The gym is an absurd place

Today, I realized just how absurd the gym is.

When you first start going to the gym, you might see someone doing a lat pulldown and wonder, “What muscle does this work?” You try it out, and it feels awkward. Initially, you feel all the muscles from your midsection to the handles working—forearms, biceps, lats, traps, core. This isn’t ideal, you hear. As you refine your form and practice more, you get better at isolating just your lats. After a few months, you may notice broader shoulders.

Isn’t that strange? To appeal to our evolutionary instincts (broad shoulders signaling good health and protection), you essentially trick your body into developing specific muscles. From our ancestors struggling for food, we’ve evolved to build intricate weight and pulley systems to focus tension precisely—either against the handle or downward with dumbbells. We learn to execute exact movements so that we activate just one muscle group, and repeat the movement thousands of times to trick our body into growing it. The gym is a stage for this ritual of tricking our primal instincts.

And let’s not forget: in today’s world, physical prowess isn’t the top predictor of success. Being good at Excel, English, or C++ is more highly correlated with being able to provide for your offspring than having broad shoulders.

So yes, the gym is an absurd place.

But let’s go jim anyway.