Creatures of Habit

Sunday, March 23, 2025 at 10:00am

It’s commonplace to the point of cliche to point out that humans are creatures habit, meaning that it’s ridiculously easy for us to become so accustomed to our environments, procedures, and practices that we lose our objectivity in evaluating whether or not the particulars of those things are actually any good for us. My life has given me ample examples of this recently. Trauma’s one upside is affords its victim the opportunity to reevaluate every aspect of their environment, their procedures, their life practices, and provides ample incentive to make sweeping changes.

Although I have indeed recently had a traumatic experience, I’ll forego the details of that today and instead share a much more benign but telling example.

I’ve engaged in weight training in one form or another since high school, but it was only after I moved to Seattle that I really got serious about learning the more difficult compound lifts: squat and deadlift. In 2018, I began training using the StrongLifts 5x5 program, and this was my gateway into powerlifting, which I began training on my own in 2019. It took until 2021 for me to get a powerlifting coach.

During this entire period, I trained at what powerlifters call “commercial gyms.” Among powerlifters, a commercial gym is distinguished from a “powerlifting gym,” but few outside of powerlifting would find the differences salient. A powerlifting gym primarily contains the special equipment that is required for a powerlifting competition: combo racks, barbells of the correct tensile stiffness, calibrated kilogram plates, benches of the width, height, and grippiness that are used in competitions, etc.

In 2021, when I started working with my coach, he began telling me about how great powerlifting gyms were, and we even trained at the one nearest to me a couple of times. However, that gym was a 30-minute drive away, and the commercial gym I’d been training at was two blocks from my house. It was easy to make the excuse of convenience.

And so, I stayed at the commercial gym for a full three years more.

This past December, the heater in my apartment building broke down, and my husband and I were forced to seek refuge in a hotel for a full week. This effectively obliterated my early morning routine, since I was stuck at the hotel until after breakfast time. And while it’s possible to squat and deadlift huge amounts of weight in a commercial gym with exactly one full rack at 3 am, it’s entirely impossible to do that anytime during the day or evening.

In other words, I was forced to find a different gym for that week. I went, of course, to the powerlifting gym my coach had introduced me to all those years ago. This entailed not just making sure I was good for a one-off session, with my coach taking care of everything. I had to figure out for myself how to get lifts done there properly. It also meant that I had to engage with other gym members and learn to navigate the social dynamics of a powerlifting gym on my own.

By the time the week was over, I couldn’t imagine lifting anywhere else.

I’ve since had a handful of scheduling conflicts that have forced me to lift at my commercial gym on a one-off basis, and I have each time come away wondering how I ever managed to squat, bench, and deadlift in a rack with peg holes spaced too far apart, with uncalibrated pound plates, and with too-bendy barbells. The benefit of the gym versus the mild inconvenience of the one-hour round-trip transit seems so clearly weighted toward the benefit. At least, it does now.

But then, creatures of habit will readily distort their subjective analyses to favor the common and the usual. A subsequent lesson, which I’m only starting to internalize, is that if I don’t learn how to evacuate my comfort zone on my own, then trauma will do it for me. The case of my building’s heater breaking was hardly a trauma, more like a mild inconvenience, and training at a sub-optimal gym is hardly a major quality of life impact, but worse choices can lead to more devastating outcomes. I’ll certainly be more introspective of my habits going forward.