Once in a while, you can find people seated in their machines staring blankly into the air or just staring at their weights, and you might wonder what they are thinking about. When that happens to me, I am probably not thinking about anything...

Nothing at all...

It is hardly surprising, since there is not much you can associate with weights except maybe effort and pain. The mental struggle between the conscious will to move the weights and the innate inertia of the mind can have a hypnotizing effect on an individual. There will be a period of disorientation as the mind searches for a reason to stretch the arms, to wrap the fingers round the cold steel and force the tired muscles to exert...

If you doubt the integrity of these words, that is because you have yet to meet the people who hang weights by a metal chain around their waist as they performs their chin-ups; or the people who lifts loads above their body weight; and people who exhaust the stack of weights on the machines.

The greatest obstacle to lifting the weights is often not gravity, but the thousand whys that accompanies every action. Often in such situations, my mind will be a sea of doubts and incoherent thoughts, of which a few might be picked up. One becomes keenly aware of every ache, every pain and every strain of fatigue that runs through the body. Arms become heavy, breaths turn short… if it is truly is such a pain, why then this?

Because all doubts fall behind when you fly...