I've been going to the gym consistently for six months now. Five days a week, weight training, no excuses. And the biggest thing I've learned is this: The hard part is simply showing up. Everything else is downstream of that. This is great news though. It's so simple! However, there is a caveat: _Once you start showing up_, the rest does become important. The specific exercises, the number of reps, the amount of rest, etc. It all matters once you're regularly going ot the gym. ## Building the Habit Iteratively When I first started, I had no plan. I just went to the gym and moved some weights around. I didn't have a plan other than to show up, consistently, and that's what I did. About 4 weeks in I started layering on tracking, slowly. First it was just protein. I used an app to track protein intake and nothing else. No calories, no other macros, just protein. A simple mission: **Get 200g a day** and you're done. Then I started tracking lifts. Not with any sophisticated program at first, just writing down what I lifted. The idea was to iterate towards higher degrees of tracking. Intellectually I knew that I would have to lift more over time in order to gain muscle, and in order to do that I would need to know how much I was lifting. However, tracking _anything_ in your life is friction. The more friction, the less likely I would stick to the plan. This is essentially playing a trick on your mind. Your mind doesn't want to change its habits, but a little bit of variance gets by unnoticed. A small change becomes normal, allowing another small change, and over time these small changes add up to a huge difference in lifestyle. ## Add tools to remove friction I knew I had to track my lifts if I wanted to grow muscle, but tracking lifts is also a lot of friction. Luckily I found an app[^2] that would tell you what to lift next. This removes decision fatigue. You open the app, it tells you what exercise to do, how many sets, how many reps, and what weight to aim for based on your previous performance. No thinking or deciding required. That's huge. The app also introduced me to the idea of mesocycles—lifting more and more for a few weeks, then taking a full week off before starting again. [^1]: I haven't explored the whole space that much. I've only tried three apps: the Strength app, the built-in training tracker in the Whoop app, and RP Strength. So take my endorsement with that grain of salt. The idea is that your body accumulates short-term fatigue (removed via sleeping) and long-term fatigue (which needs longer rest periods). So you push hard for several weeks, then take a week where you still lift but much lighter. This might just be a micro-optimization. The cure thing is still to: 1. Show up 2. Lift more over time 3. Get enough rest to support point 2. ## Recap - Show up, lift more over time. - You need to track in order to lift more over time, so.... - Use tools that reduce friction wherever possible. ## Gains? So, how well has this all worked so far? Not as well as I would like. I'm not yet ripped. I feel like I look more or less the same as I did when I started, however, I am _slightly bigger_. That's enough to motivate me to keep pushing. [^2]: RP strength. The core feature is that it tells you how much to lift next. They don't even have a mobile app! But the friction reduction is very valuable.