A Weight on My Shoulders

A couple of weeks after I filed the first draft of this column, the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic came into focus. What remained hazy, however, was the scale of the suffering. You will be reading these words many weeks after they were written, and I hope we’ll have passed through the worst by then. Either way, it might not be a bad thing to take your mind off the pandemic for a while and put it in my hands. I promise to be gentle …

In the fall of 2019 (the good ol’ days), I had one of those life encounters that comes out of nowhere and turns heavy. You can’t avoid them, simply because you don’t know they’re coming. My close friend Murray suggested I get in touch with a mutual friend whom I hadn’t seen much over the last few years. I called the friend. What he asked of me — no, what he demanded from me — forced me into a decision of such fundamental gravity that I could not give him an answer on the spot. I had to go home, think about it, discuss it with my wife. But I didn’t regret the encounter or the decision that followed. Every now and then you just have to put a load on your shoulders and lift it. We all have a weight to bear.

In the end, I decided to comply with what that friend — let’s call him “Jeff” — was asking because it seemed the right thing to do. “I promise,” he said, “you won’t regret doing as I ask.” I told him I’d been hurt before by what he was suggesting. “That won’t happen this time,” he said. “You have to trust me.” Then he mentioned money. 

Looking back, I’m not sorry I proceeded. This journey has reminded me that, as with so many instructive life experiences, yes is sometimes the better answer even if no might be more sensible.

Some background. Attentive and even distracted readers of this column will know that I still cling to the notion, delusional or not, that even on the back nine of my time on this planet I remain an athlete — or at least someone capable of an actual, if occasional, athletic activity. I have long pursued various sports and have drawn a great deal of pleasure — as well as the attendant physical and emotional benefits — from staying active. But for me it has always been about more than staying fit. It was about being able to answer the bell in the athletic arena, from playing college golf and soccer, to stepping on the squash court, to cycling long distances. But these modest achievements were due more to hand-eye co-ordination and caveman determination than muscle or strength. My fitness level has always been a byproduct of the sports I’ve played. It seemed to work well enough when I was younger, but now that I am, ahem, not young … well, let’s just say that no one has been knocking down my door looking to sculpt my physique out of marble.

Along came “Jeff.”

Jeff Woods, co-owner of Custom Fit personal training in Edmonton, had been encouraging me for years, decades even, to start weightlifting with him as my trainer. We’d met in the early 1990s when I was getting into squash and he was starting out as a trainer. Back then, although I liked Jeff, I put weightlifting in roughly the same activity classification as car theft or being a nightclub bouncer — something that probably required swagger and a rudimentary skill set but that didn’t precisely match up with my life goals.

Yet through the years the evidence kept mounting that my blithe approach to fitness might not be working. I began incurring a series of minor injuries that often seemed related to muscle strain. I was also coming across more and more articles and books about muscle loss as you age. My good friend Bruce Grierson, ’86 BA(Spec), wrote a great book, What Makes Olga Run?, about a 90-year-old athlete who did resistance training as part of her upkeep. Another friend, Tim Caulfield, ’87 BSc(Spec), ’90 LLB, author of the soon-to-be-published book Relax, Dammit! A User’s Guide to the Age of Anxiety, was regularly supplying me with the latest science proving the value of resistance over cardio. It was coming at me from every angle. Then Murray started working with Jeff and it was all I could do, whenever Murray and I got together for a beer, to stop him from waxing hypertrophic. The universe was giving me explicit instructions.

Which is how I found myself last fall in a weight room, confronted immediately by the sight of a guy about my age but who looked like Brad Pitt’s body double. The dude had muscles on his muscles. I nearly turned around and left. But no, I told myself, put your biases and preconceptions aside. Stay strong … I mean, get strong.

In the first sessions, Jeff explained that the point of resistance training for the vast majority of the population is not to get stronger just for strength’s sake but to avoid injury and live better. “Most of us just don’t lead task-oriented lives anymore,” he said. “It’s become common to farm out the duties associated with caring for our homes and property. You can even grocery shop from your laptop.” Which is why, he explained, the medical diagnosis of frailty is being applied more and more to people as young as 50 and even 40 — we just aren’t using our bodies anymore. “We have to just move!” he said. Thereafter, it’s important to make sure you are pursuing what he calls Primal Movement Patterns, which I at first took to mean drinking beer and operating the TV remote. But no. He described these as “movements that force you to squat, push and pull.”

We started slowly, lifting various bars without much weight on them, just to get the technique down. Jeff focused on form rather than pounds. It’s vital to perform a movement properly with some of the more technical lifts, such as the dead lift, the goblet squat, the back squat, the bench press and so on. If your technique is bad, your back will be, too. We progressed slowly over the weeks and months, adding a few pounds here and there. One day, a few months in, a curious sense of achievement came over me when I managed to do a goblet squat with a weight I couldn’t even pick up in my first session. The surprises continued, the most astonishing coming when I realized I’d double-booked myself, scheduling a squash match and a weight-training session on the same day.

I cancelled the squash match.

Now, let’s not overdramatize this. I haven’t installed mirrors in the kitchen to check out my guns as I lift my bagel to my mouth. I’m hardly lifting Olympic-level loads. The amounts are numbers I never thought I’d reach, but anyone who has been doing resistance training for some time would find them modest. I haven’t even really tried the bench press yet because I’m protective of the rotator cuff I tore a couple of years ago.

The point is not how much I’m lifting but just that I feel so much more stable. What is amazing is the difference I have noticed in things you can’t really see (which, I suppose, is what I have to say given that there has been no appreciable increase in the size of my musculature). I do feel stronger, but it’s more about sturdiness than anything else. When I play squash, I don’t fear injury and I’m moving around the court with more assurance. When I pick up a chair in the kitchen or lift a bag of groceries to put in the car, the load feels effortless. Small things, I admit, but small things become big things the minute you can’t do them. In other words, when you become frail.

The evidence keeps tumbling in. The New York Times reported in mid-February that a new Australian study found the healthiest adults were those who combined cardio and resistance, to which I say, Duh. Humans were built for two things primarily — to move from place to place under our own power and to lift things that need lifting using our own strength. It’s not that complicated. The truth is that I don’t see much of a difference when I stand in front of the mirror. My love handles are still graspable. My pecs have yet to pop a button. My calves still look like pale birch saplings. The only thing that’s noticeably bigger is my ego, because now I’m a weightlifter. (Though if you ever catch me drinking a lumpy brown protein shake out of a plastic slurping cup, you must immediately alert my family and friends for the pre-arranged intervention.)

More than anything else, Jeff has convinced me that resistance training is not so much about how you look (though over time that might improve) and not even so much about how you perform your sporting activities (though that will also improve over time). It’s more about how successfully you cope with life’s physical demands as you move into your 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond. Not everyone has to be Arnold Schwarzenegger. Strength is not about how good you look but how well you live. It pains me deeply to admit that my thinking has been imperfect for 40 years, but it turns out there’s nothing wrong with being strong. It’s a weight I’m learning to carry.

And, of course, in these very unsettling COVID-19 days, we all have a different kind of weight we’re learning to carry. The toll — physical, emotional, spiritual, psychological, economic — won’t be fully understood for some time. But we have to persist even, or especially, in the hardest times. “Stay strong” is an oft-used metaphor, but it becomes even more powerful if we can turn it into both metaphor and habit.