My name is Alexa Hayes, and for the last decade, I’ve been a gym trainer here in Berlin. I’ve guided countless people on their fitness journeys, helping them sculpt their bodies, build strength, and find confidence. But what most of my clients don’t know is that my own journey of building and shaping began in a very different kind of gym, the digital one.
It all started when I was 20, a bit of a late bloomer for high school, I’ll admit. Life has a funny way of throwing curveballs, and mine had sent me on a slightly different path. While most of my peers were already in university, I was just diving into my high school studies, with a focus on computer science.
Hello World!
Just like a new gym-goer staring at a complex cable machine, I remember my first encounter with code. It was a language called HTML, the very skeleton of the internet. My teacher explained it as the basic structure of a webpage. Think of it like the bones in your body (permanent), providing the framework, but on its own, not very appealing. An HTML page without any styling is just plain, black text on a white background, with maybe a blue link here and there. It’s functional, sure, but it’s lifeless. It has no personality, no aesthetic appeal. It’s a body without muscles.
That’s when CSS entered the picture. If HTML is the skeleton, then Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, is the muscle, the skin, the hair... everything that gives a body its unique and attractive form. CSS is what adds the color, the layout, the fonts. It’s the difference between a bare-bones anatomical chart and a living, breathing, strong human being.
This parallel struck me deeply. In the gym, I was learning how different exercises targeted specific muscle groups. A bicep curl sculpted the arm, a squat built the glutes and legs, and a crunch defined the abs. Each exercise was a specific instruction, a line of code, if you will, that told the body how to shape itself.
Muscle gives form to the skeleton like CSS gives form to HTML.
In the same way, I began to see my web development studies as a form of digital muscle training. Each day, after spending hours in the gym, I would come home, my muscles aching with the satisfying burn of a good workout, and I’d sit down at my computer. The glow of the screen would replace the fluorescent lights of the gym, and my focus would shift from physical exertion to mental construction.
My training regimen was intense. I treated learning to code just like I treated my physical training—with discipline, consistency, and a clear plan. My daily workout started with the fundamentals. For my body, it was warm-ups and basic compound movements. For my mind, it was the MDN Web Docs, the bible for web developers. I would spend hours reading through the documentation, understanding the core principles of HTML tags and CSS properties. It was like learning the anatomy of the web.
MDN Docs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_development
Just as a personal trainer needs to know every muscle and how it functions, I needed to understand every element of the code. The <p> tag for a paragraph was like a basic push-up, fundamental and used everywhere. The <div> tag, a container for other elements, was like the core, holding everything together.
Then came the CSS. color: blue; was a simple instruction, like a dumbbell curl. font-family: 'Arial'; was like choosing a specific grip to target a different part of the muscle. I was fascinated by how a few lines of code could completely transform the look and feel of a webpage. It was the same thrill I got when a client would see their body changing in the mirror for the first time—a sense of creation, of bringing something to life.
After mastering the theory on MDN, I moved on to a more practical training ground: W3Schools. This was like moving from the anatomy charts to the actual gym equipment. W3Schools provided interactive examples and exercises. I could write a piece of code and instantly see the result. It was my digital sandbox, my place to experiment and play. I would challenge myself to replicate the layouts of my favorite websites, breaking them down into their basic components and then building them back up with my own code.
But reading and practicing can only take you so far, both in the gym and in the world of coding. You can read every book on bodybuilding, but you won’t gain a single ounce of muscle until you start lifting heavy weights. The real growth, the real expertise, comes from applying your knowledge to real-world projects.
This was the final and most crucial phase of my training. I started small. My first project was a simple personal blog. The HTML was the basic structure: a header for my name, a main section for my posts, and a footer for my contact information. It was functional, but it was that same old boring black and white page. It was a body with a skeleton but no muscle tone.
Then, I started applying the CSS. I added a soft colour palette and a clean, readable font. I styled the header to be bold and eye-catching. I the page. Slowly but surely, my bland webpage started to take on a personality. It was becoming an extension of me. It was like seeing the first signs of muscle definition after weeks of consistent training.
My projects grew in complexity. I built a portfolio website to showcase my work. I developed my grappling dummy-selling shop on Shopify under my brand, RTX Sports. I even tried my hand at creating an interactive fitness tracker, a project that beautifully merged my two worlds. With each project, I was pushing my limits, learning new techniques, and adding more tools to my developer toolkit.
There were days of frustration, of course. Days when a single misplaced semicolon (;) would break my entire layout, and I would spend hours staring at the screen, trying to figure out what went wrong. These were the moments that tested my discipline, much like those days in the gym when you feel too tired to complete your last set. But just as in weightlifting, the struggle is where the growth happens. Pushing through those moments of difficulty is what builds resilience and strength.
Looking back, the synergy between my life as a gym trainer and my journey into web development is undeniable. Both are about structure and aesthetics, about building something strong and beautiful from a basic framework. Both require dedication, a deep understanding of the fundamentals, and a passion for continuous improvement.
Today, when I guide a client through a workout, I often think about my coding days. I explain to them that the exercises we are doing are like the foundational HTML of their fitness journey. We are building the essential structure. The consistency, the diet, the proper form that’s the CSS. That’s what will add the definition, the tone, and the overall aesthetic that they desire.
You can’t have a strong, well-defined physique without a solid skeletal structure, and you can’t have a beautiful, engaging website without clean, semantic HTML. A body without muscles is just a skeleton, and a webpage without CSS is just a collection of text. The magic happens when you bring the two together.
My journey from the world of computer science to the world of fitness might seem like a strange one, but to me, it makes perfect sense. Both are about the art and science of building. Whether it’s crafting a powerful physique or a beautiful website, the principles are the same. It all starts with a solid foundation, and with dedication and the right techniques, you can build something truly remarkable. HTML without CSS is like a body without muscles and I’ve dedicated my life to building both.
Top comments (3)
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Thanks! Shiva
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