My guide for gym beginners

Happy Saturday, friend (and 550 other subscribers)!

Welcome to Strong Stuff, where I share the love of all things strength. Today I'm writing to you about beginning your strength training, being idle like a cat, supporting abortion access, and meeting up with the ladies and theydies.

Strength starter kit

So many people tell me they want to start strength training, but first they want someone they can trust to tell them how. Not everyone can hire a personal trainer like me, though. So here's my way of helping more people, and it's a new perk for all our members.

I've created this Strength Starter Kit with seven clear, focused workouts that you can complete at the Out Fitness studio, other gyms, or a home gym. You follow the workouts step-by-step in the Strong or Hevy apps. The kit also includes my guidance for sleep, food, scheduling, and equipment.

I designed my kit for this goal: increase muscular strength and size, with noticeable results in 3 months, by resistance training in a gym 2-4 times per week.

I've spent years designing strength workouts that will respect your autonomy and schedule. My workouts are intentionally different than punishing styles like "boot camps" or "no pain no gain," which cause injury and demotivation that halt your strength progress.

When you read the kit guide or try the workouts, let me know what you think!

Your reminder to do some nothing

By late August, warm weather has kept us all busy for months. On top of summer events, maybe you're also biking and walking more, staying up later, or working extra hours. Maybe you've gotten sick but still didn't slow down.

This week, I felt my energy running out after a series of job stressors, home renovations, and social gatherings. I noticed I was irritable and having trouble falling asleep. (I've gotten more mindful of these patterns over the last five years.)

On Tuesday, I still wanted to go to the gym, because a workout can be my favorite part of a bad day or good day. I even took a lovely walk to the gym's street. And then I felt weary. "I don't want to go inside," I thought.

So I sat down on a bench by the Cuyahoga River and let my body slump while my mind wandered.

The water was serene and the air was comfortable. My body enjoyed the stillness even as my mind analyzed whether this was a moment of failure. Normally, when I'm feeling low energy, I'm still happy to get into the gym and do some easier lifting, reduce my number of sets, take long rests between exercises... On this day, I couldn't imagine doing one lift.

Exercise is a key part of managing my mental health. But so is rest. And so is idleness.

This is the part where I should proclaim that resting by the river was worthwhile, because I came back stronger for future workouts. But I was recently disabused of this single view of stillness by The Idle Gazette, from which I will quote at length:

The approved rest goes by many names. Recovery. Recharging. Self-care. Downtime. It arrives now with its own industry: the apps that track your sleep so you may optimize it, the retreats that cost a month's salary, the scented candles sold with the vocabulary of medicine, the entire apparatus of wellness, which is simply the word the productive world uses for maintenance performed on itself. This rest is permitted, encouraged, even prescribed, and the reason it is permitted is the reason it should be regarded with suspicion: it is rest in service of work.

Idleness cannot be sold this way, because idleness refuses the premise. It does not promise to make you better at anything. It offers no return on investment.

This is a harder position than it sounds, because the temptation to justify [idleness] is enormous, and it comes from inside. You sit down to be idle and within minutes some voice begins constructing the alibi: this is good for me, this will make me more creative, this is restoring my focus for tomorrow. The voice is not malicious. It is the voice of a person raised to believe that time must answer for itself, and it cannot bear an hour that simply refuses to. 

If you are exhausted, rest, and let the rest serve your work, and feel no shame in it. The wellness industry is not wrong that recovery matters; it is only wrong in believing that recovery is the whole of what stillness is for.

Some time should be wasted. [...] Because a life in which every hour serves work, including the hours of rest that serve work by restoring you for more work, is a life that belongs entirely to work, even in its leisure, even in its sleep. 

My bench moment was closer to idleness than rest. For a while, I couldn't begin to decide how long I wanted to be on the bench or what I should do when I was ready to leave. I unexpectedly found myself in wasted time, but it was my time, and it was utterly pleasant.

You should be suspicious of me, because now I'm justifying that idle moment by using it for writing inspiration! But you'll have to believe that I took many other restful moments during the subsequent days before I began feeling interested in life again. And I am taking more idle time, too, about which I will tell no one. So should you.

Better world builders

Here are more people whom I'm seeing use their strengths in ways that I find inspiring.

Abortion advocates: Today, Aug. 29, a dozen small businesses in my neighborhood are holding a Detroit Shoreway Sizzle shopping event to raise money for Preterm! Preterm is Cleveland's nonprofit provider of abortion and sexual healthcare (as well as where friend of the studio, McKenna, works). If you can't attend their event, you can donate at that same link. Nothing is hotter than supporting abortion access.

Meet them at X: My friends Luciana and Rachel are founders of WXMX Cleveland, a social meet-up for ladies, theydies, and allies. Their monthly mixers are low-cost and welcoming, and there's one this week in the neighborhood. And recently, they're also organizing active events like soccer, basketball, and walks! They keep it all low-key but have created such a big, positive community.

Thank you for supporting my writing, being part of Out Fitness, and working out for a better world.

Until next time, claim and enjoy your strength!