What Exercise Means To Me

The meaning of exercise, and the purpose it serves in my life has changed over time.

When I was a teenager in school in the middle of England, exercise wasn’t even the term I would have used for it. It would have just been fun (or sport at a push). I played because that’s what naturally called to me and because it formed the core of my friendships. It was doing what felt enjoyable in the moment and the fact it was a supposed ‘healthy’ habit was purely by chance, if it was considered unhealthy, as we think of excessive drinking or drug use, I still would have done it. This is most clearly shown by the contrasting side of my free time as a teenager, as when I wasn’t engaged in some form of competitive sport, I was consuming sugar… and lots of it. The exercise and resilience of the young body mean’t that on the surface, this was no issue- I was a healthy weight, felt fit, and saw no issue. This just showed that I was not exercising for health benefits, I was doing it because it was fun.

As I approached my later teen years, sport was still a key part of my life, especially football which had always been my sport of choice, but the amount I would play recreationally reduced with less opportunities and less perceived social acceptance to be sprinting around a public park, sweating and laughing. Most of my peers at this time were discovering ‘mature’ forms of fun, namely alcohol and relationships. This was also the time that some friends started going to the gym. I remember seeing 3 or 4 of my close school friends develop physically and what seemed like the space of about a week. They came to school with their sleeves rolled up to show off arms which seemed to dwarf mine and the confidence to match. The feeling of inferiority was strong and it was at this time, I wanted to get in on the act. I tagged along with 2 of my friends to their council gym after school and got one of them to take me around some of the machines. He loosely showed me how they worked, using it mostly as an opportunity to demonstrate his strength on each machine and exercise, which I saw as insanely impressive at the time, almost superhuman. From there I had a go, sheepishly trying each machine without any plan or idea. It was fun though, I was in a new place, with my friends who I looked up to, rubbing shoulders with people older and stronger who I wouldn’t risk making eye contact with but watched discreetly to learn from. I don’t remember how long it took to see progress but I definitely remember the addictive feeling once I caught sight of my shoulders broadening, my arms becoming more vascular and my chest filling out. As for my legs and back, they never got trained because… well, I couldn’t see those, so why bother?

Around this time I had some health issues and spent time in hospital, requiring operations. This set me back physically and mentally. I was weak in both regards and felt anxious and completely uncomfortable in my own skin. Football and any sport like that were too strenuous physically and frankly seemed impossible mentally to even think about. So again, I turned to the gym. The obsession with the gym grew larger as I left school and went into college. I found a friend who was of a similar strength and ambition to myself and we became attached at the hip, inside and outside of the gym. We would go to college, eat a lot of food (the health of which was unimportant, other than the fact it needed a high protein content), go home, meet at the gym a few hours later where we would workout until it closed at 10pm, training either chest or shoulders 90% of the time and back the other 10% and we ended each session with an arm superset combined 2 cable exercises to make sure we left feeling on top of the world and with arms as pumped as possible. Training was still done for aesthetics and the progression in size was what mattered most but we did also start to get addicted to the more competitive side, the numbers. We were bench pressing, shoulder pressing and occasionally deadlifting and always looking to go heavier than ourselves previously but also each other. It was great fun and the progress was definitely coming. We were committed, consistent and enjoying it. A perfect combination. Our legs still got no attention.

We continued to develop and I remember one summer around that time working out with another friend in his home gym/garage. He had an older brother and other friends who were more advanced in the gym and had advice and guidance for him, which he then shared with me. I learn’t about bulking, protein powders and learn’t about creatine, which felt revolutionarily at the time. From there I would also spend all my free time watching youtube videos of the best exercises for muscle growth and whatever titles would pull me in. I was by this time in good shape, with a decent level of strength and building muscle which was still all that mattered to me.

University came around and I went excited to study Sport Science following the summer of 2020, locked down at home where my time was taken up transforming my parents garage into my own gym and taking plenty of photos and videos for my fitness instagram account. When I arrived in Liverpool, I picked up where I left off- going to the gym, eating huge portions of chicken and rice and drinking litres of protein shakes. I made new friends with similar interests and our puregym memberships were used daily.

As uni life progressed, I continued to go to the gym and slowly but surely started training my lower body (which was still underdeveloped compared to my upper body). My flatmates and myself found a new gym, closer to our digs which were slightly out of the centre. The gym was very much bodybuilding focused and catered to a much more serious clientele. Again, we would train pretty much everyday and it was a huge part of our lives away from studies.

I graduated from university and left to a full time job trading steel, something that didn’t fit with my passion for health and fitness but it was a job I was offered through the part time work I was doing in a pub at the time. I found this period challenging at first to balance the new commitments and time pressures of work, alongside training and moving back home- this mean’t my training frequency and intensity dropped off for a while until I managed to rebalance. The longer i worked in this environment the more it became clear to me that something wasn’t quite right. The atmosphere and environment was extremely sedentary and drained all energy I had. It was bad for my diet, my back, my posture and my step count. I wanted to get out and back to my passion.

After a year at the job, I made the decision to leave to pursue a new venture, a very scary and unknown venture. I had decided while on a family holiday to South Africa that I was going to start my own health and wellness business. This would meet my passions head on and allow me much more freedom of time and direction, I was confident I could get the ball rolling with the support of my family and with the savings I had built up through my year of full time work. I left in June and have never looked back- starting bootcamps, 1-2-1 training, company coaching for health and wellness and online training. With being so busy, my own training was not a priority but I had more freedom over when to train which kept me going and being my own advert meant my health and condition was a real part of my job now.

Within the past few months, I have got more and more into my own training, aided by engaging much more in running and my metrics for training changing from aesthetic goals to performance goals. I now consider myself an athlete and have grand ambitions to train very hard and become an elite athlete at the top of the sporting world for hyrox. My aim is to qualify for the elite 15 within the next 3 years.