I made a friend at the gym.
Actually, I have been on a bit of a roll and made several friends at the gym lately in an attempt to be more socially-orientated and community building. It is not that I have ignored people there, it is more that it has been a polite nod and smile and occasionally a word or two. But now I am consciously interacting and I have found that so far, people have not only been receptive, but it is like they have been craving some socialisation. Tonight, one of the guys came up to me and asked me to connect and since he nor I are on social media, the only way to do so was to "become friends" on the gym app used to login. Sad.
He seems like a decent fellow though.
But while we were doing this and since I don't use the app for anything other than signing in to get through the front gates, he was showing me the workout tracker, which just logs how often I go to the gym. The "goal" is set to 4 workouts a week, and so far this year, I have apparently been crushing it. The first half of last year however, well, that was pretty lame. But thinking back, it was probably because I slipped on the stairs and caught myself at the end of 2024, tearing my shoulder and needing a few months to recover enough to do anything much with my upper body.
The last six months are more where I would like to be, where I aim for five a week but average over four. I think that is an ideal amount for gym sessions without having any specific endgoal in mind. The last month or more though, I have changed my workout quite a lot and have pivoted away from most weights for the time being and into band exercises to improve my posture and overall tendon strength.
These aren't that bad I suppose considering my age, but I also think that a lot of the weight exercises I was doing were a bit too static, rather than engaging multiple parts of muscles in the chain of movement. And now with the bands (a range of light to heavy) I have been able to put a lot of pressure without impact, and I am noticing the difference in my general muscle strength and shape. Not only that, it is a far shorter workout, so I spend extra time stretching a bit more, though I am nowhere near as flexible as I was a handful of years ago.
As I get older, I want to be able to maintain strength, balance and bone density, which means that the body has to work together and be put under enough pressure to stay solid. I am not that far away from mid-century and it has been going downhill for some time already, and then speeding up after the stroke. At forty, I could standing jump onto a 140cm block, now I am scared to try 40cm. I can feel the fear in my body, already predicting that it is going to fail. But, I don't think in reality it is and I should instead be pushing it harder than I do.
I have lost so much confidence in my body.
No, this is not a body image thing, as the looks themselves aren't as important as the function. It is just that throughout my life I have been able to "know" what I am physically capable of at any given time. For instance as a kid, I functioned very well, but after getting chronic illness, I had to relearn what I could do, and it was a reduced range of movement, but not that reduced. After the stroke however, my body failed at the same time my head failed, which sort of through all the telemetry into a state of disarray and it has taken me an embarrassingly long time to even start to understand how to deal with it.
My body and mind are both misaligned.
But I am determined to not shrug my shoulders as if nothing can be done to improve either, and even if I fail to get better, at least I might do enough to slow the decline of getting worse. We all have a lot of excuses as to why we can't do this or that, but at the end of the day, for most of us most of the time, they really are just lame-ass excuses that have no real substance to them. Instead of not doing what we know we should because we don't feel like it and use excuses, we should just "man up" and get our asses to the gym, or to wherever and whatever we know we should do.
It might not be the gym.
It might be other things that get in our way of being a better version of ourselves, like being more social, or being kinder, or being more loving, or more present, or more patient. Every moment is a chance to practice being the kind of person we want to be, but every moment is also an opportunity to choose to be something else instead.
I am tired of the something else.
I choose to be a better me.
Taraz
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