what I talk about when I talk about lifting

A knee injury took the gym away for a while, and made me look at how much of my life runs on structure.

It’s November in Singapore, so most afternoons end in a thunderstorm. Around four o’clock the sky habitually turns a heavy gray, holds still for a while, and then lets go all at once, as if it has been saving up since morning. The gym is about a twenty-five-minute walk from my apartment. If I leave at the wrong time I arrive soaked. I go anyway.

These days, before I touch a barbell, I spend about fifteen minutes on a primer my physiotherapist gave me. Balance work, step-downs, mobility exercises. A few years ago I would have skipped all of it without a second thought. Now I do it with the seriousness of a man doing his taxes. Then I squat and deadlift again, carefully, with weights I would have called a warm-up not long ago. The bar feels familiar in my hands, the way it does when you run into an old friend after years apart. There’s an awkward moment where neither of you is sure what has changed, and then you remember how you used to talk. The songs in my headphones are ones I trained to when I was stronger. Each one brings back a weight I could move then and can’t now. I mind that less than I expected.

2026 was the second time in my lifting “career” that an injury tore me away from my training and my routines. The first was at the end of 2019, when I tore my psoas, the deep muscle that runs from the lower spine to the top of the thigh. Then a global pandemic shut the gyms down for so long, and I got caught living between countries, and it took me so long to get a home gym set up, that it never felt like an injury layoff. It felt like a forced break. The whole world froze, and I froze with it.

This time was different. The world kept going. Only I had to stop.

The cause was a torn PCL, the posterior cruciate ligament, one of the two ligaments that cross inside the knee and keep the shin from sliding back under the thigh. At some point I tore it without knowing (this is very on brand for me). It healed, but it healed stretched out, like an old elastic band, and the knee lost some of its stability. For a few months leading up to January 2026 I would leave the gym with a strange feeling of swelling, radiating from the inside of my knee. It didn’t hurt. It was just there.

I think anyone who has ever been an athlete knows this kind of feeling. Some small discomfort shows up, sits with you for a while, and usually leaves on its own. If you stopped every time you felt a little off from your normal, you would never get any training done. So you keep an eye on it, and if a break is coming up soon, you push through until then. I had a work trip a month away, and a personal trip after that. The knee could wait. That was my reasoning, anyway. It seemed sound at the time.

Then, the day before the work trip, life decided to treat me to a sharp pain on the inside of my right knee. Fantastic. I know my anatomy well enough to know that’s where the MCL is, the ligament that runs down the inner side of the knee. I know my age well enough to know what a knee injury in your mid-thirties tends to mean. What followed was a strain of the MCL in both knees, almost two months of not being able to walk for more than five minutes at a time, and probably the worst layoff I’ve ever had from any sport.

I think I’ve been fairly lucky that it took until I was 36 for a lifting injury to really set back my progress. I fractured my wrist playing basketball when I was around fourteen, but at that age you are so young and pliable that it never felt like a hindrance. It healed and I forgot about it.

The psoas is a different story, even if the rest of the world was on a break with me. I still feel it day to day. It has gotten better over time, but now and then it flares up like a snake in the grass, hissing to remind me that it’s there and could strike whenever it likes.

The knee is different again. A knee is something you use every day, for nearly everything: getting out of bed, climbing stairs, standing up from a chair. It’s also the quintessential old man’s injury. It’s the one men talk about around a campfire, telling each other about the season or the scholarship or the career that was waiting for them right up until the knee gave out. What could have been, if that pesky knee injury hadn’t happened?

Though I’m not sure I have any real athletic aspirations left, so it’s hard to say what the knee has cost me. I lift because I like getting stronger. I lift because it makes me feel good. I lift, these days, toward one fairly general goal.

Lifters have a shorthand for milestones, counted in plates. A standard plate weighs 20 kilograms, and the numbers say how many plates go on each side of the bar for four lifts: deadlift, squat, bench press and overhead press. So 4/3/2/1 means a 180-kilogram deadlift, a 140-kilogram squat, a 100-kilogram bench and a 60-kilogram press. When I finally got there it felt easier than I expected, and the next step, 5/4/3/2, seemed like a reasonable thing to take my time over. That’s 220, 180, 140 and 100. No hurry.

I have no plans to end up on a stage, competing against other people, chasing a podium or a medal. I have too many competing priorities now. I think I did want that when I was younger, but I honestly can’t say when the desire left. I don’t remember deciding anything. Maybe it was when the world shut down. Maybe it left quietly, without telling me, a simple acceptance that I know, deep down, I’m getting older.

I still enjoy lifting an incredible amount. It’s one of the few things in my life that feels like a pure pursuit. It’s entirely physical. There are no relationships to manage, no drama, no politics. The bar weighs what it weighs. It doesn’t care how my week went, or what anyone thinks of me, or whether I slept well. I find that peaceful in a way that’s hard to explain to people who don’t lift.

I have a spreadsheet, a nice, easy-to-understand one, that keeps me on track. I go to the gym. I try to lift the weights it has calculated for that week. Depending on how that goes, the number goes up or down for the next attempt, and over months and years the trendline is supposed to point up and to the right. I think it tickles the same part of my brain that RPGs did when I was a kid. You put in the time, you collect experience points, you hit milestones and level up. All those hours grinding levels trained me for progressive overload before I ever lifted a weight in a gym, though I didn’t know it at the time.

But I am getting older. Maybe maturing, too, though that depends on who you ask. I do know that if you ask some people about me, they’ll tell you they have no idea where I still get so much energy. I’m not sure that’s entirely a compliment. Inside, though, I’ve started to feel that age brings changes, and I can’t tell whether they’re wisdom or just an acceptance that time does what time does. It’s a conflicted feeling. Some days it feels like raising a white flag against the relentless march of Father Time, and that feels a little like failure.

I have always been a very structured person. I like things orderly and logical. I have routines. On weekdays the alarm goes off at 6:40, and the gym bag is packed before I leave for work. My apartment is clean. Things are where I can find them. If something can be counted, my brain is drawn to the number and how it changes, and that alone keeps most of my stress away. Most people would call these good qualities, and for a long time they were. They carried me through eleven years of moving my life from one country to another, through new apartments and new cultures and new friendships. I handled every move the same way. Make a system, follow the system, adjust the system.

But as I get older I’m starting to think that the things that carried you through one stage of life can be the very things holding you back in the next. That once you’ve built up enough skill and knowledge, some of the structure is supposed to come off, and you’re supposed to live a little more freely. I don’t know exactly when that point arrives. I suspect it arrived for me a while ago and I didn’t notice, because this injury forced me to stop checking my spreadsheets.

Take diet. To build muscle you need to meet certain nutritional needs. Enough protein. A varied, healthy diet that covers your macronutrients and micronutrients, which is to say the protein, carbohydrate and fat, and the vitamins and minerals. Enough energy to fuel the machinery that turns all of it into muscle fiber. It’s an incredibly complex system, and also an incredibly adaptable one. If you want to lose weight, perhaps to get leaner, the needs are similar, but now you’re balancing on a knife’s edge so you don’t lose the muscle you spent so long building. And the approach changes again depending on how “advanced” you are in your training life. The obvious answer, especially for my structured, number-loving brain, is to track and count all of it.

That works, up to a point. You do need some understanding of what’s in your food to know, roughly, what you’re putting into your body. Am I eating in a surplus or a deficit? Am I getting enough to reach my goals? So you get an app to help. You log every meal, every day. Then, if you have the same taste for order that I do, you start grading yourself strictly against the targets the app hands you. This can work! It works really well for some people! It worked for me, too, for a time. It’s part of why I’ve looked good in a mirror, or at the beach.

But after this injury, for some reason, I can’t bring myself to open that app anymore. I still have a general sense of when I’m eating in a surplus or a deficit. I still have a general sense of whether I’m meeting my needs. But the tool, structured and easy to measure, has lost most of its purpose for me. Really, I can tell by looking in the mirror. It’s a completely opinionated, lighting-dependent measure. But it takes no time and no real mental effort. Hell, the number on the scale was only ever a loose proxy for what I look like in the mirror on any given day.

I’ve thought about why. The app didn’t stop working, and nothing about it changed. I think what happened is that it had already taught me what it had to teach. Years of logging left the numbers somewhere inside me, the way a pianist stops counting the beats of a piece she has played a hundred times. The tool had done its job. I was holding on to it because holding on is what I do.

I think this is happening because I approach most of my life the way I approach fitness. I didn’t see that clearly until the knee took the gym away and I could look at what was left.

Programming, math, anything I’ve taught myself: I learned it the same way I learned to lift, with a plan, a lot of repetition, and some way to measure whether I was getting better. A few months ago I spent a weekend reprogramming the mirror in my apartment so it would show me my calendar two weeks out. I enjoyed every minute of that weekend. I’m aware of how that sounds. If something in my life can be turned into a system, I’ve probably done it, and the system has probably worked. A lot of good has come from that.

But what happens when the structure seeps into every part of your life? When there’s no corner of it where you aren’t keeping score?

There’s a part in Lupe Fiasco’s “Ms. Mural” that I have always enjoyed:

I never wanted my life to be a collection of some dates
And holiday my days away and intellectually sedate

He’s refusing a life that adds up to a string of dates and holidays, with the mind left to doze in between. I hear it as a warning about exactly this. A life run entirely by structure starts to look like a spreadsheet of its own: the days you trained and the days you didn’t, the milestones, the targets hit and missed, the dates. You can look back over it and see everything you did. What you can’t see is whether you were there for any of it.

In 1894 an Englishman named John Lubbock published a book called The Use of Life. He was a banker, a politician and a naturalist, and at one point the president of the Royal Statistical Society, which is to say he was a man who took numbers seriously. In it he wrote:

“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the blue sky, is by no means waste of time.”

I like that it comes from a statistician. You would expect him to be the one telling you to count.

The strange thing is that lifting has been trying to teach me this for years, and I’ve only half listened. You don’t get stronger in the gym. In the gym you break things down. You get stronger afterward, on the rest days, asleep, on the couch, while the body repairs itself a little better than before. Every decent program builds in deloads, planned weeks where you lift lighter on purpose so the fatigue can clear and the fitness underneath can show itself. I did my deloads because they were in the spreadsheet, and I treated them as one more task to complete. I don’t think I ever once thought of them as rest.

There’s another lesson in there, too. When you start lifting, structure is everything. A beginner can follow a simple plan, add a little weight every session, and get stronger almost every time they walk in. The plan is right and you are wrong, so you follow the plan. But the longer you train, the less that works. Progress slows. Some days you walk in strong and some days you walk in tired, and a program that ignores the difference will grind you down. So more advanced lifters train by feel. They rate how hard a set was, how many more reps they could have done, and adjust the day’s work to match. The structure is still there, and now it adjusts to the lifter. Getting better, past a certain point, means trusting yourself more and the spreadsheet less.

The Japanese martial arts have a name for this, shuhari. First you protect the form and follow it exactly. Then you break the form. Then you leave it behind. I think I’ve spent most of my life, in the gym and out of it, in the first stage. I was very good at it. I’m not sure I ever thought about what came after.

I had a job interview recently, and partway through I was asked what it means to be human. It came up in the context of AI, of machines that might take away our work, our meaning, and so on. It’s a big question, and I gave whatever answer I gave. But I’ve kept thinking about it since, mostly on the walk to the gym.

Perhaps what it means to be human is that we can give the machines the structure. They’re very good at it, better than I am, and I’m good at it. They’ll count the protein in your lunch, plan your week, and work out next Tuesday’s squat to the half kilo. They don’t get bored, and they don’t get tired of it. What they can’t do is the other half. The part where you look up from the plan, decide today isn’t the day for it, and go sit by the water instead. That part takes the freedom to live in a moment and the judgment to know which moments are worth it. Maybe that’s the part that’s left for us. I find that oddly comforting.

I’m not sure what it is about this injury, but for several months now my whole life has been under review. I keep asking whether the structure I’ve always relied on still holds the value it used to. Or whether, again, the things that brought me success in the past are what’s keeping me from a new chapter. From the next level, to borrow the language of the games.

I’m still going to work toward 5/4/3/2. I’ve even added some goals for running, and signed myself up, in my head at least, for a half marathon. Running is not something I especially enjoy. But I think it could be fun to overcome, and going from a knee that couldn’t carry me for five minutes to one that carries me twenty-one kilometers seems like a good challenge. There’s still structure to it. There’s a plan, the plan has weeks, and the weeks have numbers in them. I’m not about to throw that away. I don’t think I could if I tried.

But I think it’s time to drop the overbearing structure. I want to keep the plan and loosen my grip on it: skip a session now and then without logging it as a failure, eat a meal without knowing how much protein is in it, lie on the grass under the trees sometimes, as Lubbock put it, or sit on the balcony and watch the afternoon storm roll in, and not count it as anything at all.

It’s nearly four o’clock. The sky is starting to turn. I think I’ll watch it.

The title is borrowed from Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which borrowed its own from Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.