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Gym motivation quotes for the days you'd rather go home

You've driven to the gym. The engine is off, the bag is on the passenger seat, it's raining, and home is twelve minutes away. A shouted slogan is no use to anyone at this point.

Week three is the other hard stretch. The new-kit feeling has gone, the mirror looks the same as it did a month ago, and a lift you were pleased with has stalled. People who keep going tend to describe a much smaller bar on those days. Put the kit on, do ten minutes, then decide. Some of them count the days they turned up and leave the numbers alone for a while.

Keep one for that stretch, and for walking back in after a missed week. The voice is a coach who has seen it all before, and it won't ask you to train through pain.

The moments

  • The alarm before dawn, with rain on the window
  • Week three, when it has turned into a chore
  • Parked outside and thinking about going home
  • Kit laid out the night before, and the sofa looks better
  • A lift that has gone backwards after weeks of work
  • Walking in after a missed fortnight, sure everyone can tell
  • One set from the end, wanting to call it

What people say helps

  • Making the bar tiny on a bad day: turn up, ten minutes, then choose
  • Counting the days they showed up in place of what the mirror says
  • Coming back after a gap without trying to make up for it
  • A class, or one person who will notice if they don't arrive

“No excuses” and “go hard or go home” land as pressure on exactly the days you have the least to give.

Quill Originals are written by Quill. Popular sayings are widely repeated lines with no name attached. Lines with a name are checked word for word against public-domain books.

Quill Originals

Your bed will still be here tonight.
Quill Originals
Last set. It was always going to feel like this.
Quill Originals
Nobody needs a make-up session. Do today's.
Quill Originals
You're the sort of person who looks at a heavy thing and has a go.
Quill Originals
Someone saw you walk in today and thought they might try it too.
Quill Originals
Today is a normal session with a slightly awkward door.
Quill Originals
You can do things this year that last year's you assumed were for others.
Quill Originals
Stalls are dull and very common.
Quill Originals
Your rest between sets has started its own podcast.
Quill Originals
In here, the hard things have their weight printed on them.
Quill Originals
New kit won't do the set. Old kit works fine.
Quill Originals
Not everyone would have gone in today.
Quill Originals
Aim to be fit enough to say yes to the long walk.
Quill Originals
Picture catching the bus and not needing a minute after.
Quill Originals
A bad set is one row in the log.
Quill Originals
Yours is a face people expect to see here now.
Quill Originals
Leave the watch at home for one run.
Quill Originals
You've stood at this water fountain long enough. Back to it.
Quill Originals
You've been scrolling on that bench for a while. Next set.
Quill Originals
The emails can't follow you under a barbell.
Quill Originals
Those online plans assume you have no job and a personal chef.
Quill Originals
You don't look silly. You look like someone having a go.
Quill Originals

Popular sayings

Just show up.
Popular saying. Its source is unknown.
Stop wishing, start doing.
Popular saying. Its source is unknown.
Give it your all.
Popular saying. Its source is unknown.
Always room for improvement.
Popular saying. Its source is unknown.
Mind over matter.
Popular saying. Its source is unknown.
Leave it all on the field.
Popular saying. Its source is unknown.

From the books

Victories that are easy are cheap.
Orison Swett Marden, Pushing to the Front
Read the passage around this line

Victories that are easy are cheap. Those only are worth having which come as the result of hard fighting.—BEECHER.

Nothing that is of real worth can be achieved without courageous working.
Samuel Smiles, Self-Help
Read the passage around this line

Nothing that is of real worth can be achieved without courageous working. Man owes his growth chiefly to that active striving of the will, that encounter with difficulty, which we call effort; and it is astonishing to find how often results apparently impracticable are thus made possible. An intense anticipation itself transforms possibility into …

Nature only gives us the use of faculties we employ.
Orison Swett Marden, Pushing to the Front
Read the passage around this line

No person can be really healthful whose mind is not usefully and continually employed. So there is no possibility of finding real happiness in idleness if we are able to work. Nature brings a wonderful compensatory power to those who are crippled or sick or otherwise disabled from working, but there is no compensation for idleness in those who are able to work. Nature only gives us the use of faculties we employ. "Use or lose" is her motto, and when we cease to use a faculty or function it is gradually taken away from us, gradually shrivels and atrophies.

The spectacle of effort is what awakens and sustains our own effort.
William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology
Let there be only a proper husbanding of strength, and let each man proportion his efforts to his powers.
Marcus Tullius Cicero, Treatises on Friendship and Old Age, Evelyn S. Shuckburgh translation
Great results cannot be achieved at once; and we must be satisfied to advance in life as we walk, step by step.
Samuel Smiles, Self-Help
The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Health is the prize of a constant struggle.
Orison Swett Marden, Pushing to the Front

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