Training Community

Training is often a solo endeavor for people, especially those looking for time alone with their thoughts. There is something special about putting your earbuds in, working hard, and thinking about life.

But, just as you can isolate yourself and attack your fitness goals alone, you can also become part of a local training community. Aside from your fitness results, being part of a community can offer numerous unique benefits, making the experience more fun and engaging.

With that in mind, let’s explore the value of training communities and what benefits you can reap.

1. Establish a Sense of Belonging
Whether we like it or not, we are social creatures and need to communicate with others. Research shows that people who lead isolated lives are at a much higher risk of mental disorders, including anxiety and depression.

Being part of a training community means that you get to interact with like-minded individuals. You can discuss ideas, goals, training approaches, and more. You can also share your knowledge, receive feedback from others, and improve your training process.

More importantly, you establish a sense of belonging to a group of like-minded individuals who are there to better one another.

2. Get Encouragement to Pursue Your Goals
Accountability is a powerful driver of human behavior. It’s easy for us to seek comfort by skipping workouts when we don’t feel like training. But, if we belong to a training community, others expect us to show up, making us much more likely to stay consistent, even when we don’t feel like it.

Aside from that, being part of a training community can be profoundly encouraging because you surround yourself with hardworking people. As a result, you feel motivated to work hard, which leads to better results.

3. Expand Your Perspective
Many people lose their drive to push themselves and improve because the wrong people surround them. For example, if you start training at a commercial gym, it won’t take much dedicated powerlifting training until you’re one of the strongest people there. Even if you come across some outliers, you can comfortably be the strongest person with numbers like:

• 140 kg bench
• 180 kg squat
• 220 kg deadlift

While impressive, these numbers aren’t enough to put most people on any kind of a powerlifting map. Even worse, being the strongest among mediocre people won’t drive you to keep improving. Instead, you’re more likely to get complacent and only maintain your progress.

But, if you transition into a solid powerlifting gym, you will quickly see what strong looks like. That alone can be incredibly motivating, and it can help you understand that you can make a lot more progress.

4. Help Others
An old Chinese saying suggests, “If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime, help somebody.”

An underrated but incredibly fulfilling benefit of belonging to a training community is that you get to help others by sharing what you know. There is something unique about lifting others and helping them succeed.

Even if it took you a decade to accumulate knowledge, you would never regret sharing it with others. Seeing someone succeed thanks to your knowledge is a feeling like no other.