It has been about 15 months since I last went to the gym. As with many of you, I cancelled my membership in April of 2020 due to the Coronavirus. I always enjoyed lifting weights ever since I was introduced to it in college. Now, that doesn’t mean I was a bodybuilder or anything of the sort. Far from it. However, it helped me deal with stress and let me vent out frustration from a hard day at work. It is funny to think that the one time I had the most free time, thanks to furloughs and quarantine, that I couldn’t go to the gym anymore.
I am sure many people would ask why I didn’t do home workouts or buy some home gym equipment. First of all, did you try to buy weights during 2020? It made the Hunger Games look like Girl Scout Camp. I certainly could have done more calisthenics or gotten into running and the like but I think the same reason I went to lift before is the same reason I couldn’t bring myself to do more in 2020. Stress. For the first time I went through furloughs which threw my schedule and my brain into a tailspin. Every day there was news about cases rates and death rates and then daily press briefings. I went to the gym to escape stress and just get some energy out. Now, there was still stress to be had and more stress every moment of the day. So I completely fell off the wagon.
That brings us to today. Well to be more clear it brought us to January 1st 2021. I stepped on the scale after having not done so since March of 2020. I weighed in at 263.3 pounds. At 5’11” that is a BMI of 26.7. I hadn’t been in great shape before but that was still 40 pounds higher than March and the now highest weight I had been in my life. I had to lose weight. Luckily, 2020 did bring me one thing that made the idea of losing weight a lot more palatable. I now had a wedding to look forward too. And a suit to fit in to.
I began dieting as well as I could and did make some good progress. As of last week my fiancé and I officially rejoined the gym. My weight at the time was about 240 pounds. For anyone who has been out of the gym like I have let me tell you exactly how it went. It sucked. It was terrible. Weight I used to lift with ease nearly killed me. By the time I made it home it already felt like my chest had been hit by a semitruck.
Want to know the best part? I absolutely loved it. I love that feeling of being sore. Of knowing you really worked and pushed yourself. It felt good to be sore the next two days. I went back to the gym twice more that week. And I am writing this before going for the first time this week.
A part of writing this is for accountability. I want to write every other week about how the gym is going, how I going through newb gains 2.0, and how I am progressing towards being healthy at my wedding. If any of you are doubting about going back to the gym after 2020, you should absolutely do it. It will be tough but it will be so rewarding. 2020 taught us the lesson that health can be taken at any time and living a healthy lifestyle can help in so many ways. Take any ounce of motivation you have and turn it into small and consistent action. And the most important lesson of all, if you could bench 225 before a year off the gym don’t expect to be able to do so afterwards. Trust me.
SimpliFI 