As some of you may know, I love playing sport and going to the gym. I am sometimes asked: why do you go to the gym? What is the point of going into a building, three times a week, with a bunch of random sweaty dudes, to lift things up and down for an hour and leave? I usually answer with classics such as: “I want to be stronger for footy, fitter for rowing, or just to make girls recognise that I even exist.” But this isn’t really the real reason why I lift. And I believe that this analysis of
my passion for exercise, will shift us towards a broader understanding of strength and how we should acquire it. I go to the gym because in Year 7 I was the runt of the litter and a frequent subject of bullying. I weighed 29 kg at the time and was naïve as can be. This made me the target for bullying by the much larger Year 8s. Being one of the smaller lads in my year, I was forced to wrestle much larger kids, which usually ended in frequent trips to the nurses’ office. I had my belongings stolen and thrown at me, I was once taped
to my bed, and I dealt with events that are too vulgar for Formal Hall. As you can see, in my first year of high school, I was straight-up not having a good time. Towards the end of the year of torment, a little film was released in cinemas called Captain America. Essentially, Steve Rogers – a stick-thin young man from Brooklyn who is constantly beaten down by the local drunks – gets juiced up with super-serum and takes on the most sinister villains of WWII. After this film, I thought that if I can get big muscles and be stronger, bullies will leave me alone. If I suck at fighting, I need to get better at fighting. Thus a 6-year campaign of
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gym going began. I was desperate to be strong. I was so afraid of being weak compared to my peers, and I hated being an easy target. I hated always being told that “I’ve got to be tough” and “be a man”. Now, I am not going to go into a rant about the way boys are raised. Rather, I want to ask: why is strength important? From the story I’ve just told, the answer is that strength allows you to stand tall within the social hierarchy and avoid
