As a young kid, I was more often than not found with my nose in a book than playing outside. I loved reading, and after my initial childhood, was ambivalent about moving. I enjoyed skating and wheel based movement methods, but walking or running was not my scene. I was a naturally skinny kid right up until puberty though, so it was okay.
After a ligament tear in my teenage years and a trip to the United States, I got fat. I was okay with this. Until then, I was not very physically active, mostly preferred to bunk sports period(of which we only had one a week - i think i would have participated more if it wasn’t a choice between library and sports). I wasn’t too fond of contact sports, didn’t like cricket, and preferred to skateboard and skate instead. None of which built much muscle.
Again, this is a grown up me writing this down with his lens of then. At the time, this wasn’t even something I was aware of. I was often praised for being smart, funny, intelligent, knowledgeable, stuff like that. I took the brains over brawn mentality to heart, and sort of glorified the oh yes of course I’m a nerd, I can’t be built also. That wasn’t to say I didn’t attempt to be physically active, but it was extrinsically motivated, not an internal need.
I did a couple months of Yoga, after my nana and mom insisted a lot. It was good, I enjoyed it, but towards the end I would get out of the house at 6, drive to a shady tree, and go back to sleep, returning an hour later. I stopped going eventually. I joined the gym too, half heartedly throwing my body around hoping for something to happen. There was no plan, no real heart in it.
Sometime around after the Pandemic, this changed a lot. I had been reading a lot of r/fitness, and decided it was time to take the time to sort out my body. At the time, I didn’t know what a beautiful journey it would set off.
I was slow. I didn’t go about it with extreme enthusiasm. I searched around for gyms near my house, they were expensive. The movements on reddit seemed comprehensive, but I was very scared about injury. In my head, if I did a movement even slightly wrong, once, I would immediately tweak my back and be messed up forevermore. So I took my time, saying I’d start eventually. This was a year.
It started with pull-ups. On the way down from the first floor to the ground floor in my house, there is a little ledge. I started hanging on it for a few weeks. Just hanging. I would then jump, and hold myself on the way down(I later learned that was called a negative). I started having to jump less and less, and eventually could pull myself up without jumping at all. That felt really good. It was the first pull-up I did since puberty. I started noticing some definition in my biceps, which wasn’t there before. This was a revelation to me. For some reason, I had just taken it as fact that my body’s “strength” was static. Theoretically, I knew that people could change their bodies, but what I had internalised was that this was what I was.
That was when I joined the gym. I saw a tweet somewhere that recommended GZCLP, and instead of even attempting to go into analysis mode to see if that was the best, I went with it. It took me a while to wrap my head around it, but it made sense to me once he explained it. It starts simple. You lift the empty barbell, and just add five kg each week for the heavy lifts, and 2.5 kg for the light lifts. there are just 3 workouts per exercise, and I loved the simplicity.
This became like crack to me. There are just 4 movements. Bench, Deadlift, Overhead press, and Squat. You keep adding weight. Repeat. I started in June 23, for real. I struggled to lift the empty barbell the first time I bench pressed, and had to use a smaller bar. I was not the most consistent with it, going 59 times from then till today, when I’m writing this in Jul 24. Some workouts are not tracked, maybe 10. That makes 70 workouts in about an year, or once per week.(the reality is more there were entire weeks I didn’t go, and weeks where I went religiously, but that’s somewhat what it was like). Today, I can deadlift 100kg for three reps. the first time i repped above my body weight, there were tears in my eyes I can’t explain. It felt so good.
That’s not the end of it really, or even a good middle. Lots of other stuff happened along the way, I got injured once(it wasn’t the end of the world! i recovered!), I went to Himachal for a month to do yoga again(self motivated this time, it was great), and also definitely lazed around for a lot. But