It’s Not About Weight, It’s About Health

How To Make Your Gym Membership Work For You

Allan Milne Lees
17 min readSep 30, 2024
Image credit: Shutterstock

I’ve been going to gyms almost daily for nearly five decades now. As a result, I’m in excellent health, my bone density is almost exactly what it was when I was in my twenties, and I rarely get ill. If I were to worry about my weight (which I never do) it would be about losing, not gaining, as the years go by.

Going to the gym and lifting weights is an essential part of my life, and yet I see so many people taking gym memberships for all the wrong reasons, doing the wrong things, and then electing to return to their old sedentary unhealthy lives. What am I doing differently, that my experience and outcomes are so dramatically different from those of 90% of people who pay for gym memberships?

This article distils the important lessons I’ve learned over the years so you too can get the most out of the membership you pay for.

First of all, motivation is key. I don’t mean the gung-ho “I can do anything if I put my mind to it” sort of motivation. I mean the motivation you have for going to the gym in the first place.

If you’re thinking about joining a gym in order to lose weight or, worse yet, “spot reduce” fat around one or two areas of your body, you’re doomed to disappointment and failure. If you’re…

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Allan Milne Lees
Allan Milne Lees

Written by Allan Milne Lees

Anyone who enjoys my articles here on Medium may be interested in my books Why Democracy Failed and The Praying Ape, both available from Amazon.