How to become a gym bro
Some people are so drawn to gym culture that their progression to becoming a gym bro is inevitable. Their motivations are varied, but many people start with the simple vision of wanting to look better or be healthier or stronger. Others do not find themselves with this motivation, intrinsic or external. Perhaps worse, some find themselves with the motivation to be jacked, but they do not know how to cross the hurdle to actually becoming a gym bro.
I’m using the word “bro” colloquially to refer to any gym-goer who associates their existence with time spent in the gym or hours or effort spent exercising. These two facets host a subtle but important distinction—it would be bizarre to consider someone a gym bro if they went to the gym but spent no time actually lifting weights, doing cardio, mobility training, or any other form of exercise. Gyms certainly can act as a third space, but to take advantage of benefits, both mental and emotional (and in this case, physical, as most third spaces do not provide) of belonging to the gym, one has to actually do something while there. First, we will talk about the latter point within the distinction, hours and effort spent exercising, also to be considered “identifying as someone who exercises.”
I was fortunate to be instilled with an inclination toward exercise as an early development in my life. I still hold the benefits of doing gymnastics when I was young; I’m eager to learn how to move my body and use my muscles to achieve some end, whether rock climbing or hiking or even opening really tight jars. However, not everyone acquires this natural desire towards fitness, as they did not practice sports as a youth to learn that your body is forever in flux and that they have the agency to control muscular capacity and technical proficiency.
In these scenarios, people grow up to become adults who are not familiar with the malleability of their bodies and they lack the mental processes for navigating this flexibility in physique. They sort of know that you can go from underweight to overweight, atrophied to muscular, or along any dimension of body fat and lean muscle composition, but they remain unaware of their gaps in understanding of how to go about modifying these attributes, because going to the gym and exercising are primarily mental pursuits. They are learned, both as a habit and as a series of techniques.
Returning to the concept that there is a large chasm between being a gym-goer and a person who identifies with exercise is essential. We use these interchangeably; I have often said “I go a little crazy if I don’t go to the gym for too long,” but that’s not an accurate statement. What I mean to say is “I go a little crazy if I don’t exercise,” but my exercise of choice is specifically weightlifting which is mostly possible for me at the gym.
An important note: it is largely a trap to identify with one type of exercise and shun all others. This leads to poor development and robs us of the richness of experience in utilizing our bodies the way that they were intended. We will return to this later.
How to eventually become a gym-goer: an effort along two converging paths
For the most success in becoming a healthy gym bro, we have to actually break down two different goals and two different identities.
The first identity that is essential to curate is someone who exercises. This is the lowest base that we can acquire and it’s often okay to stop here as it’s more important than the identity as someone who goes to the gym, as gyms are a form of optimization.
The second identity that is worthwhile in curating is someone who goes to the gym. The benefits of going to the gym are not that they convert a person automatically into one who exercises. The benefits of the gym are community, optimizations in exercise techniques, shared knowledge and social information, and reinforcement of an exercise habit.
Let’s discuss the first path. If you want to fulfill the eventual goal of a shining physique or having peak health, you must start here. How do we start? I like to consider James Clear’s Atomic Habits for the strategy behind associating yourself with a desirable identity. We can break down this identity into one of its most basic actions: to curate an exercise-focused existence, pick an exercise. It needn’t be complex at this stage. I think pushups are a great starting point, but you can do literally whatever. Walking, kettlebell swings, pushups, bicep curls. The point is that you are building repetitions towards something that reinforces your identity as someone who exercises. For this reason, I think it’s helpful to pick something that you can do repeatedly, anywhere, at any time, multiple times a day. If you wake up and do ten pushups, and you do ten pushups before you go to bed, you are someone who exercises. It is that simple. We have started down the trail.
I like to employ more of James Clear’s strategies like keystone habits and habit chaining, but those are not vital to my point here. It is also important to note that you have to recognize that you are starting, and that you are committing to learning. I mention this because if you start the exercise habit with bicep curls and just do those for a year, with no aim of progression into variety, you open yourself up for muscle imbalances. However, the possibility that you stagnate after the first step is extremely low, so I hesitate in mentioning it.
Now that you have begun to reinforce the first identity, you might want to add in a second identity which blends so beautifully into the first: someone who goes to the gym. Again, we employ James Clear: the easiest way to start is to break it down. Start by putting on gym shoes every day without even going to the gym. Next, go to the gym and just touch the handle to the entrance at the very least. You will likely want to go in as you’re already there, and fortunately you already have your first identity to fall back on, and this is the key.
There is an order which is important, here. Being someone who exercises makes you more comfortable being someone who goes to the gym. Once you’re at the gym, you can automatically just do the same thing that you have reinforced—gyms are designed to support most exercise modalities. Unless what you chose was something niche like rock climbing, you’ll probably be able to maintain your first identity while slowly blending in the second.
Note how it is really hard to do these in reverse. You can start iterating on the going to the gym habit without really having locked down the exercise habit, but this is much more difficult. You can exercise in isolation, but as said before, it feels weird to be in the gym but not know how to exercise, so I strongly suggest that you go having a few weeks of identifying as someone who exercises under your belt.
This is where you acquire your card as a gym bro. Having both of these comparable identities, it’s possible to put their paths on parallel lines. You go to the gym and you exercise. The gym, as mentioned before, allows for optimizations in exercise modalities, but even greater: it allows for learning. You can watch what other people are doing and consider, “I want to do that.” “I want the result that he has,” or “I wonder what other exercises she does.” This is perfectly acceptable and encouraged. Most gym bros want to talk about their plan—some are junk and some are wonderful, but it’s largely irrelevant at an early stage, as you should be interested in branching out. As mentioned before, you could go to the gym and do pushups like you typically do for a year, but you’ll probably want to try out that weird bench press thing.
Another note on this is that you will likely notice individuals, each on their own path, who are over-indexed on specific modalities. There is the stereotype of a giant bodybuilder who can’t touch his back. There’s nothing wrong with this if you’re conscious of development down this path, but know that it’s easy to walk too far down one road without realizing it. Getting really good at bench pressing without ever exercising the muscles in your rotator cuff or your legs can be dangerous. It is vital to check back in with your motivations and understand that deep down, you’re doing this to exercise or to be healthy and not to bench press. Biology is full of tradeoffs and our own subconscious motivations may be opaque.
On Motivations
It’s important to not lose sight of your motivations which meander for most people. To retain the aspect of being someone who exercises is really the habit most worthwhile to keep—I have fallen in the trap before of going to the gym, lifting weights, but not really being an exerciser. I stopped the habit of stretching before bed, or doing any cardio, or learning niche things outside of my typical weight lifting routine. I stopped having the impetus to do a set of 20 bodyweight squats at night just because I felt like it. Routines are incredibly helpful, but they can limit us away from listening to our bodies which crave exercise. Continue to do things which answer “yes” to the question of “would a person who exercises do this?”
I started really going to the gym when I was a freshman in college. I had exercised much of my life, but the actual motivation for “gym” was “big muscles” for “be more attractive to women.” We can poke fun at it, but I think it’s a perfectly legitimate motivation with which to start. Just recognize that if you haven’t already started with an exercise identity, someone who has big muscles is an identity that may be a few iterations away, so you have to break it down. If this is your goal, know that your goal might shift.
My personal motivations ebbed and flowed. I went from “be more attractive to women” to “stroke my ego to look impressive for other gym bros by lifting big number” to “exercise because I feel weird if I don’t” then back to “stroke my ego for big number just because.” I now fluctuate between many of these motivations but the prevailing thread is to exercise so that I acquire the health benefits from exercising, which are numerous. Often I’ll pepper in a little “change my physique so I look impressive,” or some “hit this number because I chose it as an arbitrary goal,” but I’m focused more on “use good form, have healthy and supple muscles, lift weights and exercise to be a capable individual into old age.”
It’s a worthwhile endeavor to track your progress along any one of these stages or motivations, but I think the most important thing to know is that you have to learn to exercise if you aren’t already doing so, which in turn leads to learning to go to the gym and to optimize your routine. Exercise is an innate goal, but recognize that often the later stages of exercise are attached to optimization which is not in itself the end goal. It is important to keep an open mind and say yes to exercise with which you are unfamiliar, and building that breadth in your existence is worthwhile.