Everybody Wants To Be a Bodybuilder, Nobody Wants To Lift No Heavy Ass Weights

Because lifting heavy ass weights is really hard.

I had many great reasons for not going to the gym and working on my body. I didn’t have proper gym shoes, for one. I didn’t know what to do in the gym. I did not have the time. I had no idea if I would look silly trying to lift with no experience. I didn’t even know If I earned enough to sustain regular gym fees. Maybe I could even starve myself into into my desired shape! So many reasonable excuses twirled around in my head. Excuses that I am sure would make a boat load of sense If I told them to a sympathetic crowd. But they were excuses nonetheless. I knew I would feel really stupid if, some day in the future, my kids looked at younger pictures of me and saw me out of shape and asked why I didn’t get in better shape. Would I really recite all my worthless excuses to them? Really? That would be embarrassing and, if they turned out anything like me, they would not believe it.

So, on that fateful day, I decided that my excuses, perfect as they were, seemed sort of worthless. The gym was quite far from my house, and it was already 8PM. But again, that seemed like an excuse that a non-doer would give. So I plugged in my ear-pods and walked all the way to the gym.

The faces were unfamiliar, and people who were working out looked at me like an alien who’d just dropped unto their planet. I didn’t care, and I asked for the receptionist. Thirty minutes later, I was in my house. I was 16,000 naira poorer, and a month’s subscription at a gym richer. All of a sudden my previous excuses seemed like rags. I didn’t have gym shoes? Who cares! I saw someone wearing crocs! I didn’t have time? Really? I could not carve out 5 hours out of a week? I didn’t know what to do? Really? I couldn’t learn? I couldn’t ask? Excuses that had held me back for months were suddenly nothing. Irrelevant. A waste of time. They were revealed for the sham they were.

The next morning, I woke up excited. I didn’t have actual gym shoes, but I remember I had a pair of run-down-on-its-miserable-head-rainbow-sneakers that I used to wear in the university. Interesting history about these shoes; they were my first big boy purchase, and I bought them for what seemed like a lot of money at the time: 20,000. I had not worn them in years, and they still fit. Importantly, they had no holes and were under no threats of falling apart. So I wore them and went for the first day. And I almost died.

My rainbow colored shoes featuring my very well toned legs and my NYSC socks

I won’t get into the details because they are boring, but the most important part is that by the end of the first couple of sets, I was pretty sure I was going to die soon. There was a trainer there, and he didn’t even care that I was on the verge of death. The other people in the gym started teasing me about my stamina, and it got so ridiculous that I started explaining myself despite not being asked a single question. Have you ever been in a situation where no one asked you to explain anything, but you just spontaneously burst into one to save face? That is exactly what happened. Before long, anyone who had ears became aware that this was my first time ever in a gym, and that I was trying my best actually. Soon, the teasing turned into pity, which was actually worse for my self esteem. One of the older women teased me and said something like this; Iwo okunrin kunrin, you’re passing out so quickly. I informed her that I might be a man, but I was actually a feminist, and as such I believed that men and women were equal. She was shocked to learn that men and women were equal, which only lent credence to my suspicion that I am actually more progressive than most Nigerian women. Unfortunately for me, male feminists do not get a badge at the gym. In the end, I could not finish the day’s sets, and it took all I had to drag myself from the floor home. I slept for two hours afterwards. I went back to the gym the day after that.

Every day at the gym was torture, and about 25 minutes into every workout I felt like dying. I felt like dying so badly that I would curse myself and wonder if I wasn’t just wasting my time. And then I would tell myself to stop being a little bitch, and it would go on like that for every minute until the end of the session. Wow I feel like dying— what a little bitch — but this little bitch feels like dying — #Things little bitches say — what if I agree that I am a little bitch? — well, what if we don’t little bitch? It was hell, hell, and just more hell. But every time I almost died, I repeated what I knew to be true to myself; the difference between the doer and the non-doer lies only in the doing. And I had to do. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done, and the fact that I was doing it without anyone forcing me to just made me even more miserable. Unfortunately, that wasn’t a good enough reason to quit, so I continued anyway.

My main problem was that I wasn’t losing weight or building muscle fast enough. After the first session, I stepped on the scale and foolishly expected to see some results. I didn’t. Then I tried that for the next two weeks, and saw nothing. At that point, I once again felt like giving up. Then I remembered that the only difference between the doer and the non-doer lies only in the doing.

One day, while working, I overheard some dude, with somewhat impressive muscles, showing off to some lady. She teased him about not seeing results, and he informed her that it was still early days as he’d only been training for four months. Four months? Only? And here I was lamenting about my lack of gains after two weeks? That seemed really pathetic. But what was I to do, as the passage of time — that glorious process where you go from being a beginner to an amateur — was too slow.

During those first two weeks, I could remember every gym session, every motion that almost killed me, exactly what clothes I wore. By the end of the first month, the days began to blur in my memory. It was already a part of my routine. Every other day was just more of the last day. I suppose that was when I began to be truly at peace with the time and investment it would take for me to get to my goal. I realized that it was only when each session became a blur in my memory that I would be able to put up with the pain and dedication I would need to get from here to there. No one wants to be a novice or a beginner at anything, and I found that the easiest way to stop being one is to do and do and do and do till you cannot even remember how many times you have done.

When I was in Uni, I knew many hijabis who were totally cracked academically. I thought that would be the limit of Muslim crackedness, and I was wrong. My gym has not one, but two Muslim women who work out like they have four lungs. At first it was cute, then it became embarrassing, then it became seriously impressive. It reminded me of a curious study I once read that showed that top athletes aren’t just stronger and fitter, they tend to also be smarter than the mean. And that makes sense, doesn’t it? The grit that it takes to mog an entire class could, in some cases, also transfer to the gym. The dedication one puts into doing one thing could also be transferable to other things. So, if you think that someone is stupid just because they work out in the gym all day, know that they are probably smarter than half of the people you know, and may best you in a classroom — or boardroom — as well as they best you at the gym.

Another interesting thing about my gym are the people who only come because it looks fashionable on Instagram. I remember one girl lamenting that lifting was a lot more painful than she saw online. Of course, she was wearing nice gym outfits and looked really good. I didn’t see her much after that one meeting. My thing, especially when I see people who looked so decked out for an hour of sweaty work, is to wonder why they didn’t invest the money for their outfits into a better gym. As you probably guessed from the amount I paid, my gym is a low-end outfit that is obviously for the poors and striving. There is no AC (there are standing fans), only two treadmills, and only three small rooms for working out. It is basically a repurposed three bedroom flat. So, if you were looking for Instagram-quality aesthetics, why would you come here? I never understood it. I still cannot.

Everyone wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy ass weights because lifting weights is really hard. It is difficult. I don’t know how else to put this, and I feel it is only something you can understand if you were to the gym often. I watched (or saw, rather) an interview last week where Tacha said she could never date someone who didn’t go to the gym. That might have sounded stupid to me three months ago, but now, even though I don’t think it’s an important determinant of a person’s personality, I see why she may find that extremely desirable in someone else.

It sounds banal, but once you start seeing just how much dedication and work you need to put into getting your desired body, you begin to appreciate the sort of work you need to get your desired life. Getting your desired life is a lot more harder than working out, yet many people (including me!) approach it with a sort of laissez-faire attitude that would get you nowhere in the gym. Many people put zero thought or effort into the things they think, or the work they do, and then expect to have nice muscles. Yes, luck happens, and sometimes a truly worthless person (Portable, for instance), may live your dream — but what are the odds that that would happen in any person’s life? What are the odds that your regular routine will get you nice muscles without lifting heavy ass weights? The odds seem low, don’t they? To get nice muscles, you have to wake up at 5.30AM, drag yourself out of bed, find clean socks, wear your gym outfit — which must be clean — and head out. When you get to the gym, you have to complete strenuous tasks despite every fiber of your being screaming at you to stop it. Then you have to do that multiple times per week before it even gets easier. And when lifting indeed gets easier, that’s when you have to pick up heavier weights. You have to do that multiple times over weeks to even start seeing a sliver of results. If you think of letting your foot off the gas for as little as a month, you may have to start the whole process again. It is no wonder no one wants to do it. You have to be sort of mad to do it, actually. You need to have some virus in your brain always telling you that the only difference between the doer and the non-doer lies only in the doing. Everybody wants to become a body builder (achieve their dreams), but nobody wants to lift no heavy ass weights (actually wake up every morning thinking about the dream and working at it). Whose fault?

I eventually had enough money to buy “proper” gym shoes, and by proper I mean a fake second hand shoe at Yaba.

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