Content note: This article mentions topics of diet culture and its effects, such as body dysmorphia and disordered eating.
Weightlifting, cardio, stretching, squats, abs are all unfamiliar words associated with fitness and sometimes are fear inducing among newbies. When you first start going to a gym, you have this feeling that not only those machines look unnatural, but they also look as if they are going to hurt you. At least, these were my first thoughts and feelings when I had first experience at my gym.
I was afraid to go to the weights section – where all strong people with salient muscles holding protein shakes were working out —because I feared to look like an amateur and be ridiculed. This is why I was doing cardio first pretending to like dying on a treadmill and having fun while looking at the screen with counting calories and my heartbeat. The problem here is that if you are a pretender (like me) and do not favor sprinting, you will not be at this gym for more than a short time and you will probably not have fun while being there. At that time, I had some friends who did weightlifting and really enjoyed it, but for me the idea of pumping iron to get happiness was nothing but madness. Regardless, I wanted to give it a try because I was curious why weightlifters and my friends, in particular, think it is so cool to lift fifty kilos of weight and look like a red tomato. My experience in weightlifting started not that long ago but I am a bit surprised that I still have fun doing it.
After two-three weeks of weightlifting and learning about humans’ muscle structure and body in general, I realized that it was indeed fascinating how our muscles work, how they behave on this or that machine. However, the most exciting thing was to find out about mind-muscle connection. The concept of this connection is that a person feels the particular muscle and knows that that muscle works at the time of training. After more than one month of training at the gym, I started feeling stronger and hardier; I could walk more, I had more energy and I just felt better.
Diet culture did not pass me by, even though eating broccoli all day long is not my thing. Despite the fact that counting calories might indeed affect your appearance in a way that you can lose or gain weight, it does not cancel out the fact that you can still pump weights and feel good. Sometimes, my motivation of going to a gym was reduced because of overeating after keeping my “diet”. By the way, I experienced many issues with food while doing sports, because I thought that if I ate chocolate or something sweet at the time, I would most definitely ruin my day and my muscles would not grow. Since I assumed I was eating “healthy” and “clean”, I started dividing food into “bad” and “good”. Broccoli and chicken, for example, were “good”, while bread and peanut butter were worse than alcohol or cigarettes. I used to drink at parties and suppress the feeling of hunger because I considered the calories that were in wine as food for me. Overall, it all started for the sake of my health and ended in eating disorders and body dysmorphia. That is why we should be very careful while trying to be healthy as it sometimes can lead to unexpected consequences which are not really “healthy”.
Now I feel a lot more confident with my exercises because I know many of them and I learned how to do those exercises properly and not to cause harm to my body. If you are a newbie at your gym, do not be afraid to ask others for help – they are not as scary as you perceive them to be. All of us once were new at our gyms. Just do what you really enjoy doing: try as many machines as you want, be creative and learn the technique in order to avoid injuries. Start your gym experience with light weights and three sets. You can do it!
Author: Katharina Drozdov
