There’s a particular kind of lie you tell yourself before you join a gym.
Not the big one – “this will change everything” – but the smaller, more convincing one, the “I more or less know what I’m doing. I’ve watched the enough Dr Mike and Jeff Nippard. I understand the basics, but more imporantly I understand the science….“
That illusion lasted roughly ten minutes (with that time being spent warming up on the treadmill).
On a whim one Saturday morning, I picked up a couple of friends from the gym. They’d been badgering me to join for months. They had declared to me “2026 is the year“. Somewhere between the driving from my house and arriving at the car park, I decided I’d stop delaying and just sign up.
The sign up itself was more revealing of what was to come than expected. Busy day. No intro. No orientation. I was handed a tag, had my photo taken, and that was it. I was now, apparently considered to be “a gym-goer”.
While I didn’t mind the cold intro, I’ve spent enough time watching fitness content to understand the unwritten rules, but I couldn’t help but think about the eighteen year old who walks in cold, gets zero guidance, and then gets told off for not wiping a machine they that were never told to wipe.
Accepting you’re weak
That first session was with my friend’s younger brother, who (unintentionally) tried to kill me.
After a warm-up, it was straight into bench press. The closest I’d come to doing this was lifting the bar in my high school’s “gym” (a maybe 4x4m room) several years ago. I’d never ‘actually’ done one before. We started with the bar, then 30kg, then I capped out at 40kg. In the moment, it felt surprisingly good. There’s something affirming about discovering you can do something you’ve never done before.
But… my body disagreed with this sentiment quickly the next day.
I’ve always thought of myself as reasonably strong for my size. I’ve run consistently. I’ve done dumbbell workouts at home for long stretches. I’ve lifted using 20kg dumbbells here and there. But the gym has a way of stripping away that narrative and telling you that the last time you picked up those 20kg dumbbells was a few more years away than you remember. It doesn’t care how you feel. Suddenly I was struggling with 10kg dumbbells, and my confidence shrank quickly, but not uselessly. It was humbling in a oddly clarifying way.
I followed the routine exactly – just lighter – and woke up the next day feeling like my upper chest and shoulder joints had been glued in place. In hindsight, I’m sure I irritated a tendon – not a dramatic injury. However, it was enough to remind me that my enthusiasm isn’t a substitute for adaptation. Muscle soreness is one thing. Joint pain is another.
While my friends kept going back over the next few days, I stayed desk bound at work, gently prodding muscles I didn’t realise were there, and experimenting with massage angles until I finally found a technique that relieved the pain.
Going back and learning publicly
By Wednesday, things had eased enough that I decided to go back with my friends. Except this time, I’d be doing my own thing.
This is where my brain did what it always does: take my anxiety/uncertainty and try turn it into a system. I fed a pile of exercise PDFs scraped from Reddit into AI. I explained my constraints to it. I then asked it to build a programme. I then manually loaded almost every exercise into Liftbear because, inconveniently, most of them didn’t exist in the app. After building my five-day plan and headed in for my first pull day.
Walking into a busy gym hit a bit different to the calm Sunday session I had a few days before. On weekends, it’s relaxed. Mid-week, after work, it’s crowded, somehow efficient (and paradoxically not) as well as quickly intimidating. I stuck deliberately to machine-only exercises. After the earlier session, I had no interest in fluffing around with the free weights again. My ego was still recovering.
The mistakes still happened.
On the low-row cable, I put my feet where the handle was meant to land, assuming the seat would move. It did not. By the time I realised, I was already mid-set. At that point, you either abort and draw attention, or commit fully and draw a different kind of attention. For some reason I chose commitment.
The next sets were fine. Still, the lesson stuck. Gyms are one of the few adult spaces where learning still happens publicly. It felt like I was back at high school.
Machines felt good. They were more controlled and predictable with a locked range of motion. I even used a bicep curl machine to avoid dumbbells. Later, I discovered the Internet’s near-universal agreement that these machines are… not great. Apparently, they’re best used as a finisher for that ‘extra pump‘, not at all suggested for beginners. Noted.
The soreness this time was manageable. Less sharp, more spread out. It felt a bit more like a tiny bit of adaptation rather than all protest from my body.
What surprised me most
What’s surprised me most isn’t the physical discomfort (that part is well-documented). It was how quickly exposed I felt. I mean, I knew going into it, I would – but sometimes you just manage to ride the anxiety.
Going to the gym assumes prior knowledge, and that you have any clue what you’re doing on the machines/weights. It feels like It rewards confidence a bit more competence. You walk in with no idea what to do. You just have to try to gain some of that competence by doing. If you have a real job and are riddled with social anxiety, yes – It’s busy at the exact times you would think and more.
I’ve started wondering whether early mornings, around 5am territory, might be the solution. Hopefully, quieter, less crowded., fewer variables. But that would need an actual lifestyle change, not just a tweak to the schedule, which I’m not pretending is easy to do.
Still, I want this to stick. Not because I suddenly love the gym (I really don’t) but because I recognise the pattern now. People say it sucks, but you go anyway, because over time it gives you something back that outweighs the friction. Strength, resilience, and a pep in your step that you did something good for yourself today.
Two days in, I feel like I understand that sentiment more than I expected.
I’m not sure yet whether the gym will become part of my identity, or just a tool I use imperfectly. But I do know that starting wasn’t about motivation. It was about finally making the step to go. It was about letting it tell me the truth. I wanted to learn about my body, my assumptions, and how much room there still is to grow.
And maybe that’s the real bit to overcome, not becoming strong, but becoming honest with myself about where I’m starting from.
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