It worked, and quickly. My pants don't fit properly anymore and my leg strength has increased drastically, as muscles tend to do over the first section of a training run. People tell me my legs look and feel different, which I kind of can't see myself, but I believe it. I am lifting about 50% more weight on variable weight exercises, and have increased my number of squats on a fixed weight from 10 to 25. Big numbers!
The trouble is that I am hurting myself and breaking things.
The hurting myself part is bad. I need to fix that.
The breaking things part is all bragging rights. I mean, who doesn't want to say that they lifted too much weight and broke the weight machine? I certainly want to say that! Sure, any reasonable person would conclude that the weight machine slowly wore down over years of use and the metal pin holding it together just happened to snap when I was using it... but I would rather say that I am just too strong for the world to handle and I busted the machine because MIGHTY.
There are problems though, namely that hurting myself thing. My knees are not great. Under normal circumstances they work just fine but when I do repetitive leg exercises I end up in pain, and I sure don't want to damage my joints. Those don't repair easily. Over the last week or so my knees have been complaining some and I think it is because I have pushed my squat reps up too high.
The trouble is that I can't differentiate between doing too much squatting overall and simply doing too many reps. Clearly my current style of doing low weight and tons of reps is a problem. It is possible that I would be fine if I were stacking on tons of weight and only doing a few reps, but it is also possible that I just need to stop squatting completely.
I can definitely say that the current style is not going to work long term. I don't have a squat rack so I am just holding 18 kilos in each hand and squatting till I can't go anymore. However, instead of finding that my thighs can't take it I actually end up either with my arms giving out or stopping because I feel like I need to puke. This is not the crushing leg workout I was hoping for!
The universe seems to be shoving me bodily towards a real gym. My leg machine is broken (because of overwhelming MIGHTINESS) and squats don't work because I can't do it properly and I am hurting my knees while not actually working my leg muscles as hard as I want.
Might be that it is time for my desire to get strong to finally put my money demon down for the count. Time to go see what Good Life fitness has to offer aside from extremely annoying salespeople.
Perhaps a trip to see a kinesiologist as well?
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Sounds good...i have a torn meniscus so i cant put too much strain on it {squats did that to me....and genetics}. But i try to walk at least an hour a day to keep my legs strong, i always at least had that to keep my leg muscles strong enough.
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