🐦‍🔥 Update No.16 – Turning a Corner 🐦‍🔥

It’s been a long time since I last wrote on my physical progressions, haven’t really felt the need and I had chosen to change some styles of training since a lot of things have been changing in my life as well as my training philosophies.

My goal last time was to cut weight and to achieve a lighter weight I felt reasonable, while this is still the goal, I have decided to pause it to essentially finalise my current gym goals. A big part of everyone’s training, is the point where they question what they are doing.

This happens all the time, you pick up a weight- you want to put it back down when it starts to hurt, you start running- your legs begin to ache and your shins feel like they are being pricked at the bone, you squat in succession- your thighs begin to burn.

During the stages of my training when I was applying martial arts training to lose weight, I realised that the gym and everything I was doing there felt like a poor imitation for what it was that I was doing when I would train in my own way, training Martial Arts and pushing the limits. In a lot of ways, I have intended to shift to Martial Arts and more ‘functional’ training if you will, for a long while now. Recently, however, what I do in the gym and with how gym culture is, I see so much insecurity and foolish attempts at self-validation by literally adding more to your physical form or by lifting heavier.

The difference for me in what I would call ‘Martial Arts style Training’ and the gym, is that when you lift for strength or to increase the size of your muscles, you’re set to a basis in which muscle fibres break down and dependent on your routines of recovery, they build up stronger again. It’s for this reason that lifting to me is incredibly underwhelming as no real test, or at the very least, the test- the challenge I personally crave, is not provided for within this training. I am accustomed to it and even if I wasn’t, it is mostly a test of muscle than anything else.

My point in all of this is that, once I reach my current goal of a 500lbs deadlift, my time with the gym and conventional weight lifting will be conclusive, at least for the foreseeable future. My muscles I am pleased with, my strength I am satisfied with, but most importantly, my experience with it all is for the most part complete.

The bottom line to weight training and conventional gym training is that it is repetitive and the results are only cumulative from what you know you have already trained within. To train Martial Arts and the means to physically express yourself in a way that is meaningful to you, is to be in touch with who you are and how you intend to move through and with the world around you.

In a lot of ways it is just subjective and my point in all of this is that once I have ticked the metaphorical boxes with the gym and achieving specific weight lifting goals, I will be doing what speaks to me more, which is martial arts style training. If there was any message I could leave for you to take away from all this jibber jabber, it would be to find what you need to physically express yourself in a way that is truly meaningful to you, something that surpasses explanation and provides you with the challenges and clarity you may need.