What I Love About Weight Training

It's all about centre.

You get underneath a barbell loaded with your bodyweight and more. You take it on your shoulders, hunker down and drive up. There's no room in that for mental sloppiness.

You can't get lost in superhero fantasies, because the absolute reality of the weight is there as a constant reminder: I can imagine squatting a car, but put one on the bar and it'll crush me like a bug. There's no space here for self-deception.

You can't get distracted, because the moment you do, your form starts to falter and your performance fails; you run the risk of injury. That's a big weight. There's no doubt it could seriously fuck you up.

There's only room for you, clear focus, and the action. It's very Zen, in its way.

It works for me because of the need. If I sit down to meditate, I can get distracted: noises next door, random thoughts, uncomfortable posture. The usual stuff, and stuff which I find often fatal to a good sit-and-centre. But those distractions aren't present during a heavy weights session: the act compels a state of clarity, and so a state of clarity is achieved.

There are other reasons, of course: I love the incremental increase in strength, the feeling of self-improvement, the boost to body image, the adrenaline release (after working in stressy programming all day, that's a biggie), and the view's not bad either. But when it comes down to it, I train the way I do because that gets me centred.