Sometimes I feel like our gym is its own phone booth.

Wait, does anyone remember phone booths? Those little rectangular pods on streetcorners you’d go into to call someone? Right. It’s been a long time.

Maybe we don’t need phone booths anymore to call friends, but I’m pretty sure Clark Kent still needs one to change into Superman. That’s, like, universal law or something.

And that’s what I mean about our gym. We have these wonderful folks in their everyday clothes who come in to get a workout and over the course of the hour I watch them all turn into superheroes.

You can see them change. Their eyes narrow and focus. Their breathing quickens. They open themselves up to possibility and greatness.

And they all do it with their hands on barbells. They squat, push, pull, hinge their hips, and carry things. This is the living commercial: they pick things up and put them down. And they leave stronger, happier, and a little bit better than they were when they walked in. Every time.

Barbell training isn’t for everyone. I wish it was. And yes, absent a barbell you can get some awesome workouts with your own bodyweight or smaller implements. Make no mistake about that.

But for in-person work…man, I’ve seen the barbell do magic things. Over and over again. I’ve seen it become the platform for real and lasting physical and mental change.

We’ve been closed to live training for three months now. While we’ve bridged the gap with online and now outdoor classes, we know our superheroes miss one thing more than anything else. They’ve told us.

Pay phones may be pretty scarce nowadays. You don’t need to drop quarters into those machines anymore.

But in our gym, in our phone booth–it’s the barbell. All you need to do is pick it up.

Funny thing is, once you do that? You realize you can carry a whole lot more on your back.