel great and your body is an effective functional wonderland out and about in the world.

But at a certain point, or perhaps it’s at a certain age, you cross this boundary. You feel your mortality begin to encroach. So you want to stay fit, you want to full mount old age and give it a rear naked choke….and the multi-billion dollar fitness industry bombards you with advice that you must.
It’s not just teenagers that experience body dysmorphia.

So your gym training becomes a means… to improve your gym training. That’s the ends. More gym.

I am trying to avoid this. I definitely concur that maintaining a level of fitness and functionality will improve ones quality of life (‘moving forward’ as they say). But the important thing is to extract those fitness payoffs from life enriching activities.

• Riding my bike.
• Going for a mountain walk with Kelly and Juno.
• Morning stretching and meditation.
• Being able to exert myself in various tasks without ‘gassing out’⁴
• Stuff like that.

Training at the gym should simply be a means to support those important fitness activities of living an embodied life.
It really doesn’t take much effort at the gym to accomplish this.
The real effort is in living life.

Spot me.