Life after SSRI

Some hopefully somewhat original thoughts on going to the gym

Today at the gym I did eight reps of thirty kilo dumbbell presses, a personal best for me.

I vividly remember the day my trainer handed me a pair of twenty-fives for the first time. I could do almost nothing with them; at best I may have slowed down their inexorable descent to the ground a little bit.

Four and a half years ago I walked into the gym for the first time, and it was the best did thing I ever did.

Forgive me, but like a lifelong smoker who has just quit, I feel the strong urge to evangelise, and think the best way of doing so is to tell you about a few things about going to the gym that weren't as I expected.

There's no need to be miserable

Popular media loves to depict weight loss and exercise as some kind of punishment for fat people, with drill sergeants shouting in your face about maggots and the need to do endless pushups.

We are no longer in high school and I now pay a personal trainer to help me improve my fitness. He fully understands that shouting in his clients' faces would a) not help them and b) quickly cause them to become former clients. (Which is not to say that he cannot sometimes be gentle but firm, as and when appropriate.)

I was prepared to accept a certain amount of pain, but I was worried that my supply of motivation would not last to get through a lot of it. As it turned out, I was certainly asked to put in some serious effort, but it was never anything I was not capable of.

In school, physical education consisted of teachers telling me to do things I physically could not do, and then getting mad at me for not being able to do them. Nobody ever even mentioned the concepts of training or improvement; it was just my weekly scheduled reminder that I wasn't good enough.

Not a great school, in retrospect.

It works for everyone, even you and me

I fully realise that being able to afford a personal trainer is a privilege, and finding the right one on the first try was a stroke of luck. I can only advise you to be equally lucky, or if you aren't, at least try to adopt this mindset: that bodies mostly all work the same, and if we can get our brains to get that body to move, we're set.

Obvious maybe, but it took me several decades to attain this insight.

Motivation schmotivation

There is something elegantly simple about the logic; if you exercise regularly, you will improve. Especially in the beginning, what you do exactly doesn't matter as much, as long as you do something. That doesn't mean it's easy, but it's not complex.

I know myself, and I was aware that motivation wasn't going to last long enough to achieve anything, so I just focused on ways of making sure I would show up:

You might actually enjoy (some of) it

I'm in no danger of becoming dangerously addicted, but strength training in particular is not unpleasant. There is a certain satisfaction in using your muscles, getting better at handling the weights, and seeing the numbers go up. I enjoy the feeling of having acquired a measure of expertise and no longer being a complete beginner.

Fuck the haters

The standard advice is that nobody in the gym looks at anyone else, and this is mostly true. (I think it's more accurate to say that looking is acceptable but staring is not.)

My gym certainly has its share of obnoxious gym bros, but they are not your standard high school jerks. I am irrelevant to them, not because I'm fat or weak but because I'm old; they live in a world of Tiktok and broccoli hair and vaping and they accurately perceive me as someone from a different world.

I've never seen or heard of any bullying in my gym, and it's the kind of place where it wouldn't be tolerated anyway, but I'm not going to pretend that it doesn't exist. We've all seen the Youtube videos. This is the one occasion where you should maybe read the comments; these people may be younger, thinner, and better looking than you and me, but nobody likes them.

In my experience, the worst kind of person to encounter in the gym, as in most other areas of life, is the middle-aged white guy with no filter who doesn't recognise that I don't want to talk to him and won't leave me alone.

Where are we now

Right now I am... probably about average. Certainly no worse than many men my age. I could certainly still stand to a lose a few pounds, but I'm reasonably strong and I no longer walk hunched over like a cartoon caveman. I can't say I enjoy looking in mirrors, but I don't avoid them as much as I used to.

I wear expensive designer glasses and my wardrobe has improved a lot. That's not a direct result, but it's certainly related.