 |
| © Victor Freitas / Unsplash |
By Maggie Lange, GQ
After a few years of being out of shape, I feel like I have a good gym habit now. But it seems like everyone at the gym always has a new goal or personal best to brag about. I just want to maintain. Do I have to keep getting more in shape?
Hello first and second, just a wish for you: I hope your gym has windows, which is what I hope for most rooms, but especially gyms which I think could use the ventilation, sunlight, and connection to the natural world.
In my mind, there are three reasons to be fit. (1) So I don’t die. (2) So I look babely. (3) So I am physically prepared for some unforeseen emergency or apocalyptic war-like scenario where humans are required to trek thirty miles a day to find potable water or battle some interesting new swamp-monsters or sprint around forsaken national parks in a televised sport to entertain our new alien tyrants. While I am working out, the third reason is the most relevant. You can feel good about pursuing any of the above rationales. Really, you should work out to the extent that it makes you feel good. When it doesn’t, stop. As for where to stop, all three reasons conveniently contain a limit.
Let’s get heavy with this first one: You have to work out so that you don’t die. Our bods were made to be active, to lift things, to run around and catch meat we could eat. Now, someone else catches our meat and we’re just lounging on our sides like mouth-breathing tree-sloths, ordering someone to deliver the meat right to our nests. So we gotta stretch our legs and stuff. We can’t let things fall into disuse if we want to live for a while in a healthy, pain-free fashion. That is a baseline we should all aspire to. For example, you should be able to do a handful of pushups, before you have to lie on the floor and think about how dirty the floor is on your face. You don’t have to be able to lift a lil smart-car over your head and twirl around. Pushing your bod can mess up your bod. If you start to hurt yourself all the time or feel exhausted by working out all the time, wind it back. Working out should give you more energy actually, even though that doesn’t make sense. Again, the human body and brain are two very confusing entities, who have somehow been paired up Russian-nesting-doll style.
Now to (two): The sculptor’s crafting of physical perfection within themselves. Chisel out that cool under-arm line, chip away some of that rolly neck chub from below the hairline. You can do these things! It's truly magical we can change our bodies. STILL, and I know you’re hearing it here first, I’m just going to let you know real quick that there is no physical perfection. I’ve thought about it for at least one minute and it doesn’t exist. Perfect is a crazy-making asymptote. And the way that brains work (very helpful) there will likely always be something on your physique that is displeasing to you that you can’t do anything about. Regarding that, I doubt anyone else notices or cares that your ankles are different girths. For the body components that can be shredded and molded, it takes a lot of work to get there and maintain it, but it also can get out of hand. You know, like when it looks like your muscles have their own tiny muscles? Like when it looks like someone’s skin is fresh ready to break open and release whatever swole it’s struggling to hold onto? Rest it up for a minute please.
Finally, we are at three: a bootcamp for an alien-war I am not yet conscripted in. We can never know the future, so it does behoove us to scrupulously prepare for a new world scenario that no longer allows for a sedentary lifestyle. We all must be battle-ready back-packers, who are both nimble and powerful, with twitch-muscles and unprecedented endurance. There is no way to know exactly which physical skills, muscle groups, combative maneuvers will be necessary in this environment of the future, so we should probably do everything just in case, but also perhaps, just enjoy the world as we have it now, and relax a little bit in a relatively swamp-monster free lifestyle.
See more at GQ
