The Iron Paradise

An essay on how the gym has taught me about the psychology of the real world

I am a religious person.

I visit a temple called the Gym to offer my gratitude in the form of mental and physical activity. In return, it has blessed me with a lifetime of lessons and partially shaped the person I am today.

Today’s blog post is about a few lessons I learned from my temple of worship and my fleeting observations about this holy place.

I’ve been going to The Iron Paradise, as some would call it, for the last 14 years now.

When I step into the gym in the morning, I leave all my worries and tensions from the real world behind.

Going to the gym is like an anchor for my day. It's where I go for my exclusive 'me time.'

Those who don’t go to the gym may find these analogies preachy and stoic, but I am confident that those who do go will find some resemblance with these musings.

- Equality

The gym does not discriminate between rich or poor, beautiful or ugly, average or brilliant. The work you put in equates to the amount of success you achieve.

Everyone is equal here, and everyone's story is a zero to one story.

This is very unlike the real world we live in, where circumstances and status play a huge role in our progression and how we are viewed.

The gym is the great equalizer in that sense. There is no cheat code or unfair advantage that a person is blessed with.

You can cry all you want about how unfair the world is, try to navigate a situation using your privilege, or use any shoddy trick in the book.

But the dumbbell will not care about all this.

It will just be sitting there, in its iron cloak, without moving, without saying anything. No hack is going to make it jump into your hand and lift itself.

The gym gives you two simple options: do the work and benefit, or suffer the consequences of not doing the work.

- Positivity

In the real world, most people are either whining about what they don’t have, what somebody else has, or something they should have instead of what another person has. This leads to an endless cycle of negativity.

In the gym, each person who comes is only focused on the task at hand, finding a way to fix their own problem, so no one is worried about what the other person is doing.

Moreover, exercising helps the body release endorphins, known as 'the happy hormones,' thereby elevating our mood.

As a result, it's natural that everyone around you is in a fairly happy mood, unlike in the real world outside the gym, where everyone is carrying some form of anxiety, stress, and feelings of constant comparison.

- Delayed Gratification

Most people who join the gym want instant results and end up being consistent for only the first few months. After these initial three months, they become frustrated with the slow progress and often end up donating their annual subscription amount as charity by not attending for the next 9 months until the new year begins, and this endless cycle repeats itself.

Delayed gratification is the practice of resisting immediate rewards in favor of long-term goals or greater benefits.

Exercise is the ultimate form of physical delayed gratification.

It is immediately toxic to the cells, leading to increased temperatures, oxygen, and glucose deprivation in the short term during the movement. In fact, exercise literally involves tearing of the muscles during the movement and the subsequent recovery thereafter.

Yet, it is clear that there are tremendous long-term benefits to it.

Muscle takes time to build. You may go days, weeks, even, seeing practically zero change, but you need to push past this phase if you want to see any growth.

The gym is a place where I have learnt this form of delayed gratification.

- Envy

Our inability to delay gratification also stems from envy.

You want to post that picture on Instagram of you lifting heavy weights, so you entirely compromise on your process and plan and try to lift that heavy weight.

In this process, you end up harming your body and possibly injuring it too.

Let’s say you do lift that weight and post it on social media. I can guarantee you that the person viewing it is not thinking of you for more than a second, and neither is the person in the gym who is standing next to you and observing the lift.

So it is better to do it right than to speed up the process just to impress someone because, in reality, we put too much importance on ourselves when in reality, everyone is just focused on themselves.

Envy affects our ability to delay gratification.

When you come to the gym you may also get pushed on by some person or the trainer to lift heavier weights, you need to resist that temptation.

This is a picture of my bench press in the gym at the 99.5 kg mark.

I worked towards reaching this goal for almost four years by gradually adding 0.5 or 1 kg each time I worked out. Throughout this period, I was tempted to increase the weight faster, to impress the people around me, coupled with my impatience to progress faster.

I reached this 99.5 kg mark by subconsciously delaying gratification over the years.

The trainers, too, told me to rush and do 100kg because the goal was right there.

I did eventually reach the 100kg mark, but it took me 3 more weeks to progress from 99.5 kg to 100kg on the bench press.

Had I jumped straight to 100kg, I would have risked injury and had to go all the way back down to 80kg or even less to rebuild from scratch.

- Regret

No one ever regretted going to the gym, but almost everyone regretted not going to the gym.

This is similar to doing hard things in life; no one willingly wanted to do hard things, but no one ever regretted doing them.

I would say that working out in the gym is not the hard part; 95% of the work is done in just showing up and fighting against our minds. Once we do that, the remaining 5%, which is the workout, will take care of itself.

This is similar to sitting down and doing the work we are avoiding in other parts of life, the biggest part of the mental battle is won by just showing up.

- Judgement

For newbies, the first thought that will come to their mind is that they will be judged for their appearance or ability.

This is a big myth.

Newcomers face this anxiety that veterans will look down upon them and judge them, and I totally get where they are coming from.

But from my experience and personal observations, no one really cares, and no one is looking at you.

Don’t be so selfish thinking that someone comes to the gym and thinks of you when they are there.

Imagine yourself, how much time do you spend thinking about someone else rather than on your own goals?

No one will judge you based on your fitness goals, as everyone is hyper-focused on their own goals.

This is actually similar to the world outside the gym; we think that everyone is thinking about what we are doing when in reality, no one really is.

- Mundaness

The gym teaches you to embrace boredom and uncertainty, which is key to consistency with any worthwhile activity.

It teaches you that every day is not going to be an adventure-filled day; most days are going to be mundane.

It's this mundane work that ultimately leads to progress.

This is honestly quite analogous to life itself. Life itself is no rollercoaster ride; most of our days are mundane, and we do the same things over and over again, whether in our personal or professional lives. Why should going to the gym be any different?

I covered more on this in my piece on boredom.

There will be periods of plateaus throughout this journey of mundane activities.

The most successful people around me, whom I admire, continue to engage in the same routine tasks every single day without complaining, and they have been doing so for years on end.

Human beings are desirous of some level of novelty and as soon as the novelty factor wears off, boredom starts creeping in.

The key to consistency is getting past that boredom and novelty factor and the gym is the place that keeps reminding me of this.

- Resistance

I practice a lot of ‘resistance training’ in the gym; it's also another term for ‘strength training’.

Resistance training involves pushing the body against the resistance of gravity caused by the weights.

It’s not always going to be easy. Pushing beyond resistance is where actual growth takes place, which also forces us to push ourselves out of our comfort zone.

Conclusion

I am happy and grateful for this place, as it is the one place where I can leave all the troubles of the world behind and be with my thoughts. I can channel these positive thoughts when I navigate the real world.

I have been able to subconsciously apply these principles I learned from the gym in my personal and professional life too.