You asked. That is the part people forget when they tell this story afterwards. You asked me, and you asked twice, because the first time I said I would think about it.
I was never going to say no. I just wanted to see whether you would ask again.
Half six, and you were early
I said half six. You were there at twenty past, sat in your car in the car park, because you did not want to be the one waiting inside and you also could not risk being late.
That told me most of what I needed to know before we had said good morning.
You had new kit on. Not brand new, you are not stupid, but newer than what you normally wear, and you had thought about it. And you had done something with your hair, at twenty past six in the morning, for a session in which you were going to sweat.
I did not mention any of it. I said morning, and I walked, and you followed.
The first thing I take off you
Your phone. It goes in the locker with everything else.
People think that is about focus. It is not about focus. It is that a phone is the thing you reach for when you want to stop being where you are, and I do not want you to have that available for the next hour.
Second thing, your music. Off. You are going to hear what is actually happening in this room, including yourself, and including me telling you what to do.
Third thing, and this is the one that gets people, is the mirror. We start facing away from it. You did not like that at all. You have spent years training in front of one and you have no idea what to do with your face when there is nothing to check it in.
Why we go light on the first day
Because you would have gone heavy. Of course you would. You would have loaded a bar you had no business loading, in front of me, on the first morning, and then either hurt yourself or spent the session managing the fact that it was too much.
So I halve everything and I make it slower. Four seconds down, no rest at the bottom, up when I say up.
It is harder than what you normally do and you will not believe that until about the third set, when your legs go and there is no explanation for it because the number on the bar is embarrassing.
That is the lesson. Not the weight. Who decides the tempo.
The bit you were not ready for
Somewhere around the middle you stopped arguing.
Not out loud. You had not been arguing out loud. But there is a thing men do in a first session where they explain themselves constantly. Normally I do more than this. My shoulder has been. I usually go on a Tuesday.
Around set six it stops. You just do what I say, when I say it, and there is nothing in between.
The room goes quiet in your head. That is what you actually came for, whether or not you had the words for it in the car park at twenty past six.
Afterwards, in the car park again
You were wrecked and you were also lighter than when you arrived, and you said something about how you would definitely be sore tomorrow, which is what men say when they do not want the conversation to end.
I said same time Thursday. Not a question.
And you said yes before you had checked whether you were free on Thursday, which we both noticed.
What the second lesson is
Not something I am going to put on a website that Google reads on its lunch break.
All I will say is that the first one is about who decides the tempo, and the second one is not about weights at all, and by then you already know which of us is running the room.
What I do not do
I do not shout. Not once, not ever. Men who shout in gyms are performing for the room and I have no interest in the room.
I do not count for you either, after the first session. You count, out loud, and if you lose it we start again. It sounds petty. It is the fastest way to find out whether a man will actually do what he is told when nobody would know the difference.
And I never tell you it was good. Not on the first day. You will get that eventually and you will remember exactly when.
You were early on the first day. You will be early on Thursday as well.