“I hate working out!” Jack LaLanne once said in an interview I heard him give before he passed.

I remember when I was young, and I didn’t have to workout. I could look good, feel good, and my body was a well-honed machine without it. I call those days the glory days. I didn’t workout as often as I should’ve, because it was boring. It was also painful. If you do it right, you should experience a little pain. “Who told you that?” workout fanatic John Johnson asked. “That might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“It sounds dumb on the surface,” I said, “but if you finish working out without some pain, what some call a small, satisfying amount of pain, you know that you didn’t do it right that day.” John Johnson refused to concede the point, but when he finished he gave one of those thousand yard stares that told me he was thinking about what I said.  

There were times when I went through runs. I’d work my way into a 2-3 times a week workout week, but it wasn’t biologically required. Now that I’m old, I work out as much as I didn’t when I was young, and I hate every minute of it. 

I know, I know, you love it, but that’s probably because you’re not doing it right now. You love the effects of it, and I feel you, because I know how great it makes me feel, how energetic I feel, and how great peak, physical health feels, but while you’re doing it? C’mon! We do it, because we know we have to do it, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it. 

I hate it, you hate it, we all hate exercising, and now we find out that Jack LaLanne, the guy who gained fame for reportedly working out two hours a day, every day of his life, hated it. “Every minute of it,” he said. LaLanne went on to talk about why he did it anyway, and all of the benefits of doing it anyway, but the soundbite remains. He didn’t go into details on why he hated working out, but we can all guess that it had something to do with the fact that it’s painful, and painfully repetitive and boring.

A good book, a podcast, or an energetic heavy metal album can make working out less tedious, but physical fitness experts tell us that doing that is a mistake. “If you want the optimum results from a workout,” they say. “You need to mentally and physically maintain a focus on the muscles, or the muscle groups, that you’re working on. If you seek optimum results, you’ll workout without distraction.” My guess is that they’re talking about weight training exclusively, because what difference does it make if we’re distracted on a treadmill?  

I also consider working out relatively unrewarding. I see the benefits in my mood, my energy levels, and on my health, but I’m in a good mood today, and I’m in good health, as I write this. Good health is the norm, we don’t appreciate it, and we take it for granted. While we’re experiencing our relative definition of peak physical conditioning, it can prove difficult to keep it going. After a while, we realize there is no higher peak, there’s only sustaining the peak, and that can be relatively unrewarding. Even though it’s completely logical to want this to last longer, we begin to consider this feeling the new norm, and we don’t have the urgency to keep it going. I think we all experience this to varying degrees, but I didn’t comprehend the totality of it, until I ran into an old friend at my gym. 

“Have you ever had a bad back?” Imelda asked me at the gym. “It goes away, right? What if it didn’t? What if you experienced the worst back pain every day of your life for years? What would you do if you saw every expert, in every field you could think up, and they couldn’t help you? I am not a suicidal person, but I was in such horrible pain, for so long that I thought this was my life now. I just didn’t see how I could go on like that.” Imelda said, alluding to the fact that the idea of suicide crossed her mind. She eventually found a savior, a massage therapist who informed her that there were limits to what she could do for her. “You need to learn how to help yourself?” this message therapist told her. The message therapist put her on a workout plan at the gym. “It took a while,” Imelda informed me, “and when I say a while, I mean a while for me to endure the excruciating pain of working those muscles out to find some relief, and it took a while after that to achieve something close to normalcy.” After seeing those benefits, Imelda began working out every day, and she informed me that she hadn’t missed a day in about three years. “I live in fear that if I miss a day, I’ll be back on the floor screaming in pain, and I’m not going back. I’m never going back.”

Imelda informed me that I knew nothing about pain, real pain. I only made it to the gym when I was feeling particularly sluggish. To Imelda, it was about improving her quality of life, and she was either so grateful for the benefits, or fearful of returning to ground-bound pain that she was afraid to miss a day for years. The rest of us can’t help but take good health for granted. 

How long does a physical peak from an excellent workout last? About as long as our workout sabbatical? Peak physical condition, for most of us, usually follows some sort of health scare, or at least a moment of concern. We beat and abuse our body until it hurts, and we workout to recover. When we get back into peak, physical form, we start the cycle all over again.  

“See, to me, you go to the health club, you see all these people, and they’re working out, and they’re training, and they’re getting in shape, but the strange thing is, nobody’s really getting in shape for anything. The only reason that you’re getting in shape is so you can get through the workout.” –Jerry Seinfeld.

Those of us who hate working out on a regular basis love jokes like these, and we repeat them as often as we can. We also love articles that state, “No one really needs to undergo intense weight training four days a week. Some of the times, all we need is a low impact, low stress, long walk.” It’s true, but how true is it? Is it a convenient truth that we use to avoid stressful, rigorous workouts that can prove painful. Depending on our age, we need to stress and strain our muscles a little, maybe as little as two times a week for fifteen minutes a day. “That’s it?” That’s it, but they need to be intense workouts. They should involve some strain and some pain. 

We also don’t workout as often as we should because we’re lazy, undisciplined, and we can think of about 10,000 other things we’d rather do. I’m not on restart day. Restart day is not always on a Monday, but let’s just call it Monday. When Monday rolls around, I enter full workout mode. I listened to all of my excuses last week, and I just got tired of hearing all of that complaining. One of the first things that happens on restart day, soon after I lift that first barbell, I begin thinking about how often I will be working out this week. Even though this is the first time I’ve worked out in weeks, I immediately think that I’m actually, finally going to break my lifelong record of working out four different times in one week. I’m excited, because I’m actually working out, and I think the streak I really haven’t started yet will never end. I buy into the notion that this time it will all be different. When Tuesday rolls around though, I’m just a little too sore to work out again. It’s not a lie, but it’s not really the truth either. We don’t lie to ourselves, but we do fib. It’s more of a convenient truth. On Wednesday, I have something else to do, but that’s all right, because I still have Thursday and Friday, and I have all of that free time on Saturday and Sunday. Before I know it, I haven’t worked out in weeks again, and I have to start the dreaded restart.  

The restart is embarrassing and shameful, because we know we didn’t really do anything during those weeks when we could’ve been working out. We lost the discipline we showed that Monday, and we’re a little mad at ourselves for giving all that up. So, how do we get that discipline back? We buy it in the form of a gym membership. By buying that membership we’ll be putting our money where our mouth is. Making that financial commitment will surely up our personal level of commitment.

“I can’t tell you how many people buy gym memberships on January second, and they don’t show up again after about January twenty-second,” a friend and former gym employee once told me. “Our gym was always packed in January. We had to teach loyal customers the policies our gym has for time spent on machines and wait times, because they never had to learn them throughout the prior year. This was not much of a problem by February, as most of the crowds thinned out, and by March it was pretty much back to the same faces we saw throughout the previous year.”  

If we are one of the few honest enough to cancel the gym membership we’re no longer using, we might supplant it with an in-home machine or gym.

“Yeah, be careful what you spend on those,” he said, “because you can’t buy discipline.”

These at-home machines are a physical showcase of our discipline, and we’re not afraid to parade our friends around them, but the only exercise they offer us, after the initial push, pedal, and pull, is when we dust them off before our friends arrive. These machines and home gyms are also not only expensive, they take up a lot of space in our homes, because we’ll never resell these products for that would be an admission of failure beyond cancelling a gym membership.

The reward of a good workout is not the workout, as most of us hate every minute of it. No, we look forward to the end. We do everything we can think of, while in the midst of it, to occupy our mind and time until the end, but if we don’t start, we don’t have to long for the end. I know once I start, I won’t be able to end for hours, so why start? Well, how old are you?

If we’re not yet forty, that beautiful machine we call our body is still an incredible machine. For most of us, it’s still resourceful, adaptive, and able to recover from just about anything we put into it. Depending on our lack of activity, we may not see much diminishment until the big 44 hits. According to the scientists at Stanford University and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore when an individual hits forty-four-years of age, they will experience a serious drop off in physical ability. It’s the first age, they say, when we’ll experience the first number of effects of age. At age forty-four and then sixty, we will see two huge drop-offs in physical ability, they observe.

“Aging is no longer viewed as the gradual, linear regression we’ve all believed for so long,” they conclude, “it happens in two huge drops.”

“So, if I’m not yet forty-four-years-old,” you say, “I have nothing to worry about?” You are correct, if you believe the study, but there’s that stubborn, little asterisk labeled routine. As I wrote earlier, most of us will not establish a bona fide workout routine, until we experience a health scare. If those scientists are correct, that health scare will probably occur somewhere around our 44th birthday. That’s right, the day of reckoning that so many talk about will hit, and you might want to do everything you can now to prepare for it.  

Are you going to wake on the morning of your 44th birthday with a barbell in hand? Of course not, you’re going to do what you did on your 24th and 34th birthday. You’re going to continue to do what you do. It’s what we all do. You’re best proactive measure is to develop a routine that incorporates some weight training, and I’ve read that some can mean, depending on the person, as little as two workouts a week for as little as fifteen minutes a day. You are also correct, again according to the study, that if you pick up a weight on your 44th birthday, and you develop a healthy relationship with it going forward, you might be just fine. Are you that disciplined? Can you turn it on and off, like a light switch. If you can, you’re a better man than I am.

I don’t care who you are, or what age, working out just plain sucks, and anyone who says different is either lying or so disciplined that I just cannot relate with them. Check that, if we’re talking in hypotheticals, most people talk about the glories of a rigorous workout, how they feel so alive after a great workout, and they do it so often that it’s almost a competition. “I work out four days a week, and I work out with various weights, leg, arms, chest, and back alternately. I’d rather be on an elliptical or under a barbell than anywhere else in the world. It makes me feel so alive!” Are they lying or exaggerating? Hard to tell, but if they were as alive as they claim to be, they’d probably look more alive. If they were more honest, they’d say, “I hate working out, it’s boring, but I do it for all of the health benefits, and the effects it has on my mood, but I can think of about 10,000 things I’d rather do than lay on another bench, pick up a barbell for the umpteenth time in my life, or walk on a treadmill to watch the hundredths of a mile pass by in agonizingly slow progressions.”