Going to the gym is something I knew I would love doing, but I was not fortunate enough to have access to the gym when I was in high school. To compensate for that, we had a sport master that made sure we stayed fit everyday. We got woken up by 5 am and told to work out. While this was fun to me, lots of people complained because they never liked exercising but I did it with all my heart. I loved exercising because aside the fact that it keeps you healthy, your body excretes this happy hormones when you do great in your exercise and I need all the happiness I can get.
I thought of working out in university, but we all know about the university lifestyle and frustrations. I could barely manage balancing my grades and having a social life, I couldn’t afford to add gym time to that. But before I went to university, during the waiting period after applying to the university, I used to lift household items. It worked for some time but I got into the university and I had to stop.
I have a very high metabolism, meaning that no matter how much I eat, my body burns out the calories faster even when am at rest or when am doing any activity. I find myself in the midst of people that we eat same quantity of food but they get bigger or gain weight, but I don’t. I was worried for a while because I felt I was sick or something. I get asked a lot if I eat fine when I was younger because I didn’t gain any weight. This made me research about metabolism and how it differs from different people.
Eating a lot of and working out is one of the best ways for a person with high metabolism like me to gain weight. The only issue is that, it takes time for my body to actually get as big as I want it to be, but with consistency we are getting there.
Working out is one thing that needs a lot of self discipline because, without self discipline and consistency you are not going to see any result. Working out has taught me patience, endurance and strength. Before working out in the gym, I used to think that your body size matters in how much weight you can lift in the gym. I felt the bigger you are, the bigger the weight you can lift, I was wrong, I have seen people twice my weight unable to lift half of what I lift.
Okay I exaggerated a bit in twice my weight.
Working out takes lots of patience and realizing that you are in no competition with anybody but yourself. Because you see people you assume to be weak based on their physical appearance lifting heavier weights, you feel you can lift it without actually trying your body first. Those people have been lifting that weight for a long time, their body has gotten adapted to tolerating such weight.
The gym I work out at don’t really have much gym equipments, so most times you find 4 people sharing a particular equipment, especially the weight for bench pressing or curling. The first time I joined the gym, I watched the gym guys lift their usual weight of 30kg and above. I sat down quietly waiting for them so I can adjust the weight to 10kg because, that’s what I could lift. They laughed and tried to motivate me to increase the weight just a little. That wasn’t my first time in the gym before, so I knew that getting intimidated by their weight lifting was something to overlook, because you can easily hurt yourself trying to force your body lift What it’s not used to.
Dieting is one essential part of working out that I used to neglect, forgetting that our body is biological and food is necessary to get the perfect body size we need.
My greatest challenge working out at the gym is working on my legs. I don’t like leg days at all, but sadly it’s necessary because, you don’t want to end up having an even body where your upper body is way bigger than your lower body.