Why do you work out?

I’m not only going to tell you why I work out. I’m going to tell you why a lot of gym rats work out. This is a secret that most of them don’t want to tell you. But I’m about to spill the beans.

It’s tradition at this point. OR maybe habit is a more proper word. Like I said, I’ve been training for about 5 years now.

Anytime you do something for that long it becomes a habit. I go to the gym the same way most people brush their teeth.

You wake up, and you do it. You don’t think about it. You just do it.

This is also why I don’t look down on people who can’t seem to stick to the gym. I get it. It’s hard. Doing something as difficult as working out multiple times per week is tough for anybody.

That’s why I try to get people in the habit of going to the gym as quickly as possible.

Here are some tips I came up with to help with habit creation:

1. Get your workout clothes ready and sit them at the door before you go to sleep at night. This is for those who train in the morning. This way you’ll be forced to get out of bed to go to the door and get your clothes on. Put on your clothes and keep going right out the door.
2. Set very specific short term goals. Being specific will allow you to narrow your focus and ignore all the noise. Short term goals will light a fire under your butt while long term goals make procrastination easy. If you have a goal of bench pressing 225 lbs. 6 months from now it becomes easy to say, “I don’t NEED to go. I can miss a day and still hit my goal.”
3. Don’t do too much too quickly. Too many people take an all or nothing mentality to fitness. Starting with a 6 day/week training schedule leaves you nowhere to build to and will burn you out more quickly. Start off small and build from there.
4. Have some fun. The best way to keep yourself going to the gym is to actually enjoy yourself while you’re there. This will take some experimentation on your part, but you have to find a particular niche that you have fun with. Whatever you find enjoyment in, use it to push yourself into that weight room every day.

My 3 Months Body Transformation

Four years ago, I actually did this for around 3 months. My motto in our fraternity lifting group was “every day is pull-up day”, and every lifter in the fraternity knew me as the pull-up guy. I would do 5 sets to failure of full range dead-hang no-kip pull-ups every night and sometimes both morning and night. At that point I wasn’t lifting anything else. Weighed 130 pounds, could barely bench my body weight, couldn’t squat even 100 pounds and never tried deadlifting before.

So here’s what happened:

1. My max pull-ups per set increased from 4 to 19 in 3 months. My recovery time between sets dropped drastically as well, and I could do 81 full range of motion reps in 5 sets with 5 minutes rest between each set.
2. With a huge swing and big kip, I did my first muscle up after 3 months.
3. My shoulders started developing some instability that sometimes hurts a bit if I do too many pull-ups, or drop from a muscle-up too hard. I stopped doing them every day after this became a problem. This largely became a problem because I would ignore any pain outside soreness. and do my pull-ups every day no matter what.
4. My lats got pretty big, while every other part of me was still small and skinny. I had tiny legs, chest, and arms. Even the upper part of my back and shoulders, trapezius and deltoids, were small in comparison to my lats. This made me look really out of proportion.
5. My shirts stopped fitting well around my back, but my arms weren’t big enough to fill out any shirt sleeves. Again, I developed really strange proportions.
6. I went to the gym and picked up some dumbbells for the first time in months, and to my surprise realized my curling rep weight almost doubled.
7. Witnessing the significant gains from dedication to pull-ups, I learned that the body is very responsive to any hard work you put into it. I applied similar dedication to other exercises (push-ups, deadlifting), and managed to even out my physique a bit more.
8. Stopped having issues with opening bottles with screw-on caps, and wasn’t particularly hindered when the wheels on my luggage broke.
9. I don’t have a before picture, but here’s a picture taken two summers after all the pull-ups and also after my bro drew a “palm tree penis” (yes I knew he was doing it, and no I didn’t care) on my back with sunscreen at the beach. I am standing naturally and weighed 145 pounds at the time:

I found another picture taken during my pull-up obsession days. It was around this time that I could do close to 30 full range-of-motion reps in one set:

In conclusion, I wouldn’t really recommend doing pull-ups every day, but if you do you’ll see results fast. If you use good form and fight for those last reps, your lats will grow quickly. In my experience, doing pull-ups when you are really sore is no problem at all. Your body will just grow even more and you will see gains faster. HOWEVER, if you experience joint pain in your shoulders and elbows, do not ignore it. Take a break, and listen to your body please. Even to this day my shoulders still feel a bit funky sometimes when I do pull-ups. Do not make the same mistake I did. Good luck!

EDIT: The image here is in no way edited. I really did have that tanned into my back and it took over half a year for it to fade. I only posted it because it is the only picture I have that shows my back musculature