Sometimes, you dip your toes into weightlifting and you can find a fiery passion for it. However, what once felt like you needed it in your life, can slowly develop into a chore.
With pressures from social media, seeing many athletic-physiqued ambassadors and accounts, unconscious pressure and desire to look a specific way crept in. Wanted, but unsolicited advice is thrown at you to digest about how you should train and what you need to do to see progress.
Those drastic before and after pictures showing the ambassador’s physiques were once “regular,” then after an X amount of the same boring weightlifting exercises, they attained an unachievable build for most body types.
After experiencing a major injury, I was introduced to weightlifting, which sparked a strong interest. Initially, I thought weightlifting would help me recover from a major injury, helping me get back to cheerleading, but it became more.
It was fun to see my quadriceps, hamstrings, and calves growing and returning to a similar size as its co-pilot. Then, I slowly shifted my focus away from regaining strength to how weightlifting made me physically look. Physique became an obsession.
As time passed, weightlifting slowly lost its luster and became a chore. The early morning discipline to get a lift in, was just to get more cut. It was a never-ending narrative of chasing after a physique that is probably impossible for my personal body type unless I commit to a very strict and unsustainable long-term diet.
I decided to switch up the way I was training as it was no longer serving me. Progressively, I reduced the amount of weightlifting exercises that I didn’t really fancy anymore and substituted them with calisthenic exercises.
Although I reduced the amount of weight I was lifting significantly, this was a new challenge. Due to my cheerleading background, I didn’t do much traditional weightlifting pre-injury; it was all about being able to move my own body weight and toss others efficiently.
Calisthenic exercises were a great way to relearn and test my body awareness and become more agile solely using my weight as resistance. For me, I’m working on rediscovering my passion for training.
Along your exercise journey, you may find yourself losing interest in the type of workouts you are currently doing or have been doing for weeks, months, or years. I’m here to say that that is normal and that training has the potential to be fun. Our interests and goals warp and evolve, and so our training should follow.
If your training is lacking radiance, what type of training will you switch to next? Let us know on Instagram @HerCampusSJSU!