Week by week, from somebody who has watched a few hundred people do it. Mostly it is less dramatic than you are expecting, and that is the good news.
People arrive with a fairly specific idea of what is about to happen to them, usually assembled from January advertising. It involves suffering, a large amount of willpower, and a visible result at some point.
What actually happens is stranger and considerably duller. Here it is, honestly, week by week.
Week one
You will be more nervous than tired. The session itself is not hard — a first session is deliberately conservative and you will go home thinking you could have done more.
The thing that surprises most people in week one is how much of it is standing still. There are two minutes between sets and you will not know what to do with them. Everybody stands about awkwardly in week one. By week five you will be using them to talk to somebody.
You will probably be sore two days later, in the muscles you did not expect. It lasts about three days and it does not mean anything.
Week two
The soreness is roughly half what it was, which is the first real signal that your body is adapting. This surprises people who expected it to get worse.
This is also the week people notice they cannot remember what to do with their feet. Coordination is genuinely a skill and you are learning it from nothing. It is frustrating in a way that has nothing to do with fitness.
Weeks three and four
The soreness mostly stops. The bar starts moving faster at the same weight, which is the actual first sign of getting stronger — before you can lift more, you lift the same thing more easily.
Somewhere here, the social thing switches over. You will recognise four or five people, one of them will ask how your week was, and the room will stop feeling like somewhere you are visiting. Across a few hundred members, this happens between weeks three and five with remarkable consistency.
At the end of week four you get a programme written for you.
Week five
The most common week to miss a session. Life gets in the way, the novelty has worn off, and the results are not visible yet.
Nothing happens if you miss it. Nobody emails you. Come back on the Thursday. The people who are still here in a year are not the people who never missed week five; they are the people who came back afterwards without making it a decision about their character.
Week six
This is where the useful stuff starts showing up, and almost never in the way people expected.
Nobody has ever told me they noticed it in a mirror at week six. What they say instead is that they carried the shopping in one trip, or got up off the floor without using their hands, or went up the station steps and did not have to think about it. One member told me the first thing she noticed was that she could reach the top shelf, which had nothing to do with strength and everything to do with not being scared of standing on a chair.
The number on the bar will be somewhere between twenty and forty per cent higher than week one. Almost all of that is skill rather than muscle, which is worth knowing because it means it is available to absolutely everybody, at any age, in any condition.
What does not happen in six weeks
You will not look different. Six weeks is not enough and anybody telling you otherwise is selling something.
You will not stop being nervous about it entirely, though it drops off sharply after week three.
And you will not have discovered whether you like it, exactly. What you will have discovered is whether you like the room, which turns out to be the thing that decides it.
