What are you actually afraid of?

This post originally appeared on medium.com/@kannarkk before I consolidated my writing here.

Leg day was my favourite gym day — if there was one day I would look out eagerly for, it was this day; it didn’t matter if it was on a Monday either. It was my favourite workout day, until my legs gave away doing leg press at 120 kg two weeks ago.

Leg press — image from http://johnsifferman.com/

My legs couldn’t push up the platform back to the starting position. If it wasn’t for a trainer who was nearby, the platform would have come tumbling down on my legs while I frantically tried to push it up with my hands.

That was two weeks ago. My previous leg day was no better. I didn’t feel the soreness I usually felt after the workout. It felt underwhelming, as though I wasn’t doing enough. I was encouraged to increase the weight to 80 kg on each end, but I flatly refused. It was affecting all of my leg day workouts too. I felt I had hit a plateau.

Today was leg day again and it was time to face what was once my favourite workout — leg press. I began with a warm-up of 40 kg. I put 70 kg on each end and sat down on the machine and removed the safety bars. My legs began to shudder even before I lowered the platform. I put the safety pins back and got up. This wasn’t going right.

My breathing was normal, my legs weren’t numb and yet I wasn’t feeling right. I felt nervous. The more I thought about it, I realized I felt afraid. I felt afraid, not of failure, not of hurting myself, but just my legs giving away. The focal point was my legs being able to push the platform up and this was the only thing I felt afraid of not being able to. It was a fear of cause — legs giving away — and not fear of the consequence — hurting myself.

I sat down on the machine after a minute and completed the set of 15 reps successfully. It felt a tad overwhelming to get up and walk away from the fear. I completed the next set too with no problems. Could I be successful once more, but with 80 kg on each end — the weight I was really afraid of?

I walked around the gym nervously for a few minutes. This was the fear creeping in, a fear that was about fear itself. I called in a trainer to supervise just in case. I added the additional weights, sat down, took the name of God (something I usually don’t do) and began — one, two, three… I stopped at twelve and I felt I could do one more. 13 reps at 160 kg and I felt the kick that I usually get on leg days again!

It’s amazing the way fear can creep within, letting us believe we can’t, making us paranoid. As I walked home, I recollected the previous time I had felt this way — the aftermath of a check-in gone wrong at my office. I owned up for my mistake. The mistake was silly; I forgot to copy a ‘}’ into the build code leading to a complete loss of service. The damage it did made me feel extremely paranoid the next few times I checked-in my code. It was a fear of committing a mistake. It wasn’t a fear of thereby damaging the build.

Now that I pen down these words, I can sharply recollect how afraid I was of my possible lack of preparation more than fear of failing an exam. Why? Why do we feel so afraid of causes and not the results? My best guess is that the cause is the immediate local aspect while the result is an eventual one. Nevertheless, it’s disconcerting that causal fear is what puts us down and holds us back.

I can still feel a residual amount of that fear and I know it won’t completely go away by the time the next leg day comes up. But it does feel good to conquer it, spurring me to conquer more.