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https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/the-weight-of-the-everyday/article70312371.ece

The weight of the everyday 

Published - November 30, 2025 05:36 am IST

Muscles are not for vanity; they are what helps one in the cut and thrust of daily life

Updated - December 02, 2025 02:57 am IST

THOMAS PAUL


 Strength gives you options: to lift, to help, to act — and occasionally, to impress the crowd at the baggage carousel. ILLUSTRATION: SREEJITH R KUMAR

You don’t need to know your ‘deltoids’ from your ‘trapezius’ or count calories on a smartwatch to start exercising. Just look around. Every day life throws at us a series of weight-lifting contests disguised as ordinary tasks — and most of us fail them spectacularly.

Being out of shape has been your comfort zone. You are at the airport baggage carousel watching your suitcase doing lazy circles on the conveyor belt, coming around for the third time. You are summoning the courage to pull the thing without getting dragged into the carousel yourself. Meanwhile, other fit travellers stride up, grab their monster luggage one-handed, and are out heading for the exit.

You are on a crowded train, trying to hoist a suitcase into the overhead rack while everyone goes quiet watching your trembling arms, wondering whether a cardiac episode is on the way. You wobble on tiptoe, grunt, and finally tip it in, earning relieved applause from fellow passengers. Congratulations, you’ve just done a set of ‘shoulder presses’ in public — unintentionally, but effectively.

At home, the gym comes to you in far sneakier ways. The bed you decide to shift “just a little to the left” reveals your true fitness level. Ten seconds later, you’re red-faced, and promising never to clean under it again. Or changing that gas cylinder — the real test of strength and character. You wrestle it into position like a sumo contestant, trying to maintain dignity while panting.

Even small tasks morph into Olympic events: opening a stubborn pickle jar can feel like an arm-wrestling contest. The door that refuses to budge? That’s the ‘forearm-day’ you skipped last week coming back to haunt you. And if you’ve ever carried grocery bags in both hands, refusing to make two trips, you’ve already done an inelegant ‘deadlift’ circuit.

Then there’s the outdoor scene requiring you to be an action hero. The car stalls in the middle of the road and you need to move it to a side. You look around for help, but it’s just you, your steering wheel, and gravity. You push, grunt, while your biceps send an SOS. Or take the two-wheeler that runs out of petrol half a kilometre from the pump — a real-life endurance test you didn’t sign up for.

A friend trips and falls; you rush to help but realise lifting a full-grown adult is harder than it looks. You tug, strain, and nearly join him on the ground.

The elevator’s out, so you climb ten flights with groceries, muttering that it’s “good cardio”. Sure — if you survive to tell the tale.

Leisure, too, demands muscle. Having fun is tough. That weekend trek looked “easy” online until the first incline when your lungs are wheezing in surround sound. The backpack that felt feather-light at home now weighs like guilt. Even playing with kids is a challenge — their energy levels mock your fitness app.

In all these scenarios, your body doesn’t need fancy names for exercises. It just needs strength — plain, old, dependable muscle power. And that doesn’t come from good intentions or ergonomic chairs. It comes from using your muscles regularly before life uses them for you.

So, yes — get to the gym. Don’t overthink it. You don’t need to study ‘core activation’ or twenty different manoeuvres. Just start with dumbbells and progress to other workouts gradually. Push, pull, squat, lift — the human body was designed to move weight.

If you’ve ever said, “I don’t have time to work out”, remember that life will make time for you to regret it — at the worst possible moment. Muscles aren’t built for vanity — they’re built for ability. They’re what stand between you and that helpless feeling when faced with everyday weight-bearing moments. Strength gives you options: to lift, to help, to act — and occasionally, to impress the crowd at the baggage carousel. Every repetition you do in the gym is a rehearsal for life’s small weight-lifting moments, from hauling a suitcase to lifting a loved one. A muscle works on the ‘use it or lose it’ principle. And some day, you’ll thank your leg muscles for showing up when the elevator didn’t.

sagitex@gmail.com

Published - November 30, 2025 05:36 am IST

 

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