I have a money demon. For this reason I have been doing pushups as my sole form of exercise for the last six months since my gym closed down. I could have bought weights but $200 for a single set was far more than I was happy with, and I know that as soon as the pandemic winds down there will be millions of sets of weights being sold second hand and my set will be near worthless. So many other people are in the same situation as I am, and they are all buying dumbbells too.
2020 was a good year for people selling weights, and 2021 probably will be too. 2022 will be a disaster for them though, of this I have no doubt.
However, my inlaws bought me weights for Christmas and I finally got them this past weekend. The traditional way to approach this is to lift really hard on the first day and be a wreck for a week afterwards, unable to continue exercise of any sort. This has been the approach in the past, but just for once I decided to break with tradition and limit myself on the first day.
For the first time ever I actually hit the correct level of strain on my first day back. I was sore on day two, but I was able to complete the same set of exercises as day one and not feel too bad about it.
The real trick is figuring out a system for recording my sets. At first I was marking Xs on a sheet of paper for each set, and Wendy tried to help me out by giving me a little string with beads on it. For no good reason I never used the string and kept on writing Xs on paper. Sometimes I tried to keep the records entirely in my head, and I will never know how many sets I skipped or did extra because I couldn't keep it all straight in there.
Finally I have settled on using dice. I put seven dice against my wall in the bedroom where I do my exercising and I move one along the wall each time I do a set. When the last die moves, I am done for the day. This worked great for pushup sets, but now I am using my new weights for rows and deadlifts so I need a more complicated system. Initially I tried moving the dice in smaller increments each time I did an exercise, but it is not always the easiest to determine exactly where the die is when I wander back in for another round and have to figure out where I am in the program.
Now I am caught trying to figure out if the optimal exercise recording program involves getting out 14 more dice of varying colours to add to the dice pool, or rotating the dice to different faces to record which thing I did last. I suspect I will end up using sets of 7 white, 7 red, and 7 green dice for my current regimen.
For most people the hard part is actually doing the exercise. For me the hard part is being willing to buy the equipment, and figuring out the optimal way to record my efforts.
