I first went to the gym in earnest a little over two years ago. For a long time, I mostly felt shame and discomfort every moment I spent there. Every machine made me uncertain, every activity made me feel incompetent and weak. I was self-conscious of my body and aware that anyone looking could see I didn’t know what I was doing.
I understand – in theory – that a body will get better at any action you ask of it consistently over time. In the gym, though, I sincerely wondered if my body might be an exception to this. For months on end, it seemed to look the same and struggle with everything I asked of it.
Change occurred in such bare increments that I didn’t really notice it. I might have been looking too hard. But one day I needed to move a bookcase when himself was out and pondered whether to try it myself or wait for his return. Carefully, tentatively, I gave it a go. The bookcase moved, so too did my self-image.
One year before, I simply would never have been able to move it. My body had clearly changed. Here was incontrovertible evidence. I was accustomed to living in a body that frequently couldn’t meet the demands I placed on it – running for the bus, carrying heavy groceries home without struggle, moving a bookcase.
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Now, suddenly, after consistent effort, here was this shocking new physical competence. I no longer felt frustrated in my body or betrayed by it. I could trust it to meet any reasonable demand I made of it.
In a world that fixates – especially for women, but also for men – on what you look like, this physical competence is deeply underrated. It filters out powerfully into other areas of your life. It gives you respect for the one body that you will ever live in and for yourself as the person who has cared for it.
Aristotle talked about a concept called hexis. It’s a reassuring idea for those of us who suspect we can’t improve in the ways we yearn to.
It refers to something deeper and more meaningful than a habit but also subtler and more amorphous than a skill. We might think of it as there in the disposition of a mountaineer heading back down from the peak, thinking with satisfaction about the next climb.
Hexis is something we cultivate as a state of being. We acquire it through engaging in an action repeatedly, but it can’t be reduced merely to repetition. It’s about what we do despite internal resistance until the resistance is less compelling than the drive to act – until the doing is internalised as part of who we are.
This is the kind of concept some tedious social media gym bro might rip the guts from and bash you over the head with while trying to sell you supplements, but he’d be incorrect to.
Hexis holds greater allure for those who are not currently competent in some chosen thing than for people who are. We can become courageous, Aristotle says, by doing courageous things.
To develop courage, we must begin without it. We can be terrified, unconfident or doubtful, but if we just behave like someone with courage then we will eventually be a courageous person.
Similarly, if we consistently behave like someone whose body can do the things demanded of it – provided we are lucky enough to have the physical capacity – then eventually we will become someone in a physically competent body. One day we will put our shoulder against the bookcase and feel it move.
I sympathise enormously with the new guy at my gym today who radiated self-consciousness. Many others have joined this January. Some will form a habit and keep coming. Some won’t.
Two years ago, I was among them and my eyes too were magnetically drawn to the people whose appearance signalled years of repetition, dedication and discipline. The way they looked seemed to signal, even as they went unknowingly about their business, that somebody like me just didn’t belong and never could.
Their achievement is deeply impressive, but I made an error in comparing myself. Hexis is not about “better than”. It concerns itself with being “fit for”. It’s not aesthetic.
In this context, it means having a body which gets up – in the morning or from a chair or up the stairs – without negotiation, one which carries what you need to carry when you need to carry it and absorbs the bumps that life will inevitably deliver without excessive complaint or falling apart.
It means having a body as well equipped for living your particular life as it can be. There is such beauty to this idea that in doing something with commitment, we slowly become a person who can.
