Strength Training - So EASY . . . To Avoid

I know I should be doing some of this stuff in the gym. “Total body workouts”, involving weights and machines and ‘reps’ and mirrors to keep an eye on my posture / posing - stuff like that. And just about everyone tells me that it’ll mean that the rest of my training will be more beneficial to race day performance AND less prone to injury.

But it’s just so EASY to avoid. Like mowing the lawn when the rain stops the sun shines for the first time in days. I mean, who’d go to the gym, or mow the lawn when they could be cycling . . . or running (which is also fun in the rain anyway) . . . or practicing the Total Immersion drills for just another hour?

I know I should. But I don’t. Actually, I have mowed the lawn, but the weights room at the gym might as well be a foreign country. The problem is that so far, I’m injury-free, so there’s no real urgency to the gym thing. There are only two basic motivators in life - moving toward pleasure, or away from pain. Lets look at ‘em from my perspective right now:

• Gym = no pleasure. Just boring moving weights around stuff. And I’m happy enough with how the rest of my training is going to convince myself that I don’t need the gym. Self delusion is a wonderful thing.
• Gym = no pain avoidance. Quite the opposite, in fact. I know on an intellectual level that it’s about avoiding injury, but not having experienced injury, I can emotionally bat it away as something that happens to other people. More delusions!

I DID do some weights stuff today though, but not in the normal sense. We’re having most of our house replastered, and the top floor was finished yesterday. Which meant that I needed to shift the tiles I’d bought for the en-suite from the first to the second floor. Tiles for 20 sq metres of wall. That’s a lot of heavy tiles being lifted a long way.

I don’t really think that counts as strength training though, or even a real workout. So afterwards I rode into my client’s offices on Trixie the Fixie. The trouble was that by the time I’d shifted the tiles, and spoken to the plasterers, I was late, and had to work extra hard against a breezy little headwind. And that definitely counts as a workout!

Workout:

• Type: Cycle
• Date: 07/11/2007
• Time: 22:57:41
• Total Time: 1:07:00.00
• Distance: 17 miles
• Average Speed: 15.22 mph

Filed under: Cycle, Motivation, Strength Training, Wind