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To press, or not to press, that is the question— Whether 'tis smarter in the mind to suffer The stalls and pains of muscle failure, Or to take weights against a shoulder of weakness, And by pushing to strengthen them? To strain, to injure— No more; and by a bar, to say we end The fatigue, and the thousand natural aches That Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a tribulation Devoutly to be wished. To grow, to succeed, To sleep, perchance to heal; Aye, shoulders need a rub, For in that sleep of heal, what growth may come, When we have shuffled off this weaker coil, Must give us pause. There's the respect That makes quality of so long life: For who would bear the aches and pains of time, The sedentary life wrong, the strong human striving, The pangs of despised DOMS, the growth’s delay, The insolence of surrender, and the grunts, That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his muscle make With a bare bar? Who would lift that here? To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of not living the fullest life, The undiscovered strengths, from whose soul Once ignited burns, grants the will, And makes us rather bear those plates we have, Than sit to atrophy, that we know not how. Thus momentum does make frailty of us all, And thus the Native hue of Resolution Is powdered o'er, with the chalky dust on bars, And enterprises of great PR and moment, With this regard these muscles burn anew, And lose the name of softness. Soft you now, The fair lifter? Strength, in thy horizon Be all my weaknesses remembered.