Winnie Lim

Last year around this time I had my first strength training session with a personal trainer. I had only 3 sessions with them, but due to a fundamental incompatibility – they had issues with me wearing a mask – I decided not to renew the contract. It was difficult getting another trainer at the same gym, so I decided to continue on my own. My issue was never about having someone to train with me in order to get motivation, but rather learning proper form.

I did mostly weight machines at first because they are supposed to be idiot proof for people like me, and I didn’t want to overthink. Midway through my gym closed for a renovation, so I was forced to find a temporary gym. In Singapore we have these mini pod-like gyms around the island:

They don’t require a contract (unlike most gyms here), they are mostly private – one pod per person – and we can book it anytime on an app. Unfortunately most of these pods do not have weight machines, only barbells, smith machines and free weights, so you can say that I was forced to learn how to use the smith machine. Since these pods are private, I didn’t feel any self-consciousness or awkwardness being clumsy or anything. With that, I did my first squat with a barbell using the smith machine.

I slowly progressed to doing romanian deadlifts, bench presses and overhead presses on the smith machine, and some basic movement variations with dumbbells. I think this is a very useful skill to have, especially while travelling. Most hotel gyms do not have fancy equipment, but will at least have dumbbells. I found that learning to strength train was an easier way to keep myself fit during travels, versus running. I know that they work different systems, but doing some form of exercise was better than none.

After my first gym contract ended I signed up with Anytime Fitness. Their membership allows me to use any of their gyms in Singapore. Since I typically wake up from 4am-6am, I thought it would be good for me to use the gym in ungodly hours avoiding the crowd.

I am always craving for novelty, so it is great to be able to visit a different gym each time. I take the opportunity to read or write on the commute, and post-gym I takeout food from a different restaurant. Win, win, win.

What I loved about strength training is becoming stronger. Duh, I know. But I’ve never associated the quality of strength with someone like myself. Most of my life I have thought of myself as weak, in all definitions of the word. I was mentally, emotionally, and physically weak. I always needed help with carrying heavy stuff. I preferred buying groceries online because I can then avoid carrying them myself. Placing my carry-on luggage in the overhead cabins felt like a life-threatening experience.

I was surprised how fast I was progressing. I don’t know how it compares to the average woman, but it felt fast relative to my self and my body. When I first started weight-training, most weights felt unbearably heavy. They just felt like I wouldn’t be able to lift them easily for ever.

In my first session my trainer made me start with 20kg on the leg press because I told her I ran frequently. I didn’t understand the phrase “train to failure” until then. Post session I had one of the worst cases of DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness) in my life, unable to walk properly for days after.

(Another terrible case of DOMS I can consciously remember was just hiking a gentle hill for a couple of hours a few years ago, which was how unfit I was.)

Fortunately I didn’t have any more cases of DOMS since. I don’t consciously train to failure since the research shows it doesn’t make much of a difference. And even if it did, I am not particularly seeking maximisation, just improvement. In life we often have to weigh tradeoffs, and since I have fragile health I don’t want to regularly walk around with an extreme state of inflammation. A little bit of stress loading is manageable for my body, but I am not sure what are the repercussions of frequent and dramatic stress. Maybe other people in general good health can push their body’s limits more, but I tend to get really ill in a multitude of ways. It is already a miracle that my body can afford to exercise regularly, because I know a ton of people with chronic illness can barely get out of bed.

One of the tradeoffs I am making is that my running progress is now slower. I have been mostly exercising every alternate day most weeks, so our of four days per week I can only run twice and strength train twice. Running twice a week is barely enough for any adaptations, and I was stuck at running 5km for most of this past year. Every time I made some progress it would be either derailed by illness or travelling.

I also started to gradually prefer strength-training (gasp), for many reasons. First of feeling strong is not a feeling I am acquainted with so I started to develop a new positive relationship with my body. Then it was simply fascinating to get obviously stronger. I would be struggling to lift a weight for a week, and the next it would suddenly feel easy. I have never experienced this sort of progress in my life before. Even running felt hard for a very long time.

I also experienced radically improved metabolic health – my blood glucose stopped dramatically spiking post meals. I mean, this is another duh: it is common knowledge that more muscle is correlated to better insulin sensitivity. Running did improve it significantly, but strength training made me doubt the accuracy of my glucose meter.

Slightly obsessive with trying to achieve my first pull-up, it was tempting to forego running all together. But I knew strength-training requires good mitochondrial health and endurance capacity too. If you watch Physical 100 you would also know that having muscles may not equate to endurance at all, so to me there is no point being able to lift something heavy up for 5 minutes but falter straight after. Cardio is also known to help with muscle recovery. So it was important for me to focus on the bigger picture rather than pursue potential quicker results.

But I still managed to hit 8.5km running last week – a distance I last ran before I got infected with covid 1.5 years ago – I think strength-training made running feel easier too because now I have more muscle in my core and legs. So strength and aerobic capacity have a synergistic relationship.

Overall I’ve also been getting less migraines, but I am not sure how much strength-training contributed to it versus other factors. Scientifically speaking it would make sense that it helped, because of the improved insulin sensitivity and also probably a better capacity for oxidative stress.

Carrying heavy weights has also become a lot less dreadful. I used to optimise everything for lightness: even something like carrying a camera in my backpack would make me think twice. These days I carry a selfie-stick-tripod with me so we have been taking a lot more photos than we usually do. Memories are so precious, and I don’t know when I’ll lose the opportunity to be in life with my partner doing little mundane things that we so easily take for granted so I like documenting them whenever possible. Who knew that starting to strength-train would lead to more photo-taking?

I have written about this before: that one of the major reasons why I love exercise is because it is one of the rare things in my life that feels truly rewarding. My mind can go berserk and I can have the darkest thoughts, but when I train my body does its own thing. It is so reliable, unlike me. I just need to show up, put in the brute force, and it gets fitter. It doesn’t care that I don’t care about my self or the world. The rest of the day I can be brimming with self-hatred but at the gym, I am one with my body. I am very thankful that it continues to bear the growing load I heap on it, and that millions of biochemical reactions are still working well enough for me to become stronger. Unlike most other people I don’t take this for granted, because I have had my body fail on me before. What I didn’t know back then was that my body failed because I have been failing it for a very long time. If I could go back in time I would treat it a lot better.

We lose 3-5% of muscle mass per decade after we hit the age of 30. Resistance training is encouraged to prevent further muscle loss. But I am pretty certain at age 43, I have more muscle than I ever had in my entire life, including my 20s. At an age when people start to accept getting weaker, it is pretty weird to become stronger.

The amount of muscle mass one can attain seems to be genetic. I don’t know when will I start to plateau. But since I had almost nothing before it has been a fascinating experience to see that I have visible biceps for the first time in my life. I can also pull myself up on a bar now:

A year ago I could barely grip and hang on the bar for a second before losing my grip. I’ll document some of my progress here so I can do a comparison if I am lucky enough to strength-train for another year (no more covid pls):

Where does this lead me? I don’t know. Because I have lost my health before I am afraid to set goals, project and hope, especially with a disabling virus still running rampant. But if I do stay healthy enough I am glad that I have both strength training and running as my psychological refuge. They are the only times of my day when I am not being tortured incessantly by my mind.

I would like to have a few more sessions with a good trainer, because I want to learn proper barbell lifting. I realised I have been lifting heavy things off the ground the wrong way once I started to learn proper deadlifting. Who knew we are supposed to use our legs, not our arms? Did you know? I definitely didn’t.

I can do a pull-up while standing flat now, but it would be really nice to do a strict pull-up from a dead hang. Still working on it right now.

I wish I started on this much, much earlier in my life, especially at an age when muscle growth would have been much easier. I’ll be heading into menopause soon and everything will be much harder. I have a family history of surgical menopause, so perhaps the time will come sooner than later. But thanks to social media I have seen a ton of grandmas still gaining while in their 70s and 80s so I am not that worried. I am more worried about getting covid again than ageing itself.

I don’t ever want to think it is too late to learn anything. I picked up photography, cooking, exercising – all late. I didn’t have the will, imagination, self-regulation or emotional capacity to learn these things when I was younger. I was either being depressed or a workaholic. I wish I could have started a lot of things way earlier, but only upon hindsight I realised I could only do all these things now because I was able to grow into a different person, and I was lucky enough to have several environmental factors in my favour. I can only feel sorry for my younger self, because she was simply trapped in so many layers.

Hopefully, my future self would be able to write many more of these posts. If not being able to exist in such a moment however temporary, is still something I am thankful for.

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