Just Go for Five Minutes

There was a stretch where a single flight of stairs would get me. I'd be winded at the top, and that voice would start up in my head, the one that tells you exactly how out of shape you've let yourself get. I was around 210 pounds. I'd spent years on fentanyl, and fentanyl doesn't exactly get you moving. Most days I didn't move much at all.

When I got clean, it got worse before it got better. The withdrawals were brutal and I lost a lot of weight in the hospital, and for a while after I just felt horrible. Motivation wasn't really on the table.

I'd love to tell you the gym had always been my thing. It wasn't. When I was 21, working at Staples, I had a friend who basically lived in the gym, and I tagged along for a few months. Around 27 I went for a couple more. Outside of that, and ironworking, which is its own kind of brutal, the last time I'd actually been athletic was fourth-grade baseball. I always wanted to feel healthy. I wanted to look good too; who doesn't. I just could never stick to it. Some of that was the drugs and the drinking. But if I'm honest, a lot of it was no discipline and no plan.

This time was different, and I think it's worth explaining why, because it wasn't motivation. It was that I needed something. This was around 2024. I was new in recovery, no job, not in school yet, just trying to find something that gave the day a shape. When you're in a rut, having one thing you show up for every single day matters more than people realize. On top of that, I was thinking about going back to ironworking, and after six or seven years of doing basically nothing physical, I knew I'd have to get back into shape to survive it. So I had a reason, and I had somewhere to point it.

I started cheap. Resistance bands off Temu, horrible. Then a nicer set off Amazon, which were fine, but bands at home only take you so far. There's a limit to what you can do, and more than that, home doesn't make you show up. A gym does. You drive there, you stand in a space that's only for this one thing, and once you're in it you're a lot more likely to actually do the work. Separate spaces make it easier to stick to a plan. So I signed up at a Planet Fitness about two miles away, my wife and daughter were going to go too, and it had tanning beds, so it checked the boxes.

There was one problem. I didn't have my driver's license back yet. If I wanted to go, I had to ride with my wife, and she didn't always want to go. So my whole routine was riding on somebody else's schedule. People who know my story might not guess it, but I research everything, and I'd shown up with a plan, I knew the workouts I wanted, how to split the days, push, pull, legs. None of that mattered if I couldn't get there. Early on I was self-conscious too, small weights, a room full of egos, all of it. I kept reminding myself that doing a movement properly with less weight beats throwing up too much weight with bad form, and eventually the self-conscious part wore off. But the rides didn't get easier. After that first day I was sore for three days straight, and it stayed about like that for a month or two. I was going maybe once or twice a week, missing a week here and there. It got to where I almost stopped going altogether. I'd do a few pushups at the house and call it.

What actually fixed it was getting my own membership, at a gym right around the corner called Vim and Vigor. Suddenly I could go by myself, whenever I wanted. That one change, not depending on anyone, is what turned it into a habit. I started going three days a week, every week, and before long that became four or five.

The thing that kept me walking in the door I took from Atomic Habits, more or less. I call it my five-minute rule. On the days I didn't feel like going, and there were plenty, I'd tell myself I only had to go for five minutes, and if I still wanted to leave after that, I could. Here's the honest part: not once did I ever actually leave after five minutes. That would just waste the trip. You get there, you start, you stay. If you struggle to get yourself to the gym, try it. It works.

For a while it really does feel like a chore. If you haven't trained in years, or ever, it's taxing, you're sore, you feel like maybe this just isn't for you, like it's never going to click. After a few weeks of going on my own, that flipped. It stopped being something I had to do and turned into something I wanted to do. It helps that about thirty minutes of training releases endorphins, so you walk out happier than you walked in.

Then the results started, in an order I didn't expect. First it was just the weight on the bar going up. Then my arms started filling out, biceps and triceps. Then my chest. Then my back, and that V started showing up as my lats got wider. Once the muscle was there, I wanted to see it, so I changed how I ate, higher protein, fewer total calories. I was getting somewhere between 120 and 180 grams of protein a day while keeping calories under 2,000 to drop the fat. I tracked it with an InBody scan. Between February 26th and May 3rd of this year, about two months, my body fat dropped 3.7 percent and my muscle mass went up 1.6 pounds.

Before

After

Before

After

My routine now is four or five days a week, three days on and one off, then repeat. Day one is legs and abs. Day two is chest, shoulders, and triceps. Day three is back and biceps. I sleep better than I have in years, and I actually keep a schedule, bed by ten, up by six. I'm at 178 pounds now.

Here's the moment it really hit me. Our bedroom door got locked one day with no key, and it's on the second floor, so I climbed the tree outside to get in through the window. I'd done that exact thing back in my twenties. At 36, it was easy. Easier than it was then. Halfway up that tree is when I understood the work was actually doing something.

I want to be straight about the hard part, because nobody is. The gym taught me discipline, and it taught me what compounding work actually feels like, which is to say it feels like nothing for a long time. That's the hardest thing about it. Your brain wants a reward now, and there isn't one for a while. The internet makes it look like everyone blows up overnight, but you're not seeing the part where they put the work in. And once you've been at it a while, the results slow down, which makes it harder to stay motivated, not easier. There's even a pull to coast once you're happy with where you are. I still have days I have to run the five-minute rule on myself. I have other days I can't wait to go. Consistency was never about enjoying it every time. It's about showing up on the days you absolutely don't want to and doing it anyway. That's the part that gets results.

If I could give you only one thing out of all of this, it's the five-minute rule. On the days you don't feel like it, go for five minutes and see if it doesn't carry you through a whole workout. And if you're brand new, don't overcomplicate it. There's endless material online, a thousand different programs, and it'll freeze you. Start with the basics, keep the weight low, and master your form first, good form is how you actually grow, and it's how you keep from hurting yourself.

I'm still going. Still climbing.