{ Out of Touch }

Last week we had a practical exam on prescribing the right exercises for our “client” on the spot, based on their wants and needs (e.g. recent knee injury, lordosis, trying to jump higher, all those sorta things…)

I’ll be honest and say dat was the least I had ever studied for an exam. Even though it was our final assignment, constituting abt 50% of our final grade, I essentially did not do any preparation whatsoever. In fact, whatever I did try to study might’ve been detrimental, becos it just caused unnecessary confusion.

While I may not be good at many things, I am pretty good at some oddly specific things (at least, I like to believe so…). One of such things is the sport of weightlifting.

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When I was like 14 as a smaller-than-average and underperforming track athlete, I discovered the sport of weightlifting. I think it was becos the Olympics was on around dat time, so sports related videos kept popping up everywhere.

Upon some not so thorough research, I discovered most weightlifters tend to be short but strong and powerful af. I met like 1 and a half of those requirements and tot “hmmm, yea I think I’d be good at dis 👍”.

So I trained for like 8 or 9 years. And now I believe I can look back and tell 14-year-old me “yea, ur right bro 👍”. While I’m not Olympic level, I am decent enough to hit abt 85% of wat the top dudes in the world (in my category) are hitting. In the snatch at least… (I think clean and jerk is stupid 😝)

Anyways, thru those years of dragon warrior training in the gym, I picked up the skill of programming, bodybuilding exercises, calorie counting, and some other things, as a by-product.

Hence, I became fairly competent in dis aspect of life, and thought it’s quite straightforward and easy to understand.

But perhaps it’s not as easy as I thought. For dis module has made me realise there are many things I haven’t acquired knowledge on. Learning new things like zone 2 cardio for active recovery, and isolating the glutes wif a hip abductor machine made me go:

I have oso come to realise my jarring weakness in scaling my workout for others. Being in an individual sport, I am so used to always pushing myself to my uncharacteristically high expectations of myself in dis regard. Cos ur so used to knowing wat u can and cannot do, u noe?

So sometimes when ppl get me to workout wif them, they end up abit flabbergasted by wat I’m getting them to do. I’d straight up tell some guy who’s never back squatted in his life dat we’re gonna hit 80kg today, while staring at him like:

Looking back, it probably wasn’t a whole lot of fun for them.

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I’m pretty sure I skipped some, or maybe many, steps of going from average gym-goer to strong boi during my journey. Dats probably why I ended up pretty out of touch wif others in dis field, based on my unrealistic expectations of an average person’s workout capacity.

But dats ok, and I am thankful to have taken dis module. While the task of prescribing exercises itself I think I’ve grown decent enough at (which was all dis assignment was focussed on), there are many other things dat go into exercising dat are worth looking more into. So many minor variations and modifications to movements and workout routines can go a long way. 

Not everyone is built the same, and so they won’t respond the same. What works for me won’t necessarily work for others, and vice versa. Different strokes for different people…

07.02.2026