08/11/2024
To everything, there is a season. Reminiscing on one of the proudest gym moments of my life, I’m gonna be honest, I miss my “lift as heavy as possible” days and I hope someday my health and my body will be able to get back to it. But a lesson that I have had to learn is that there is a time and a season for everything, even gym goals. There are seasons where you feel unstoppable and there’s no slowing down and the gains just keep on rolling in. That’s an amazing kind of season.
But then there are those seasons, where you feel like no matter what you do, you can’t seem to catch a break and the gains aren’t coming, or they even begin to fade, and you just keep getting kicked while you’re down. Funny enough, that’s an amazing kind of season too. You know why? Because it makes you reevaluate things. Not only does it force you to re-examine your “why” for being in the gym, but it makes you learn how to be flexible with it.
For me personally, I’ve learned that my why changes with my seasons. Even in the midst of chronic and mysterious pain over the past couple years, you could still find me in the gym, and even though my training style changed, I was still training. Was it because exercise made me feel better? Sometimes. Was it because I was just trying to be healthy? Yes, that’s always a driver for me. Was it my vanity? Definitely. Honestly, there were times that my vanity was the only thing that got my butt to the gym. Like I said, there’s a season for everything, even your “why”. For me I’ve been driven by the number on the scale when I first started my journey, and though I don’t really care about that now, at one point I did. I’ve chased the amount of weight on the bar for a large part of my journey, which I’ve had to let go of for now, and at other times I’ve simply just cared a lot about what I look like. All of those reasons at one time or another have been my why.
Now, I know that maybe some of those “whys” weren’t the best but they have all been a part of my journey and in one way or another, they helped me weave the gym into my routine so now it’s literally just a part of my life in a healthy way. So yeah, maybe the superficial “whys” weren’t the best, but when I look deeper than all of them, I can genuinely say that my biggest “why”, the reason the gym is just a part of my DNA at this point, is that no matter what my life looks like, the gym makes me feel strong and confident. It reminds me that I can do hard things, mentally and physically and that no matter where I am in my life, the gym fits into every season of it, even if it looks different sometimes. Honestly, I think it’s necessary to have multiple “whys” on our fitness journeys, because a lot of the time, only one of them will speak to you depending on what season of life you are in.
Sometimes you have to find the why that fits your season.
