It amazes me what floats through my brain on a daily basis. I was at the gym earlier, second day of physical abuse involving sweat, jagged breaths, pushing, pulling and most importantly, pain. At the risk of sounding completely off my rocker, I am going to say that I am a fan of pain. I can just imagine all the eyebrows being raised at that statement but let me state for the record that I am not into weird things that involve whips, chains and clamps. Uh...no thank you really. I have enough trouble dealing with a fellow human as it is. Forget the additional accessories, please.
So whilst I sat at the overhead press machine wondering why on earth I was subjecting my body to this amount of torture (there is no other word for it really), I decided to make a list of reasons as to why I keep on insisting on doing it over and over again. It's like a bad habit. Oh, but I like!
1. Vanity
Well, that was a no-brainer. Of course I bloody go to the gym so that I can err... look good without my clothes on. (Not that anyone's looking.) But ultimately that's one of the biggest reasons why people work out. You want to look good in your clothes and out of them. A nice, trim, toned body is THAT much more appealing than a flabby, floppy one that quivers like jelly. (Okay, I know some people are into the jelly but let's assume that they are a minority for the time being.) So there's reason number one. I want to look in the mirror and go "Hmmm...", and not look in the mirror and go, "Oh ewww...".
2. Boredom
When you're trying to kill time, there's only so many movies you can watch, that many snacks you can pig out on, that much coffee you can drink and that many fags you can smoke. What else do people do when they're bored? Stare at their pet goldfish? Play games on their smartphones? Have sex? Well, all of those are possible options but I don't have any pet goldfish and I don't really like to play games on my iPhone and there's no one to have sex with so I opt to travel all the way to the gym and spend a couple of hours acting like Conan the Barbarian's sister. Voila.
3. The After Effects
I'm not referring to nice, tight little butt or a ripped upper body. Sorry, those things take weeks, if not months of disciplined effort. What I'm talking about is the soreness or pain that usually comes several hours or the day after a solid workout. Yeah, welcome to my world of weirdness. I like that 'I just got beaten up' feeling (though I never have been beaten up). I look forward to it. I enjoy struggling to walk up a flight of stairs knowing full well that I can only blame all the hamstring curls I've done. I like having trouble pulling a t-shirt over my head because I've been going crazy with the pull-ups and push-ups. If I may borrow a line from Enrique No-More-Mole Iglesias, it would be, "BABY I LIKE IT!"
Am I crazy? Oh yes, for sure. In sustained quantities though. :P
In the 1960s, there was a
Heath's experiments were based on findings from a decade earlier that administering a mild electric shock to the equivalent brain area in rats - the "reward centre" - would send the animals into a state that looked like ecstasy. The rats would work at complex tasks over and over for the promise of another shock. Heath wondered whether his human subjects would react in the same way - and they did. When they were given a shock they said they felt good. And when handed the electrode's controls, they just kept on pressing, again and again, sometimes a thousand times in succession.- Helen Phillips, New Scientist, 2003.
Well, that explains some things but not everything I suppose. Over the year researchers have painstakingly diagrammed the inside of the human brain and found that there is a chemical transmitter that passes messages around. This chemical transmitter is the very familiar dopamine. It has been found that dopamine release can be linked to every natural and unnatural pleasure experienced by humans. Whether you're feeling the high of heroin, the wham-bam of orgasm, the satisfaction of a rich meal or the thrill of winning money, you can pretty much blame dopamine for every good feeling you have. The 'reward centre' from which dopamine is released the human brain's G-spot. It's the ooooh yes, please yes, keep going, uh huh, yes, yes, yes, oh yes, oh god, oh this feels soooo good spot. Only, it's lodged several centimeters below your skull.
Brain people also suggest that pleasure dictates the type of decisions we make - solving math problems, forming grammatical phrases, making ethical choices or even gambling. Apparently, all decisions are made to maximise pleasure. This does not mean that we are all slaves to instant gratification. (I would hope so, or else people would be jumping on any human they met on the street and found remotely attractive.) However, this ability to override instant gratification is a calculated one that is deemed to maximise pleasure as only by deferring instant gratification do we gain the chance of long-term rewards.
Unfortunately for the hedonists and people like me, it seems that pleasure, by definition cannot be long-lasting. It must switch off so that we can carry on with other tasks. This, would essentially explain my need to constantly return to the gym and spend hours torturing myself so that I can enjoy the feeling of exhaustion and soreness that comes later. So you see, there's a reasonable explanation for my madness. I'll just blame it on the G-spot.
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