I Wasn't Training. I Was Just Going to the Gym.

In my mid-twenties I went to the gym four days a week. Sounds good so far.

Here's what I actually did when I got there: I walked around until I found a machine that looked interesting. Picked a weight that seemed reasonable. Did three sets of ten. Got bored. Found another machine. Repeated until I'd been there long enough to justify leaving.

No log. No plan. No idea what I'd done the week before or whether I was making any progress at all. Upper body, lower body — didn't matter. Whatever seemed fun that day.

I quit.

Came back around 26. This time I almost had a routine — roughly the same machines, roughly the same order. Progress was still a guess. I think I did 100 pounds last time. Let's try that. Sometimes it worked. Usually I couldn't tell. Eventually I quit again.

Then I got a free consultation with a personal trainer at the gym — someone I'd actually grown up with. He took me over to a seated squat rack, loaded a couple of plates, and told me to push it up. Easy. Two more 45s. Still easy. Two more — getting hard. Two more — I got them and called it.

I had to leave town for work the next day. My job involved running in and out of interstate traffic weighing commercial trucks.

I could barely walk.

I didn't know what rhabdomyolysis was at the time, but looking back, I was close. That's what happens when someone loads you to near-failure with no baseline, no warmup progression, and no idea where you're actually starting from.

None of what I'd been doing was training. Not the machine wandering, not the guessing, not that day at the squat rack. It was just movement with no structure and no plan for what came next.

The difference between exercise and training isn't the gym or the equipment. It's whether what you're doing is actually building toward something — and whether you have any way of knowing if it is.

Random workouts can keep you moving. They won't make you stronger. And occasionally they'll put you on the side of a highway barely able to walk.