On a visit to the gym

You know what they say – exercise is good for you. We all know it, but sometimes I suppose we just don’t care. Still, today off I went to the gym, on a quiet Sunday afternoon with the sole purpose of making me feel like my membership fee wasn’t entirely pointless and on the way home I was overtaken by a feeling of euphoria.

They say that exercise has all kinds of benefits, one of which is helping with depression. Who knows the evidence behind these claims, yet it is pretty obvious that things like getting out of the house are a good start at beating the blues, no? The story goes that physical exercise releases all those endorphins, as well as giving you a physical release, that you can’t help but experience a natural high as result. A high that is without the guilt or shame that can result from SI.

So we’ve gotten out of the house and we’ve done something, in my case today a good, oh, twenty-five minutes on a mixture of machines… Still, my heart rate has pounded, I’ve pushed myself as far enough physically as far as I feel like going today, and I’m proud of the efforts I’ve made towards the physical fitness we are all supposed to be striving after.

My euphoria then seemed to come from a combination of factors. Number one was probably actually having left the house but number two was definitely having got myself moving, and broken into a sweat. We can push ourselves with exercise, work out those frustrations, yet still come away having benefited our bodies rather than harmed them.

The flip side is that going to the gym or doing any kind of exercise isn’t always a positive experience. Sometimes I can’t help but look at what everyone else is doing and think how stupid I look, how pathetic I am for barely managing twenty five minutes, how it’s going to make no difference in the end. But still, I go. And a day like today makes all the difference to my state of mind.