The gym is, bar none, the most ironic classroom I’ve ever enrolled myself in. You join it dreaming of chiseled glory, biceps like boulders, perhaps a shorts-worthy pair of thighs—and yet what you end up with, month after month, is a series of uninvited life lessons wrapped in sweat and soreness. It turns out that lifting weights isn’t just a workout; it’s a philosophical inquiry into the nature of progress, pain, and the peculiar ways we sabotage ourselves.
As I reflect on my 1.5-year relationship with weight training, I can’t help but laugh at the naivety of my early ambitions. Year one was glorious—deadlifting 100 kilograms, dropping six off my own bodyweight, and basking in the kind of post-workout confidence that makes you fancy yourself as a superpower. Naturally, I assumed year two would follow the same curve. Except, it didn’t.
Progress slowed. My original goal of lifting 120 kilograms and hitting 60 kilograms on the scale remained stubbornly out of reach. I found myself stuck—pushing and pulling in a literal and figurative sense—like I do when staring at the same spreadsheet for hours with no real results. And this is where my trainer enters the scene, his enthusiasm boundless and his patience maddeningly relentless.
Think of my trainer as the Sisyphus of logic—every time I come up with an excuse, he relentlessly rolls it back down the hill. “Flexibility,” he insists. “Mobility. Address your weaknesses!” And when I roll my eyes at the wisdom (and occasionally wish for him to get one exercise wrong so that I can cry out in victory), he does something infuriating: he turns out to be absolutely right.
His logic isn’t just unavoidable; it’s bulletproof. Training, he informs me, is less about raw strength and more about eliminating the inefficiencies preventing me from using my strength effectively. Where I see slowness, he sees opportunity, a chance to identify what’s holding me back. “Your hamstrings are like steel cables,” he grins; it’s unclear if he means this as a compliment or criticism, but the foam roller calls, and I leg curl bitterly.
By now, I’ve realized my problem isn’t just about physical slack—it’s also mental. I expected my body to accelerate as it did in year one when the real secret is that the foundation wasn’t even finished. Sure, I could lift—badly—but my rigid hips, neglected glutes, and stiff ankles had joined forces to play defence against progress. Success wasn’t in adding weight; it was in tearing down the bad habits that wouldn’t let me use my potential.
Of Squat Racks and Startups - this essay was partly inspired by a conversation with a friend who runs an IT company. Hearing him talk, I couldn’t help but notice how the trajectory of his business mirrored my own fitness journey, albeit on a grander scale.
When he founded the company in 2007, it was as if he, too, had walked into a gym for the first time. The early years were all about enthusiasm and grit. With a team of just twenty, they pushed through sheer effort, growing slowly and steadily to a modest twenty-five employees over a decade. But then came the tipping point. In the last four years, they exploded to a hundred staff members, their work gaining recognition and clients flocking to their brand.
From the outside, the success story looks seamless. But as he spoke, he said something that resonated deeply with my own struggles: the real challenge wasn’t growth. It was dealing with what had been ignored during the early years. As the spotlight shone brighter and the workload piled higher, inefficiencies in internal processes—the company’s “slack” in communication, data management, and operations—became glaringly obvious. Without strong systems, it was a herculean task to keep track of the “body” of the organization. Decisions lagged, resources weren’t fully optimized, and talented employees were overburdened.
Sound familiar? Just like in my training, the building stage was exciting. You rush toward visible progress: numbers lifting up (or, in my case, pounds going down). But scaling the next mountain requires something else entirely—it’s about fine-tuning the machine itself. You’re not just building muscle; you’re fixing how the muscle works.
In both gyms and offices, addressing the slack is tedious, sometimes demoralizing. Nobody writes a motivational book about ankle mobility or an employee performance review template. There’s no applause for spending two months focused solely on breathing patterns, nor does anyone celebrate the ten minutes you add to your dynamic warm-up to fix your lopsided squat. But those quiet, painstaking adjustments determine whether you’ll move to the next level—or collapse under the shiny new weight you so desperately wanted to carry.
The Truth About Strength - there’s a saying you hear a lot in gyms: “Leg day is mandatory.” When I first encountered it, I dismissed it as yet another stupid slogan, right up there with “No pain, no gain.” But the irony of this particular cliché is how deeply it cuts, especially when you consider the reality of where strength actually resides.
Somewhere along the way, my trainer shared an eye-opening statistic: 75% of the muscle in your body lives in your lower half. And yet, ask anyone to define “strength,” and chances are they’ll start flexing their biceps or puffing out their chest. It’s the upper body that captures the imagination; the legs are treated like an afterthought, as though their sole purpose is to hoist the upper body from place to place.
Those misconceptions echoed in my own training—and, again, in the way my friend described his business. Just like gyms glorify bench presses and biceps curls, companies chase the visible, headline-worthy aspects of success: signing clients, scaling teams, launching products. But if the legs of the operation—back-end systems, mobility (pun intended), and processes—aren’t strengthened, eventually the whole enterprise starts to wobble.
For me, acknowledging this has meant embracing leg day (grumbling all the while). Squats, front and back, have become a ritual—they’re unsexy but transformative. The legs are the engine, the foundation builders of everything else, and investing in their development feels like unlearning the glamor and relearning the essence.
My focus today is in removing the Slack, in Life and Lifting. As I inch closer to my goals—120 kilograms on the barbell, the elusive 60 kilograms on the scale—I’ve come to realize that progress isn’t linear, nor is it grand and dramatic. It’s stopping mid-lift to reevaluate where your feet should be. It’s listening to an annoying and frustrating, BUT highly accurate trainer. It’s recognizing when your body (or your business) is stuck not because you aren’t trying hard enough, but because invisible weaknesses need attention.
If I’ve gained anything in these 1.5 years of training, it isn’t just muscle or even wisdom—it’s an appreciation for the work we don’t see in progress photos or performance reviews. Fixing slack—those inefficiencies holding you back—isn’t glamorous, but it’s essential.
And when you finally feel the clean, taut tension of a well-executed lift or an organization firing on all cylinders, you’ll know that success isn’t built on glamour. It’s built on patience, humility, and a little stubborn persistence. Just ask my trainer. Or better yet, don’t. He’ll keep talking about it and irritating me again and again, and yet again!!
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