Why Bother Training?

Why Bother Training?

I am sure at some point in your life someone has asked you (or you may have asked yourself!), “what is the point of all that training? Wouldn’t it be easier to sit at home and eat pizza?” Well, to answer the second part of that particular question, yes it would…however there are reasons that some of us do go training, eat healthy and so on. So why would a sane person choose to lift so much weight that the blood vessels in their eyeballs burst? Why would someone else go to the point of absolute exhaustion and…keep running?! Why does a fighter continue to go and get beaten up and ground down mentally and physically day after day?

I cannot answer all the above questions (and I am sure there are many more things people do that I would not consider fun training ideas), but I can speak for myself. Having done a wide variety of sports, I have a lot of different perspectives, but I will talk about the perspective of powerlifting (or, to be more general, ‘lifting heavy weights’) which is the thing I enjoy most and keep coming back to.

What I do in the gym is definitely not the norm, and does often get some strange looks – moreso when I was competing in powerlifting, which involved squeezing into tiny squat suits and bench shirts on a regular basis – but I would much rather lift a heavy weight a few times than anything else I could be doing in the gym. The thrill of being under a bar with a few hundred kilos on it and actually being able to lower it and come back up cannot be beaten. However, there are moments I question my sanity. Moments like today, when I finished a set of squats then promptly collapsed onto the floor as I was unable to stand and lay panting on the floor for a few minutes. In the aftermath, and with a stonking exertion headache coming on, I debated with another guy in the gym the point of doing that to yourself.

So without further ado, here is my list of assorted reasons why I train. Please feel free to reply with your own point of view, no matter what you do or how long you have been training, and perhaps this can provide some inspiration to others!

The main reason I train so hard is so that the rest of my life is easier. That may sound strange, so here goes…if I am strong, lifting anything in real life is no problem. If someone wants to move house, I can do things like this:

(by the way, that weighed about 75 kilos…)

If I work hard doing cardio, I don’t have the problem of getting out of breath walking down the street – I can even run for a bus without having a heart attack! If I want to sprint across a road and hop the fence on the other side, I don’t have to think about it, I just do it. Of course, carrying and passing weights to clients, spotting etc is easy also. Seeing the weight on the bar is satisfying in a way too!

I also train because there is the element of looking in the mirror and liking what I see. This has not been a focus for a long time, for years I was just interested in getting big and strong, but I do also like to look in the mirror and be able to actually see the results of my hard work. Seeing your abs gradually appear over the course of a few weeks is a very satisfying thing – as Alywn Cosgrove likes to say, “nothing tastes better than being lean feels!”

What are your reasons for training? What keeps you going through the hard workouts? I would love to hear from you! No doubt there are people who have just trained for the first time reading this, there are also professional athletes, and I am interested to hear all your stories so don’t be shy!

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