At the beginning of this month, I had an experience, one that I would not want to re-live.
I had been pretty consistently going to the gym almost all year and had been religiously following my diet plan for a couple of months. I had an elaborate workout plan and had been sticking to it for quite some time. Everything was just perfect. Then just before the Labor Day long weekend, I decided to go to the gym one more time. I was maybe a little tired but nothing out of the ordinary. I did have thoughts about skipping but I had not skipped a session in months and also I was going out on a trip that weekend so that meant no diet and no workout. So I decided to go anyway. It was my legs/core day. I started out perfectly fine with some 20-25 minutes of HIIT/Circuit Training. I then went to the deadlift station, setup my warm up weights (25, 25 & 45 bar), wore my belt and started doing my reps - 1, 2, 3, BAM!! I felt excruciating pain in my lower back and immediately dropped the bar bell. I just knew at that moment that something horrible had happened. I had heard so many horror stories of people having messed up backs and understandably so, my mind started spinning with unpleasant thoughts. I started to feel dizzy. I sat down on a machine but felt that I might pass out so I tried getting up and this is the last memory I have.
The next thing I remember is that I woke up on the floor of the gym with 15 guys surrounding me. I opened my eyes momentarily and passed out again. The next time I woke up I was conscious but couldn’t sit up because of the pain. Within no time the paramedics arrived at the scene and did some checkups but I knew what had happened. I pulled my back, thought too much into it and got a panic attack. That was it.
But anyway, I couldn’t sleep that night, had to cancel the trip and was bed ridden for the entire long weekend. I started walking again in a few days but I was nowhere strong enough to go back to the gym. It would take me couple of more weeks to get there. It is this time when I did some thinking, had a lot of insights and learned some important lessons when it comes to working out.
On Consistency
Dropping weights to achieve full range of motion, maintaining posture and total control is better than “pushing and increasing weight in every workout” school of thought. You might get results late, sure, but you will spend more uninterrupted time in the gym and to me that is much more important. Anything which ingrains the habit further into you is more important than the pace of progress. It’s is extremely important to not get injured because that will totally throw you out of the groove and it takes immense will to get back into it after you recover. Realize that you are in this for life! Don’t rush, take it easy and be consistent.
On Muscle Gain
Physical transformation is an extremely, extremely slow process. You have to, you absolutely have to rewire your brain to stop thinking about progress. The progress is often so painfully slow that if you are consciously thinking about it everyday, it will drive you crazy. Strangely, you have to take the ambition out of your brain in order to achieve something truly ambitious. You need to make it mundane and muscle memory driven. It’s okay to not feel pumped up in every workout.
On Fat Loss
I felt that our body has different “states” and you need to get your body into specific states to achieve your goals. Fat loss doesn’t happen over days or weeks. It happens over months. It takes a lot to make it happen but when it happens, it carries quite a lot of inertia. It is like moving a giant bus over to a slope. You need to push a lot initially but once on the slope it pretty much carries itself if you are not putting blockers. I felt that after some time, my body entered this zone where I was just losing fat and gaining muscle every week. Even when I was injured I kept losing fat. The only explanation is that my body started to react in a certain way and it would take a drastic change in lifestyle to alter that. It’s like nature’s reward for your hard work. It pays off for sometime even if you are not working for it.
On Diet
You do not need to follow extremely strict diet. Performing at 80% will get you to most of your goals. It’s hard to differentiate the gain that you will have by putting in extra 20% but you will easily differentiate the lifestyle change you will have because of it. Sadly, maintaining anything at 80% is extremely fragile and often ends up sliding all the way down. You absolutely have to at some point aspire for total 100% control. Once you truly master the 100%, you have the self-control necessary to sustainably remain at 80%.
On Morale
Once a routine truly seeps into your lifestyle, you start to draw certain pleasure from it. Being on the sidelines was hard for me as I could feel the drop in morale because of it. I would have felt better if I had managed to do some pull-ups or sit-ups but I was not fit enough to do even that. I learned an important thing - you know you have formed a habit when not doing it starts affecting your mood. That’s a good place to be in. All it took for me was a few months of dedicated effort. This applies to just about anything in life.
I hope someone can connect with these thoughts and maybe avoid a few mistakes I made.