First Day at the Gym@Ascott Makati

At my age, this is a most certainly a curious pronouncement. In this age of manic gymming , turbocharged by social media and the desire to look good, if you never have ventured to the gym you may be mistaken for being either 10 years old or 100 years old. I was neither- and to be honest - I have been to the gym before..maybe 15 times in total. Of these, 80 percent of the time I have spent on a treadmill. And since the event on June 16 2021, I haven’t been to one. To be honest the last time I had been to a gym might well be in Singapore in 2014. There was a miniature gym with 2 treadmills, 2 machines and a few small dumb bells, but more importantly, it lay right outside my groundfloor unit in our condominium. It would be a shame not to visit it atleast once every 2 months given I had to pass by it every time I left home.

I have been doing other forms of mild excercise namely walking, jogging and swimming though not exactly regularly,  and while in Iraq between 2015 and 2019 I also played some cricket once or twice a week. So I would say I was moderately active as a person, certainly as an Indian person that had grown up with no one around me exhorting athleticism over other more scholarly pursuits.

Many of my friends, including a close friend who lives In Chicago, had told me that once you hit age 40, you need to add weight training to whatever else you were doing. And it was not to carve a physique per se- it was just to compensate for slowing metabolism and delay the onset of a sort of natural atrophy. This was news to me because I always thought that weight training was for movie stars- in fact I often wondered what the severely built up non-movie stars ever did with their physique.. I am sure it made them confident but for what exactly. Only in a situation where you had a public sort of role where you would be looked at by a large population would this begin to make sense. Ofcourse what I had missed was two things. The first was the general health aspect of weight training. The other was the possibility that the chiselled body was just there as anticipatory preparation- for the eventual movie star-esque role that would, magically perhaps, fall into one’s lap. 

Who knew these days? To become a performer, all you needed was a youtube channel. 

So I had woken up this friday morning at 11.45 am after a bout of confusing dreams- where I was travelling in Cuba on holiday.. and the folks around me were comprised of my own family, my team here in Manila and a few long lost childhood friends and acquaintances from My growing up years in Jamshedpur.  Amidst trying to rationalise this and also some bizarre scenes from a pub in Havana, I felt inclined to lay in bed- with not a hint of a spring in my step. And this had been going on for a number of days, so much so that it haf me a bit worried. I was in middle of listening to the audio book “Atomic Habits”, and over my starbucks americano, I suddenly decided that  after living here for a period pf exactly 6 months, today would be the day. I  changed into gym clothes and headed downstairs to the very formidable gym on the same building. It was free for me as I was a resident, and I also had a chat with Julius - short but hugely built yet soft spoken filipino man who was in charge of the place. I told him that I intended to get into weight training and I need some basic guidance so that I wouldn’t end up injuring myself as I had done several times before as a hapless Weekend Warrior. He was really kind and showed me to the machines and gave me a routine to do today-and repeat for a month. “This will get your body used to resistance- only then will you be ready for free weights”. I am grateful for this man’s generosity in advising me- If I do carry on for a month I must remember to tip him handsomely. I did manage to somehow finish the first days routine and was somewhat sore. But I felt quite satisfied by the fact that I had taken the first step and showed up. That was an important and necessary condition. Though decidedly not a sufficient one.