Working it out

It is understandable that the general public is dubious about an activity which takes 'no pain, no gain' as its motto.  And as anyone who has started out on the long quest for the castle of the body arduous can attest, it does indeed hurt.  But beyond a certain critical point - of effort and time and determination - the rewards become so apparent that crossing the pain barrier is merely the first step in an enchanted land.

The manifest benefits are easily described.  The extra years exercise may add to your life can never be known, except through the faith of statisticians; but for every hour spent working out, demonstrably you gain two or three more endowed with a special alertness.  At the end of a late twentieth-century urban day, an existence doubly fatal through being sedentary and stressful, the phrase 'working out' sums it all up: you can feel the rings of tension sliding away.  That pent-up, atavistic aggression is channelled in perhaps the purest and most cathartic form; pitting animate against inanimate body, moving objects which might have been designed almost as paradigmatic manifestations of the Platonic concepts of weight and mass.

A by-product of this activity is harder to articulate. It is as if the body had become weightless: limbs can be moved so effortlessly that they might almost be one of those perfect rods beloved of mathematical problems.  Bodies become futuristic stick robots of immense power.  Presumably those who are grossly overweight and underexercised suffer the opposite effect; their limbs seem huge and unwieldy spheroids, over which they have limited and rather pathetic control.  Their self-image is perhaps one of bloated pneumatic human dolls from some middle period Picasso painting.

A consequence of working out, then, is that even the most ordinary of movements becomes a voluptuous pleasure, an aesthetic treat. Walking is raised to the level of the Olympic swimmer's proud and masterly furrowing of the waters which part before and close after; and reaching out to take the humblest of objects becomes a languorous and ecstatic experience of balletic grace.

There is a further aspect of weight-training which is certainly a powerful attraction; you cannot cheat. As anyone who has worked out knows, you either can or cannot lift that weight or do that hundredth press-up; if you can, it is because you have worked towards that goal.  Good coaching may help, as can the right equipment; but the bottom line is you.

This makes pumping iron one of today's most democratic activities.  There can be no snobbery, no favouritism, no unfairness; what people can do, especially in terms of stamina rather than power, is largely determined by the effort they have put into training.  Body sculpture does not just mean vulgar bulging biceps; it also embraces the whole attitude of mastering your body, and shaping the physical through the mental.  It is an affirmation of mankind's transcendence of crass materialism.  'No pain, no gain' is a motto which the iron-pumpers of the world can be proud to bear on the self-made escutcheons of their bodies.
 
(9.8.88)

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