Expect The Exceptional: Build An Iconic Self

What you do at the gym is not natural. Look, men have pushed themselves in exactly that way for millennia but they had no choice. You do. You could be at home with your best girl and the Mad Men box set and some food from Saffron Indian Bistro. And yet you choose to wake up early to sweat and strain, lift and pull, raise your heart rate and pump your blood. You even pay good money for the privilege of replicating the daily lives of men who no longer exist, mimic the manual labor of our ancestors, all the men who lifted that barge and toted that bale. They did it because it placed food on their family's table. You do it, because you want abdominal muscles like a Calvin Klein model.

This is why serious physical training six days a week is good for the self. It's abnormal. What you do in a gym is carefully choreographed ditch-digging for men who no longer need physical strength or supreme fitness to make a living. Which is almost all of us.

We do it for many reasons, of course, to look better, to live longer, to sleep through the night without waking, to suck the sweetest juice from life's ripest fruit. We train because training is the big difference between fat and fit, between holding back the years and putting one foot in the grave, because training is the best way we have found to feel at peace with ourselves. But despite all the good reason, we are forever fighting the undeniable fact that we could be somewhere else, somewhere much easier. So we need help, as much help as we can get.

We need rituals that make us feel like training like a locomotive early-in-the-morning. We need rituals that will make the gym feel like our natural habitat, like always packing your bag for the next session the moment you get home. We need a personal trainer who can push us in a way we can never push ourselves. We need everything we can find to help us suit the choppy seas of exhaustion, to give us the power to ignore the sweat in our eyes, to override the lactic acid building in our muscles, to blank out those alarming stabs of pain.

Did men wear personal headphones when they built a railroad or worked on a chain gang or when they picked cotton or hoisted a mainsail? No, but they sang. Music, the great destroyer of bodily awareness when we need it most, at exactly the moment when the body is screaming with discomfort was a communal experience. And that is when gym music works best, as something shared. The music should matter, but never too much. You will not be singing along.

Sports psychologists say that there are two distinct breeds of gym users – associators, who turn their focus inward when exercising and – dissociators, who turn their attention to the outside world. If you are an associator, you will be perfectly happy sweating to the sound of silence. Elite athletes tend to be associators. They don't listen to music when they work out. They listen to their bodies. 

If you are not playing sports seriously then you are most certainly a dissociator. Reading your iPad on a treadmill, watching Sports on the stationary bike – this is all misplaced dissociation. It passes the time in the gym yet doesn't help you get any fitter. 

You are at the gym for the sweat and green vegetables that will make you younger next year.