Personal Narrative-Torture In Fitness

I have always been very obsessed with body image. When I was young, baseball was my sport. Soon after, I joined the swim team. During these years I’ve never looked the way that pleased me. When the age of fourteen came around, I decided to join the gym with a personal trainer. At this time, being overweight and unhappy. Never did I think the gym would mean so much to me in the future. Just before the age of sixteen, bodybuilding made a drastic impression on me. The art of building a well symmetrical body. Everything about this sport fascinated me because it gave a chance to create a new me.

He let out a powerful yell, one much similar to a war cry and began to lift the 500 pounds in front of him off the floor. Everyone on the lacrosse team was cheering him on as the barbell slowly moved up and reached its destination. I stood there in awe at this incredible feat of strength: at this moment that I knew that I too, wanted to be strong. Before I became serious about weightlifting, I would often settle for the minimum amount of success possible. I believed that this was enough to get by in life. Once I began weightlifting however, I saw almost no progress. After reevaluating what I had been doing, I realized I needed to take a different approach and take weightlifting more seriously. I decided to set smaller, more achievable goals

I've always been the odd man out on any sports team who looked forward to conditioning at the end of practice and would hold my plank an extra few seconds until I really felt the pain. I loved pushing myself beyond my expected limits and the satisfaction of leaving the gym knowing I gave my full effort. Although the thought of taking a weight lifting class was extremely intimidating, I acknowledged my deep love for training and bettering myself.

I knew I needed physical improvement just as much, if not more than, technical improvement. I also figured that hard physical training would make me tougher, harder, and less likely to get injured. With that mindset I practically killed myself over the offseason. I weight lifted every day, and went to club practice four days a week.

I recently got into bodybuilding and Powerlifting since i'm really strong. when you grow up with parents that go to the gym everyday you tend to do the same thing. I’ve traveled a lot through my life places including Hawaii, Florida, Utah,and Ensenada in Mexico.etc. Sadly to say i’m the athletic one while I grew up with two brothers that were hooked on video games. Being the only one having to do something with my life support from my father helped. Following in his footsteps, he used to be big time into working out he was able to squat 1,125 lb, bench 575 lbs, and 1,100 deadlift he really was big and that's what made me strive to become big and to keep trying to get bigger everyday. i’m able to squat 505 lbs and Deadlift 410 lbs everyday I know i’m going to get there and hopefully surpass my father.

In life, we all have goals that we set for ourselves. We have to push ourselves to our limits and stride for greatness to achieve and accomplish these goals. This all started after I finished my freshman baseball season, I was instantly looking for a new way to improve my game and get ready for my sophomore season. So during the offseason I decided to start training at a local gym. Starting off with small, light dumbbells and not sure what I was really doing. I had felt uncomfortable and worried about what others had thought about me. It was like I was always under pressure. I was thinking about giving up and wanting to quit, but it's too easy just to give up. So I stuck with it and thought about the reasons I chose this. I chose this

“Press”. There are a lot of accomplishment that you have in weightlifting. You have a lot of accomplishments that you have to achieve to be great at it. It's not something you do just for fun, you have to put your passion in it. It made me accomplish a lot of things but the main one was with stress and my anger.

One of my best friends, who was on the track team before, told me how painful and gruesome the amount of exercising we had to do was. Because of this annoying but helpful fact she told me, I started going to the gym. At that time I wasn't a member of a gym. The next day I asked my parents for a membership at the gym, the Y. I started going three times a week. I had a day for abs, legs, and arms and and I saw a differance in my muscles immediately.

Some people say that the journey is more important than the final destination. I agree with that. Last year I wanted to get stronger for softball. The school opened the weight room for girls, so that we could work out also. We got to do different types of exercises to make us stronger. If I wasn't able to go to the weight room all summer, then I wouldn't be as strong as I am now.

When I did Cross Country and Track for the first time, I fell short as a star runner. Instead, weightlifting became the place in high school athletics where I was able to find my niche.

Why is it that we seem to have a strong disconnection between our physical body and mind? It almost seems like there is a continuous battle occurring. Susan Sontag’s essay, “ A Woman’s Beauty: Put-Down or Power Source”, analyzes the modern definition of beauty and explores its consequences for women( ). Sontag compares how beauty is looked upon in both women and men, and leads to conclude that women are pressured to feel obligated to look beautiful on the outside while many forget the importance of inner beauty. To be obligated to look beautiful, causes an unnecessary feeling of insecurity that you do not meet society’s expectation of what is beautiful( ).

I was stoned the first time I went to a gym. I came in with some friends and we were all non-stop laughing. Everyone must have thought we were crazy. The first thing we did was go to the locker room to change out; we felt like we needed to calm down. We still couldn't take each other serious, so we decided to start working out. We started out with biceps, doing simple curls. Well, not so simple since every time we curled up a weight, we would act like Goku going super saiyin from “Dragon Ball Z.”

Am I scrawny? Am I weak? This resulted in me finding the answers to my own questions, and led me to believe that my friend was true, either he had meant what he said, or not. It was true that I was small; it was true that I was weak, I was scrawny. Knowing now the truth I hated to believe, I decided it was time for a change. I did my research, and my first goal was to quit the cross country team. Everyone who ran cross country, was thin, and fit the description of the word, scrawny. By doing this, I planned to relieve myself of running, and the burden I now see it had carried. I moved myself from a mile runner in track, to a quarter and half-mile runner. I picked up lifting after school, and eating more. This led to joining the football team, and becoming a defensive lineman. Lifting became like a religion to me and it was very regularly practiced. My junior year, I quit track altogether, and focused all my time on lifting, and football.

Weight training originated in the Egyptian-Greek era. Since war was common in those days, weight training was a tool to gain muscle and stamina. It wasn’t until the early 1900’s did a man named Eugene Sandow change the way people viewed bodybuilding. In those days, weightlifters were called “strongmen”. These “strongmen” entertained people with their displays of great strengths by lifting animals and pulling carts. Many “strongmen” were overweight with meaty limbs, in which today’s society would view as “overweight”. It wasn’t until Sandow came along that the concept of weightlifting changed. Sandow was able to display great acts of strength, but unlike the “strongmen”, had an appealing physique to the public. His physique drew people in by the masses. People became intrigued with weightlifting and many researchers began to study the sport. Through their research, they

Adding exercises into one’s daily routines can change their whole lifestyle. Many people look at exercise as being something just for people who want to lose weight or to become muscle bound, but there are a great deal of benefits that can be received from exercising regularly. Of course gaining muscle and losing fat are the two most popular reasons that usually attract people to the gym, but they make up a small part of the potential benefits that can be achieved with exercise. There are several ways in which I have benefited in my life from exercising regularly, besides just making me bigger and stronger. It has made me become more organized, helped me make better decisions, and motivated me to take on new challenges in life.