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Comment by Brendinooo | Hacker News Reader

I've tried a few times to get into weightlifting. I can never stick with it, though.

It's not necessarily a self-discipline thing, because I've run thousands of miles over the past decade. When you run, you get outside, you go somewhere, you see and feel different things. There's a race ecosystem that encourages you to get in when you can barely run a mile without stopping and allows you to push yourself as much as you want. It's cheaper to start, it's easy to create routes that are as varied as you want them to be, and if you pick the right spots it's safer.

But the gym is the same sights, smells, and sounds over and over again. I wish I enjoyed it more; I love how I feel when I stick with it for a couple months! Any tips on this?

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It's entirely subjective. I'm neutral about running outside, but I enjoy running on a treadmill because I can get into a kind of zen mode or watch something. Similarly, I love weight lifting because the experience of hard muscular exertion is intensely satisfying for me, and the overall lifting session gets me in a similarly zen mode.

> When you run, you get outside, you go somewhere, you see and feel different things.

I disagree. When I run outside, I see the same thing every time. Maybe if I lived in a wide open meadow or forest where I could take infinite paths it would be different, but in a suburb/city, it's just buildings and streets. Not that interesting to me.

> There's a race ecosystem that encourages you to get in when you can barely run a mile without stopping and allows you to push yourself as much as you want

I hate group sports. I don't want to see other people at all when I'm exercising, so this 'race ecosystem' has no value to me.

> if you pick the right spots it's safer.

I don't really understand your point here. Are you saying running is inherently safer than weight lifting? I would need to see some evidence. Safer than strongman or powerlifting, maybe. Safer than light-moderate lifting with proper form? I'd be skeptical of that claim.

> But the gym is the same sights, smells, and sounds over and over again

Again, I feel the same way about running outdoors. For me the differences from you seem to be (1) I don't need novelty, I exercise for the health and physical sensation of exercising itself. If I want novelty or new sights I'll watch a movie or take a trip somewhere. (2) I love the sensation of lifting itself, just like I also enjoy the sensation of running or biking.

Maybe find a way to focus on the exercise, not the environment. Or just watch videos or listen to music. There's no way around it, weight lifting is inherently repetitive

I started a huge reply to rebut some stuff and/or clarify but...that's not the point here! Not here to argue. Thanks for your input.

It's pretty clear that different people want different things out of exercise, and will have different individual risk factors based on what they're doing.

Thinking about it more, I know that weight (fat) loss is often a goal for my exercise, and I think it's hard to do that while lifting. With running it's simple: Loosely track calories, and each mile on the road gives about 150 extra calories to play with. When I've tried to lose weight while lifting, I usually end up really hungry and struggle to find a balance.

For people interested in fat loss, the relevant benefit of strength training is that it provides a signal to your body to hold on to as much muscle as possible. (Usually in conjunction with eating sufficient amounts of protein during your fat loss phase.)

Without strength training, you're as likely to lose muscle as you are to lose fat. (E.g., lose a pound per week on the scale and 50% may be fat tissue and 50% may be muscle tissue.)

With strength training, the ratio skews towards losing mostly or even entirely fat without losing muscle while having the same rate of weight loss all things being equal. (E.g., lose a pound per week on the scale and 90% may be fat tissue and 10% may be muscle, or 100% fat and 0% muscle.)

For people sufficiently new to strength training or for people who are sufficiently overfat, it's even possible to build new muscle tissue while losing fat, though this gets less and less likely the more advanced you get and the leaner you get. (E.g., lose a pound per week on the scale and 1.25 lbs of fat might be lost while 0.25 pounds of muscle might be gained.)

Fat loss is really as simple as: calories in < calories out. There are finer details that determine how your body reacts to different meals, like dense, calorie rich food leaving you hungry for more and so you eat more, as opposed to voluminous, low calorie foods filling you up, but it really is as simple as that. No complex diet required. No exercise required.

It’s contrary to popular belief, but the truth is in the numbers. The calories burned in the most intense cardio session are negligible compared to your next meal, and with calorie trackers it’s something everyone can see now for themselves. Running is good for cardiovascular health and some people enjoy it for various reasons, but it’s not the tool for managing weight.

Interestingly, lifting weights over time does positively affects fat loss. Maintaining every additional pound of muscle takes more energy than maintaining a pound of body fat, and so having more muscle means you burn more calories by just breathing and existing. You don’t need to become a body building hulk for this effect to have a noticeable impact, either. Muscle is denser than fat. But, as with cardio, don’t bother measuring your calories burned for a weightlifting session. The benefit happens outside the gym.

If you get hungry between meals, drink more water (most people don’t drink enough, anyway) and have a lot of popcorn on hand to snack on. Popcorn is so voluminous yet has basically no calories, helping manage appetite.

The other big trick with weight is to develop consistent diet habits that you’ll follow consistently forever. Slow and steady wins the race. If you go hard and fast you might temporarily reach you goal but you won’t be able to maintain it. You need to develop habits that you’ll follow for life, because without it the fat will just come back later as your calories in go above your calories out.

> I know that weight (fat) loss is often a goal for my exercise, and I think it's hard to do that while lifting

Agreed. Diet controls weight, exercise controls fitness. I've lost tons of weight while having varying levels of lifting/cardio, sometimes almost no exercise at all. Just eat fewer calories and more substance: cabbage, broccoli, things like that.

Have you tried pre-workout? Personally this makes going to the gym a blast when I'd otherwise be going through the motions. Just make sure you find something that's ranked well on LabDoor since admittedly the industry can be shady.

Lifting with someone else can also go a long ways in making it more enjoyable although this can often be difficult. A personal trainer can be a great substitute if you have the disposable income.

Lastly quantifying your lifts is great. This is coming from someone that ran cross country in high school but now mostly sticks to the gym and Jiu Jutsu. I have the opposite problem :)

It’s an expensive solution (heck I can’t even afford it at the moment) but my solution for this was a personal trainer. If I have an appointment with a human being who’s expecting me and will be cross if I don’t show, I’m going to go. After I let the trainer go, I had a SO who would have raised an eyebrow had I quit lifting, so that kept me going until we broke up. In other words, if you can, enlist someone to whom you can be accountable.

My tip, which helped me become consistent and motivated at the gym, is to make it part of your morning ritual. I am a morning person, so I find that making it a non-negotiable part of my morning forces me into the habit and also forces me to consistently eat a solid breakfast. At first I felt that I needed to force myself to go, but at this point I am so deep in the habit that I look forward to it each morning.

I heard an interesting interview this weekend with a clinical psychologist and ultra runner who gets into some of the physiological effects of running:

Thompson says that running has worked as a powerful medicine for the mind, and that, much like the analyst’s couch, the running trail has become his therapeutic space, allowing his traumatic memories to be processed in a safer way. Ultra runners, he explains, experience physiological changes in the brain, entering trance-like states that alter perception and enhance free movement of thoughts and memories.

https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/life-examined/jm-thompson...

Not a runner myself but found it pretty interesting. Goes a bit beyond the usual "runner's high" stuff. I imagine there are comparable effects across physical activities.

I try to hit EASY 10-20 reptition maxes or have some sort of easy rep PR goal every session. Emphasis on easy, I reserve pretty sandbagged weights, maybe 10-20% below what I'm actually capable of doing. They're somewhat challenging, but easy enough that I almost never miss even on days when I feel bad/sick. It's just nice knowing your body is doing something it's never done before. The rest of it is actually treating lifts as a skill to be mastered rather than reps to be ground through. But not everyone has patience / personality to approach lifting like that. Finally, my typical 1.5-2hr gym session is good time to catch up on podcasts @2-3x speed. There's probably only ever 20-30m of lifting happening total. It's definitely not the kind of activity that consumes me. Unless I do cross fit or other circuit programs where you're moving all the time. Incidentally I can't stick to those because they're too close to running.

If you're into a "race ecosystem", I'm surprised you haven't picked up on the weight training competitive nature. I constantly have to remind myself I'm not trying to impress anyone. It's also something I try to teach other new lifters, there is a huge tendency to "compete" with the people around you.

I’ve always found lifting to be unbelievably boring. Contrasted with an obsession with cycling which has been maintained daily for many years.

I can’t seem to find any mentality which makes lifting enjoyable at all for me. Yet somehow sitting on a bike for hours at a time, even indoors, is great fun.

I find cycling a bit boring and it takes a comparably long time to work out as much as running six miles. I also enjoy that running doesn't have any tech attached which can become a burden, like a gear shift that's not 100% adjusted. To each their own, I guess :)

This year, though, I got to enjoy it a bit more when I tried some "triathlon", sprint distance, which encompasses 20km of cycling (a joke for every serious cycler). Maybe next year I'll try to tackle the olympic distance.

Game-ify it by tracking and focusing on progression, tracking your weight and reps for each move to increase your personal bests. Celebrate your new personal records to encourage better dopamine activation throughout the next training cycle.

I'm not sure what you were doing in the gym, but for me lifting heavy and pushing the boundaries of what I can do every single time I'm in the gym makes it fun.

It also helps if you setup regular routines to make comparison easy, for example: day 1 - bench, curl (barbell), lat pull, tricep extension (dumbell)

This example hits alternating muscle groups so you can minimize rest in between. If I do something like this I can usually get my heart rate up as well.

> Any tips on this?

Go with someone and write down your gains and take photos.

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