Why We Really Go to the Gym

I’ve been in the gym for a long time and over the years I’ve trained around all sorts of people. I’ve watched people come in, disappear, completely transform themselves, get ridiculously strong, lose weight, gain weight and everything in between. But if I’m being truthful, for most of that time I didn’t really speak to many of them. I went to the gym to train, put my headphones in, did my session, maybe spoke to a few people I already knew and then went home.

I spent years training around people without really knowing them

Since starting Kravix though, I’ve kind of been forced out of what I like to call my comfort zone because if I want interviews and opinions from people who actually live this stuff, I can’t exactly stand in the corner with my headphones on and refuse to talk to anyone. So I’ve started speaking to a lot more people. Bodybuilders, personal trainers, gym managers, people who have trained for decades, people who have only just started, men, women, people who compete and people who have absolutely no interest in competing.

The more people I speak to, the more I’m starting to notice there are actually a lot of similarities between us, and I don’t just mean how we train. I mean why we train.

Some people are powerlifters. I’m a pain lifter.

For me personally, I’ve been through tremendous amounts of loss, grief, heartbreak and different painful periods of my life, and if I’m being completely truthful, a lot of that is what has driven me over the years. Some people are powerlifters. I’m a pain lifter, hahaha. But genuinely, I’ve taken some of the worst periods of my life and somehow turned them into another set, another session, another rep or another plate on the bar. I’ve written before about turning pain into progress, and for a long time that was basically how my training worked.

I always thought that was just me. I genuinely thought I had some weird mentality where the worse my life was going, the better my training became. My life could be in complete shambles and somehow my gym would be going brilliantly, then my life could be going well and my training would start slipping. That happened enough times that I almost accepted it as just part of who I was. There have genuinely been days where I could be crying all the way to the gym and then the headphones go in and it’s game time.

Then I started Kravix and suddenly I started actually talking to people instead of just training around them.

Why the gym feels simple when life doesn’t

Recently I was speaking to the manager of a local gym because I was asking him about doing an interview for Kravix. He has worked in the fitness industry for around 25 years, so naturally I started picking his brain and we got onto the subject of why people train. He said something that really stuck with me. In his opinion, around 65% of the people he sees aren’t coming into the gym because everything in their life is going brilliantly, and they’re not necessarily there because they’re vain either. A lot of them are there because something is wrong.

Obviously that 65% is his own estimate from years of working around people in gyms. It isn’t some scientific statistic, but the actual point he was making really got me thinking because it sounded exactly like what I had experienced myself.

It could be heartbreak, stress, loneliness, low confidence, losing someone, a relationship falling apart, problems at home, problems at work, or just feeling like everything outside the gym is completely out of your control. Then you walk through those doors and suddenly things become a lot simpler. You have a session in front of you, you know what you need to do, you can focus on another rep, another set, another bit of progress and then come back again tomorrow. That simple idea of doing a little more over time is also why progressive overload made so much sense to me when I first got serious about training.

There is something weirdly reassuring about that when everything else in your life feels complicated.

And the more people I’ve spoken to, the more I’ve realised I’m nowhere near as unusual as I thought I was. Of course loads of people want to look better or get stronger, but sometimes there is something else underneath it.

Writing became another version of training for me

Strangely enough, I’ve realised the exact same thing happens with my writing. Some of the strongest things I’ve written for Kravix were written when I was an absolute mess, not because I sat down and decided to write something emotional, but because I was hurting, angry, grieving, confused or just trying to make sense of something. Writing became another outlet in exactly the same way training always has been for me.

The factual articles absolutely have their place. How I train certain exercises, training programmes, nutrition, technique and programming all matter, but some of the pieces that feel the most like Kravix to me are the ones where I didn’t have to research much because I was actually living what I was writing about.

You can go online right now and find thousands of articles telling you the benefits of exercise. You can find somebody explaining how to bench press in about five seconds. I’ve got my own guide on how I bench press and the way I do it, because practical training information still matters. What I’m becoming more interested in though is the person lying underneath the bar. What happened before they walked through those doors? What are they thinking about between sets? What are they trying to get away from, or what are they trying to become?

Why I started Kravix

Really, that probably goes back to why I started Kravix in the first place. My initial goal was always to tell my story and have my voice heard. I’d spent years looking at influencers online talking about training, diet and how they supposedly built their physiques, and I’d sit there thinking that I lift more weight, I do more reps, I train hard, I eat properly, so why don’t I look like that?

For years I questioned it. I wondered if I was doing something wrong, eating wrong, if I was just genetically unlucky or whether I simply wasn’t training hard enough. Because when somebody presents this perfect physique alongside this perfect routine and this perfect diet, it becomes very easy to look at yourself and think you must be the problem.

But fitness isn’t that simple. Everyone’s genetics are different, everyone responds differently, lighting makes a difference, posing makes a difference, having a pump makes a difference, editing makes a difference, and sometimes there are things going on behind the scenes that simply aren’t being talked about.

That was one of the reasons I wanted Kravix. I didn’t want another place pretending everybody’s journey was perfect. I wanted somewhere I could talk about what actually happens, including the good sessions, the terrible sessions, the injuries, the stupid mistakes, the times I’ve completely changed my training, the times I’ve gone backwards and the times where my training was going brilliantly while the rest of my life was completely falling apart. Even the routine I started with and trained for years matters to me because it is part of the real timeline, not just a perfect programme written after the fact.

For once, I’m not training from pain

What is strange now is that something has changed.

For the first time in a very long time, both myself and my training actually seem to be going well at the same time. That feels strange because for once I don’t really think I’m training from pain. I’m training because I want to improve.

Maybe part of that is because I know pretty soon I’m actually going to have to properly show myself online with Kravix. I can’t hide behind articles forever and eventually people are going to see the person behind it, how I train and what I’ve actually spent all these years building. Maybe some of it is that I’m ready for the next chapter in my life. Maybe it’s Kravix itself giving me something to work towards. Maybe it’s all of it.

I don’t completely know yet, but what I do know is that the drive feels different. The intensity is still there, I still want to train hard and I still want to improve, but for once I don’t feel like I need something to hurt in order to get myself moving.

What I want Kravix to become

Over the next few months, that is where I want Kravix to go. I’m lining up interviews with people from completely different backgrounds and I want to hear what training actually means to them, whether that is grief, illness, heartbreak, competition, confidence, injury, transformation or simply loving the gym.

Alongside that I’ll keep building out all of the training guides, the variations I personally use, how I execute them, what I’ve changed over the years and what I’ve learned from doing things wrong. I’m also going to start going through the actual training programmes I’ve bought, followed and executed over the years, not just reading a programme and then pretending I know what it’s like, but actually explaining what happened when I followed it, what I liked, what I hated, what worked for me, what didn’t, what I changed and whether I would ever do it again.

Because that is the sort of thing I always wanted to find myself. I never just wanted somebody telling me what theoretically works. I wanted to know what happened when someone actually committed to something and lived with the result.

That is what I find interesting now.

I don’t want Kravix to become somewhere that tells people why they should be training. I want to speak to people and let them explain why they actually do.

You can look at somebody and just see a big physique, somebody who has lost loads of weight, someone lifting a ridiculous amount or someone quietly training in the corner every night, but you have no idea what that hour in the gym actually means to them.

When I started Kravix, I thought I was creating somewhere to tell my story. Instead, by telling mine, I’ve started hearing everyone else’s, and I’m beginning to realise that Kravix was probably never supposed to be just another fitness website telling people how to exercise.

There are thousands of those.

I’m much more interested in why we walk through those doors in the first place, because the weights are almost just what brings all of us into the same room.

The stories are what make every single one of us different.