♪ ♫ Everything hurts! Everything hurts! ♫ ♪

My wife is both an active person and someone in her mid-50s. Sometimes these two realities clash, particularly when she engages in high-intensity yardwork or certain home projects.

The result is soreness felt across her entire body. She even made up a song to describe this feeling, the complete lyrics to which are contained in the headline of today's post.

"Everything hurts! Everything hurts!"

It's just those two words sung over and over to an incongruently happy little tune. I used to laugh when she sang it, in a way that only someone not suffering from full-body discomfort can laugh.

That is, until I started strength training. Suddenly, I understood the deep meaning of the "Everything Hurts!" song in ways I didn't fully anticipate.

As I mentioned last week, I have (finally) begun to lift weights, something I should have started doing years ago. I do it under the tutelage of my trainer, Kirk. Well, sometimes I do it under Kirk's guidance, and sometimes I do it on my own.

Either way, I'm currently in the stage where I go the gym and work out, and anywhere from 12-24 hours later, my muscles hurt.

Part of this comes from being an older Gen Xer like my wife, and part of it is apparently the unavoidable consequence of activating muscle fibers that have lain dormant for many years.

My daughter Melanie, an avid gym-goer and someone in excellent shape, warned me this would happen.

"For about two months, it's going to be bad," she told me at the outset of my strength training journey. "Then you'll get to the point where it's way more enjoyable and sometimes you can't wait to get to the gym and lift."

I'm going to take her word for it on that last bit.

Actually, I already like the workouts themselves just fine. I love breaking a sweat, and I appreciate the work Kirk and I do on achieving proper form for each exercise.

It's the aftermath that gets me.

Hours after my first leg day last month, for example, Jack and I drove to Toronto for a weekend getaway. What started as intense leg weakness following the workout that morning soon developed into considerable leg soreness.

I walked around Downtown Toronto the next day kind of bowlegged. Every time Jack and I would get into the car, I had to turn around and essentially fall into the driver's seat, rather than bend down and slip easily into the vehicle as I normally might.

It's June 12th as I type this, so I'm not necessarily yet enjoying any of the fun results of strength training. That's coming, and there may even be signs of it by the time you read this.

But in the meantime?

Come on, sing it with me...

"Everything hurts! Everything hurts!"