The Ache

Ah, there it is: the ache. It’s just right. It means yesterday’s workout worked. Or, at least, it used to mean that. I am aware that new studies say that the next day ache is not essential to strength gain or hypertrophy. They say some studies suggest it may even be detrimental to strength gain and hypertrophy. But this is the habit of a lifetime. All of a sudden you expect me to stop associating the ache with something good? Even ‘knowing’ this, I will train for the ache and I will get the ache, even knowing full well that science currently suggests that perhaps I shouldn’t.

But the ache is more than science, more than reason. The ache is neither pleasure nor pain. It is just an intensity. I take it to mean something good. But it’s not just a meaning. It feels less to do with meaning and more to do with … being. It’s like… presence.

In his autobiographical reflections on weight-lifting, Sven Lindqvist reflects on his first encounter with the ache. Thinking back to is first experiences of the gym – somewhere he never thought he wanted to be, but something he tried after losing an argument about bodybuilding with a skinhead in a sauna – Lindqvist muses:

What was it that made me carry on? Above all, it was the stiffness I felt the day after. It was comprehensive enough to be very convincing. It came from deep inside my body. It discovered muscles I didn’t even know I had. And I had acquired this splendid, all-round stiffness not by running, jumping or dashing, but just by going round at my own pace, calmly and quietly, getting the feel of some weights.

On the third day, when the stiffness was at its worst, I realized that something really had happened to my body. And not just on the surface, where my bodily awareness had resided until then, not just on my lips, against my fingertips, in my skin. No, deep inside the main bulk of my body. That, too, was ‘me’. It was like an underground explosion in which my bodily awareness suddenly expanded inwards.

Was there perhaps another culture, a culture of the body, of which I was unaware? (Lindqvist 2003, 23)

The answer is yes. There is another culture, a culture of the body. There are many, actually. Different corpo-realities. Different practices that can bring deep, complex, undulating tectonic vistas into view. With weight lifting, these worlds ache themselves into consciousness. New languages, new regions, new grammars, new laws are learned. The ache makes one a physiologist by immersion, a biomechanic by trial and error.

The big ache today is triceps. I’m glad. I have missed it. And I have been worrying about it. I have not been doing much direct triceps training. Instead, I have been doing the big compound lifts. And none of these stress the triceps primarily. The clean and press, for instance. The press is arguably quite ‘tricepy’, but really you don’t emphasize the constant tension in this exercise – you just throw the bar up there. The bench press? Maybe, a bit. I recently added close grip bench press too. This definitely stresses the triceps. But I only do a couple of sets after regular bench press. So my triceps have not been aching. And I have noticed this. I have not been feeling my triceps. And over time, this lack of ache has made me worry. I have not been trusting the process. When I have straightened my arms in daily life and felt … nothing. Once or twice I have even wondered: Do I even have triceps anymore?

I had to go to the mirror to check. But I don’t really trust mirrors – or rather, my interaction with them. I have seen The Substance. Without the added feedback of an ache or a pump with the flex, the information provided by a mirror is too subjective, too phantasmatic. And even then…

This is about presence. It is about existing. Properly. Felt presence.

I have recently read that after a period of time working on the same exercises, the body may stop aching, but it will not stop responding to the exercises. However, in my head – presumably because of decades of sedimented belief on this matter – if there is no ache, there is no effect. For me, if there is no ache, this means the exercise didn’t ‘work’. Science can say all it likes to me. My mind is made up.

But, actually, really, I can listen to science, and I can change my ways. But on this matter, if there is no ache, then there is less of an experience of intensity, and in effect less of a payoff. In short, I get bored. So, when the ache stops, I don’t care if it means my body has adapted to the movements but will keep responding. I change my exercises.

After a few weeks of compound basic barbell movements only – clean and press, deadlifts, reverse grip barbell rows, lunges or squats, bench press, hanging leg raises, then home – I went back to kettlebells.

At the end of yesterday’s kettlebells, although I normally do no direct arm exercises, I threw in two versions of standing triceps extension: first single-handed ones – one hand stretches one kettlebell down behind the neck, then straight back up. You get a much greater stretch than with a bar or dumbbell. Gotta love kettlebells. Then a two-handed version: two hands grip the horns of the kettlebell handle and do the same. Again, a great stretch. Much more, much more easily and much better than a bar. So, today, my triceps are firing up and making their presence felt even as I walk idly along, even as my hands flap loosely by my sides as I walk. The very act of idly straightening or bending elbow is causing them to fire. Rubbing the back of my head or scratching my neck or back is making them fire up big time.

Finally, I feel some peace. At least in this regard. My triceps exist. I know this today.

What is this? Drew Leder talks about the vanishing body – the athletic or performing body that recedes from consciousness as we do something fluently, proficiently, in a flow state. This is the sports ideal, not the bodybuilder’s ideal. Of course, you want to get into the groove. You want to do all exercises absolutely smoothly and fluidly. But the last thing you want is your body to vanish. You may want lots of bits and pieces of your body to shut up: you don’t want to feel pain in your knees or neck or wrist or something when you squat. But you absolutely want to draw the plight of the quadriceps into the spotlight of your sensorium.

In sport, Leder observes, the fluently functioning body recedes – vanishes. Conversely, the body makes its presence felt in injury. The pulled muscle or sprained joint demands your attention and draws your body back into visibility – and inability.

The bodybuilder wants something different. A smooth feel but a growing awareness of precise zones of the body.

The ache afterwards is a middle ground – somewhere between or beyond the absent body and the ‘dys-appearing’ injured body.

Do I seek it because it means hypertrophy, or is it about something else? Is bodybuilding of all kinds simply about vanity? The persistence of my pursuit of the ache in full knowledge of its superfluity or even counterproductivity in the face of any of my stated objectives raises questions.

When I couldn’t feel my triceps last week, I feared I didn’t have triceps, that they had atrophied and vanished. Is this me? Do I feel about me the way I feel about my triceps? If I don’t ache, do I think I have vanished?

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body foregrounds the lived, sentient experience of the body. In this paradigm, my soreness might register as meaningful evidence of embodied agency, self-formation, and affective intensity. For Merleau-Ponty, consciousness is in the flesh. We know the world through our bodies as active, sentient, feeling agents. Post-workout ache might be an experience amplifier, physiological feedback, lived evidence via an intensification of my intentional striving and engagement with the world.

Within the terms of such phenomenology, my soreness might be proof – to me – of my intentional effort – a mark of my body’s recent history of action directed towards self-transformation. It might also constitute a lived form of corporeal self-knowledge: my soreness deepens my awareness of my limits and capacities. Certainly, it is an affective resonance. The ache resonates as affective intensity – an intermingling of pain and pleasure.

Affect theorists like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Brian Massumi have explored how bodily experiences exceed the binary of pleasure/pain. From this vantage point, somatic intensities such as the ache attest to a unique form of sensory enjoyment, in a sense beyond language, one that is rooted in bodily becoming. It is also a remnant of a ‘threshold experience’: my soreness is the trace of facing a threshold point at which the body was pushed beyond a habituated comfort zone. It also marks a threshold of communication. I can’t say much about it. I can’t dissect it, produce a complex descriptive language to convey its nuances to another person. It is like a singularity of feeling and signification, almost entirely internal to me.

But it tells me I am me and – crucially, I suspect – that I am not vanishing. This is perhaps part of the origin of a compulsion to repeat the workout rituals. Is it a repetition compulsion? Freud’s concept of repetition compulsion describes the unconscious tendency to repeat traumatic experiences or circumstances. More recent scholarship has expanded this beyond trauma to encompass broader existential concerns. Repetition compulsion may now be understood as something that encompasses the need to ‘return to an earlier state of things’ as a way of managing fundamental anxieties about existence and continuity.

Some contemporary psychoanalytic scholars argue that repetitive behaviours serve multiple functions: they provide a sense of control over unpredictable circumstances, create familiarity and stability, and most importantly, offer reassurance of continued selfhood. The compulsion to repeat familiar actions – whether going to the gym, performing specific routines, or seeking validation – becomes a way of confirming one’s continued existence in the world.

Is this me? Do I lift to ache to prove to myself that I exist?