Heavy

A few months ago I looked at myself and realized that I had put on some weight over the course of the pandemic.  I had noticed a few times that I had a bigger tummy than before, and finally it was undeniable - this was no longer a 'drank a lot of water' or 'big dinner' tummy, but long term weight gain.  Upon realizing this, it was obvious why.  I had spent many months sitting in my chair, not getting proper exercise.  I was still doing all my weight training but I wasn't doing any walking except to go to the grocery store.

I was also getting high late at night and snacking on all the things way too often.  The pandemic has led to me being frustrated and lonely, not able to do the things I am used to doing that bring me so much joy.  My DnD games were on hiatus, my travels for gaming conventions were all cancelled, board game nights not allowed, and even visiting The Flautist was off the table.  That left me feeling blue, and pot and snacks helped dull the pain and upset.

My response was quick.  I needed to get more active and stop piling junk into my body.  I added on 30 minutes of walking every day and cut out most of the late night snacking.  This was good in other ways too, because quite frankly I didn't need that food and the walks gave Wendy and I time together and improved my mental health on its own, entirely separate from body shape or size.

I am one of those lucky people whose hunger effectively regulates my weight.  If I just eat when I am hungry and eat healthy food my body maintains a weight I am happy about.  I don't have to starve myself to get to a good weight, I just have to stop messing with my appetite with drugs.

Over the past 2.5 months my weight has dropped back closer to where it was pre pandemic.  Before I began weightlifting I was at 175 pounds, and over the last five years I added on 30 pounds of muscle to sit at 205.  In March of this year I was up to around 215, and now I have dropped back down to 210.  This got me thinking a lot about how I think about my body and how society thinks about fat.

The most absurd thing is the way BMI scores me.  For most of my life I was extremely skinny and yet I scored right in the normal range for BMI.  The system takes your height into account, but it does it so badly that everyone who is tall is shifted heavily towards the overweight side of the spectrum.  Right now I am officially overweight by BMI, which is absurd.  I am a skinny guy with a bunch of extra muscle and five pounds of extra fat, there is no possible way I should be considered overweight.  This picture, for reference, is of an officially overweight person.

Yeah.  'Overweight'.  Now it is clear that BMI does not take into account muscle mass.  This makes it a stupid system, but the fact that it takes height into account so badly that tall people of totally normal build are considered overweight is pathetic.  We shouldn't be using this system for medical diagnosis, or anything else.  It is a classic case of measuring what we can easily measure and confusing that for measuring the right thing.

Figuring out a simple system to categorize people's weight isn't easy.  I don't have a replacement system to offer.  (Improving BMI to properly take height into account is easy, and the fact that we haven't done it is an embarassment.)  However, if a system is garbage we shouldn't stick with it just because we don't have an easy alternative.  Sometimes you just have to toss the system out when it is crap.

This did get me thinking about why I so quickly decided to change my lifestyle.  The main thing was I could see that snacking and sitting weren't good for me.  That is true regardless of my weight, and adding in extra walking and fixing my diet are good by all metrics.

However, I can't deny that part of the motivation was that I didn't like the way my tummy looked.  I was thinking to myself "Dammit I do 200 pushups, 56 deadlifts, and 56 rows a day.  Shouldn't I have a bloody six pack?"  I have never had a six pack, and at this point I am never going to.  My extra bit of belly still bothered me though, and it shouldn't.

That 10 exra pounds around my middle is not a health hazard.  Nobody needs a six pack, and in fact getting one is actually hazardous to the health of most people.  Our bodies are made to store some fat!  I looked fine.

But no matter that I have tons of muscle, no matter that I looked fine, my brain still insisted that I absolutely had to change things.  Vanity and desire for status clearly drove my behaviour no matter how much I could use health to justify it.

That is the way our society deals with fat in a nutshell.  We moralize over people's weight, and go on about health hazards, but most of that is just denying the truth that we want to be skinny for status, and we mock heavy people for that same lack of status.

It sucks.

No matter that I know all this, no matter that I don't want to villify fat, I still made a swift and binding decision to change things when I got some of my own.  

Hoisting heavy things

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.

Algorithms, smart and stupid

Facebook has been shoving a new ad at me.  I am full of ambivalence about it, because I both want to praise the targetting of the ad and also ridicule it.

The ad was for a jaw exercising device.   It looks like a donut shaped piece of silicone, and the idea is that you chew on it to give yourself a chiselled jawline.  The actor in the ad talked about being 48 and how he used the device to get back his youthful jaw.

I am 41, and into fitness, so that much they got right.

Unfortunately for them, they also assumed that I am ignorant and desperate.

You can't fix saggy skin with muscle exercises.  You also can't remove subcutaneous fat with targetted regimens.  You *can* generally remove subcutaneous fat from your body with exercise, but you sure as hell can't pick a spot and nuke the fat right there.  This jaw chiselling device is a ridiculous scam.  It is no different from the Ab Blasters I saw advertised on TV when I was young.  Exercise is good for you, sure, but you can't pick a spot and nuke it!  You can pick a spot and make it strong, but the body removes fat where it wants to.

Facebook is hit and miss with these things.  It does aim a lot of board game and video game ads at me, which is accurate, but it also really tries to sell me trucks, which is a total non starter.

But the truck ads are understandable.  I am in a age and income bracket where buying a vehicle is plausible.  The most outrageous miss I have ever seen is when FB started sending surrogate mother ads at me.  Much as I might like to help infertile people to have children, I lack some key things that are required for that endeavour.  Shouldn't FB have my sex sorted by now?

I can't quite sort out how much to respect algorithms.  Sending a gym rat like me ads for adjustable home dumbbells during a time when I can't go to a gym?  Great idea!  (I am not buying, but it is a well targetted ad.)  But singing lessons?  Not so much.

The algorithms are getting better, and sometimes they do make great decisions, but we are a long way away from Skynet.

Covid19 giveth, and Covid19 taketh away

Much of my life has vanished over the last week due to Covid19.  My gaming groups have all called it quits, my trips to Ottawa and Waterloo for gaming and socializing got cancelled, and now my building has closed the gym and hot tub for the forseeable future.  Aside from grocery shopping I have no reason at all to leave my condo anymore.

But while the virus has taken much from me, it has opened up new doors.  For example, even though I can't lift weights anymore because the gym is gone, I found something new to do in its stead, courtesy of our viral overlord.

Grocery bags filled with emergency food are my new weight lifting solution.  It isn't as good as proper weights of course, because exercises like deadlifts don't work with objects as large as this.  However, there are enough exercises that do work that I can use these as a clumsy and annoying replacement for proper weights.

As I said in my post a few weeks ago, I bought a lot of groceries well ahead of time to get prepared for the inevitable supply chain disruptions and the possibility of quarantine.  I collected the last few things this week, but my household was well prepared for this mess.  I may get bored of pasta and vegetable soup, but we won't go hungry.  Boost and ramen, as pictured above, aren't exactly my ideal meals, but my small person has particular tastes that must be accomodated.

You might wonder why I am weighing bags down with packages of ramen - surely those weigh nothing?  You would be right that they a bag full of ramen would be nearly worthless.  However, the bottoms of these bags are full of canned soup and bags of beans, which add considerably more heft.  They still weigh quite a bit less than the weights I am used to using, but I just increased my reps to make up for that and overall it still works.

Grocery bags full of cans don't have nearly the flexibility of a proper weight room though, so I expect that there are certain muscles that won't be getting the workout I desire.  I am going to be doing two hundred pushups a day in additional to grocery based exercises, so at least my ability to launch myself up off the floor will remain intact.

Covid19 can take away my gaming.  It can take away my dates.  But it cannot take my muscles!

Armageddon, but for farms

I am back from Farmageddon.  I travelled to North Carolina on the 26th and got home yesterday.  It was a grand time with so many games played.  Even though the event was themed around the game Agricola I only played it five times over ten days of gaming - I don't even know how many different games I played but I had a great time in any case.

North Carolina gives me culture shock.  The group at Farmageddon was pretty liberal and fit with my politics fine, but when driving around or wandering through airports I was often taken aback.  Last time the thing that got me was the emphasis on the military and veneration of active duty military personnel, as well as people wearing clothes that made it clear they wanted to murder people.  This time the strange thing was medical ads.

There are advertising pushes for hospitals here in Canada, but they are fundraising drives.  I think this is stupid and we should just tax more to fund them properly rather than wasting money making ads, but I don't get to decide this stuff unfortunately.  However, in the US the ads were different because they didn't seem to be about fundraising but rather about recruiting patients.  The idea of medical institutions having ad teams to drum up business blows my fucking mind.  How is this the way it works?

I knew that medicine in the US was privatized, of course.  Sometimes though these things catch me unawares and I realize that I hadn't followed it to its logical conclusion.  Why is healthcare in the US so ludicrously expensive?  Lots of reasons... but one of them is patients are paying for advertising aiming to bring in more patients!

The free market is a useful tool, good at many things.  Running hospitals is not one of them.

A consequence of travelling to visit my parents from the 21st to 25th and then travelling to play board games from the 26th to 6th is that my workout routine is completely disrupted.  I can do pushups anywhere, and I can do pullups off of a beam at my parent's place, but that isn't a proper workout.

During Farmageddon I found another person who was really into the whole gym rat lifestyle, and we figured out how to get our workouts into days that are full of games.  We set up challenges where we would do clap pushups based on game actions, which ended up with me doing something like 75 clap pushups over the course of a single game.  I made a lot of time in between game turns into pushup time over the days I was away, but I really didn't know how my fitness level would hold up.  Today I finally got back to the routine, and I found out that my constant pushup sets during gaming kept those muscles in good shape.  All of my push exercises were no problem.  The other exercises were pretty rough though.  However, this means it shouldn't take long for me to get completely back into fighting shape.

I wonder how much me running away from the game table to crack out 25 pushups all the time affected other people.  Were they just laughing at me?  Annoyed at the interruption?  Vaguely amused that I refused to take a week off?  I don't know!  I do know that I feel better when I get my muscles sore though, so I am going to keep on doing this as a way to cope with a lack of a proper gym.

As much as I enjoyed my time there though, I am glad to be home.  I need my own space, my own kitchen, my own computer, and some quiet and silence.  No matter how great people are, at some point I gotta run away.  I certainly am not an extreme introvert, but I trend that way without a doubt.

Not made of steel, apparently

10 days ago I was working out in the gym and I damaged myself.  Weight lifting is a pretty safe exercise regimen, assuming you don't do anything really foolish, but I managed to injure my body anyway.  The exercise that got me?  Leg raises.

I have done thousands of leg raises at this machine, but 10 days ago I got distracted or something and brought my feet up wrong, catching the left one on the little metal peg you see in the picture.  It hurt pretty bad at the time but I kept on with my routine and finished everything just fine.  That night I was moving around on crutches, it was swollen 3 cm above usual size, and I was in agony.  But over the next couple of days it seemed to get better so I figured on just waiting till it healed.  I could stand on the balls of my feet easily enough, so I was confident it was only a terrible bruise, not a bone break.

That discolouration you see is all bruising, no dirt or bad lighting.  This photo was taken a week after the damage, and I was still limping around really bad and feeling a lot of pain.  It was bad enough that I even skipped out on helping Naked Man move furniture - and it takes quite a bit of damage to keep me from honouring a commitment to move a heavy object.

I was on course to just ignore it but Wendy and The Flautist were not on board with that.  They both kept fussing at me to go to the doctor, and while I wasn't into that plan, eventually I succumbed to the pressure and went in.  I got an xray, and lo and behold I was right and it is purely meat damage.  The only cure is to take it easy and wait.

So now I am sitting around home all day waiting for my stupid foot to fix itself.  I have managed, so far at least, to avoid saying "I told you so!" directly to either Wendy or the Flautist, but I did decide to crow about it on the internet.

I have spent many years imagining what getting doubled teamed by my wife and my girlfriend on my birthday would be like.  Those dreams didn't include quite so much "Book a doctor's appointment you doorknob, you aren't actually made of steel." or "Sit down and let somebody else do that, or you are never going to get better."  and instead had .... other characteristics.  This, I think, is a great example of polyamory as it actually is, instead of how people think it is.  Outsiders mostly seem to think it is about nonstop orgies, when mostly it is just about coping with the random junk life throws in your way, just like it is for everybody else.

Functional vanity

Earlier this summer I was having a talk with a friend about our different exercise regimens.  I am all about weight lifting, while he focuses on activities more like running and swimming.  One of the things he said about his regimen is that he likes to focus on functional strength.  He pointed out that weight lifters do curls, which is a silly exercise because nobody actually curls in real life.  Practising that motion is a waste of time.

He is right, mostly.

Certainly curls are not a way to make your body perform day to day physical tasks more effectively.  I am trying to recall a single place in my life where I curled weight aside from the gym and I can't come up with one.  Rows and pushups come slightly closer to real tasks, I guess, but even those aren't that much use most of the time.

My friend's regimen of running and swimming was *useful*, as far as he was concerned, and weight lifting was not.

I rolled this around in my brain awhile, and came to the conclusion that I was right all along, and he is wrong.

Whew.  For a while there I was worried I was going to have to grow and change or something.

He was right that I am not going to suddenly be called upon to do curls in regular life.  It won't matter if I can curl 30 kilos or 50 kilos.  But in his life he isn't likely to be called upon to run fast or swim far for some serious purpose either!  In nearly all cases the specific things he is practising are going to only be used to practise more, same as me.  I can run if I have to, I can swim if needed, and being a little better just won't matter, in much the same way that curling a little more weight isn't important.  Some people might well realize real gains in life by doing exercises of one type or other, but neither me nor my friend really expect that, given our baseline level of athleticism and ability.

But there are reasons to curl... big arms!  That is an actual function that matters to me.  Sure, it is easy to dismiss as cosmetic or frivolous, but looking hot is actually far more important to me than swimming further or running faster.  I can, without any doubt, say that some really fun times in my recent past came about because of having big arms instead of skinny ones.  I can also say that if I were significantly better (or worse!) at swimming it wouldn't have any of those benefits at all.  For me, big arms are a lot more functional than running ability.

You could definitely argue that swimming would be likely to get me more cut, though not as big, which could easily have the same sorts of benefits.  That is true enough.  Actual swimming ability though?  Irrelevant.

Any type of exercise is going to have health benefits in terms of reducing stress, increasing longevity, etc.  The only real choice is what kind of exercise, and for me weight lifting actually gives me exactly the sort of functional changes I want.  Plus, the weights are right in my building.  I don't even have to go outside to use them!  Convenience is as good an argument as any, in my book.

More power

I have been lifting weights for three years now.  When I look back at the spreadsheet I maintained at the start of all this it tells me how much I lifted at the beginning and I can easily compare it to today, so my progress is charted relatively precisely.  At the outset my gains were extremely rapid, of course, and these days things are much slower, but improvement has not stopped.  Last summer I decided that I should add 10% to my reps for each exercise every so often, and I did that in August, October, and then again in February.  By the time this coming summer arrives I am sure I will be able to do that again, so I am on pace to add 40% to my rep count in a single year, which is a lot given how long I have been doing this.

I started out doing sets of 9 pushups, and now I am up to sets of 34.  My weight training has generally shown an increase ranging from 150% improvement to 200% improvement, and I can't argue with the numbers, but tripling my original strength does seem kind of nuts.

One reason these gains are strange is that my weight and size doesn't seem to track along with them.  I have added on about 13 kilos to my weight, just shy of 30 pounds.  That muscle is obvious, but my weight and size peaked more than a year ago and hasn't continued to rise.  I am still getting stronger, but nothing is changing visually, and my weight on the scale is generally flat.  I suppose that adding on more size is easy at the beginning, but eventually you have to rely on practice and training to improve the muscle you have, which is why improvements in performance take a LOT longer once you have been at it awhile.

The adjustments when I do push to increase my reps are hard though.  This past couple of weeks I have been adding in that newest set of increases and workouts feel terrible.  I have been nauseous and feeling gross a lot of the time during the workout because my body simply doesn't want to do this much in the time I am allowing for it.  This has happened before though, and I have always pushed through it and eventually gotten back to normal.  It just takes time to get accustomed to the new load.  Still, it sucks while I am doing it, no doubt about that.

I do find it odd to examine my motivation at this point though.  Since I am not getting bigger the motivation to look good is not really there.  I know that I can just cruise at the level I was at last year and look exactly like I do now - there isn't any impetus to work harder on that account.

I also have no need to push harder for health reasons.  I walk a lot and I lift for 40 minutes a day.  Lifting in general is good for me, lifting heavier is not bringing me any longevity or health.

All this increase in reps is doing is satisfying my desire to get numbers up and see regular improvement.  It isn't as though that extra strength becomes important in my day to day life - the world is not designed to require someone who can bench 350 pounds, a 300 pound bench is *plenty*.

But I keep on pushing for more.

I think that just maintaining what I have may be a difficult thing for me.  I want that improvement, those numbers going up, and eventually I will hit a wall.  I haven't yet for certain, but you can't just keep on adding 10% more reps every 4 months forever!  My age and physical limitations will stop me at some point.  I wonder, when I finally get to the point where more progress is simply impossible, if I will happily settle into a maintenance routine, or if I will stop at that point.  I suppose I will have to wait a couple of years to find that out.

A taste of the high life

I have always thought of personal trainers as one of those things that rich people do.  A luxury mostly afforded by celebrities and CEOs with lots of cash and no time.  Certainly a thing I would never have for myself.

Yesterday I had a session with a personal trainer for the first time and I gotta say I understand the appeal.

I didn't actually pay for it, of course.  I haven't suddenly become the sort of person that spends money for luxuries!  Last year at a charity auction I found a workout package that had a bunch of stuff in it that I wanted, and along with it came 3 personal training sessions.  The whole thing cost about the amount I would pay just for the physical objects normally, so I bought it and I finally got around to using the training just this week.

This first workout left me really sore.  There are multiple reasons, but high on the list is that I push myself harder when there is someone else around to see.  I don't want to be that sort of person, but I have to admit that I slack off a little when it is just me around.  I cap out at 31 pushups on my own, but when the trainer told me to do pushups so he could check my form I cranked out 35 - social pressure is a force to be reckoned with.

It wasn't purely social though.  The trainer got me to do exercises in ways that I am not used to and his way of doing things burned my muscles a whole lot more than my way.  Instead of just yanking the weights through the distance with my arms he got me using my whole body.  I am sure that doing it his way is a far better workout long term because everything we did used a whole variety of muscles and burned me down in places I am not used to feeling it.

I like this whole personal trainer thing!  I don't need it for the motivation to get into the gym, that part I have nailed down.  But the motivation to do all the exercises properly, to keep my form on point, this is a useful thing for me.  When I am alone I just get the reps done rather than take the extra mental effort to constantly evaluate exactly *how* I am getting the reps done.

I have often said that if I won a lot of money I wouldn't know how to spend it usefully.  I suppose that is slightly less true now - if I suddenly got rich, I think occasional personal training lessons would be great.

But I am not rich.  So until that changes I will just take my lessons when they are free.

Never ever enough

Round numbers have a lot of appeal.  I imbue them with extra importance in my workout regimen, and big numbers divisible by ten somehow become gateways to greatness, benchmarks that will tell me when I am finally strong and powerful.

That feeling of hitting a new benchmark is great, but it never lasts.

I have been doing sets of 28 pushups for most of this year, from about April to August.  I realized that I had gotten in a rut and I decided to increase my frequency from working out 2 out of every 3 days to working out every day at the start of September.  At the start of October I increased all my rep counts by 10%, which put my pushups to 31 per set.

For so long I recall distinctly the idea in my head that 30 pushups a set is the amount a strong person would do.  When I got there, I thought, I would finally be big and strong and powerful.  That first set of 31 felt great, and there was a rush of triumph and a sense of real progress.  Two days later I went back to the gym and did 31 again, and my brain told me that seriously strong people do 40 pushups.  Maybe someday I would get there, but for now, I am not strong.

Talk about moving the goalposts!  I barely got 2 days of satisfaction and exhilaration at my progress and I was back to striving for another completely arbitrary goal.

This is just the way I am it would seem.  No matter the strength, no matter the size, I feel skinny.  I see muscular men out in the world and wish I had arms like they do.  Hell, I probably do have arms like many of them, but I just can't see it.

I knew all of this ahead of time.  This isn't the first time I have noted that my self perception doesn't change with my body, and my ideal appearance is unobtainable.  What surprised me was just how *fast* that transformation from celebration to inadequacy happened.  I figured I would get at least a couple of weeks of good feelings!

Working out is good for me though.  I need exercise and this is the only regimen that has ever stuck.  I am sure that working out hard has improved my mood and longevity, even though those changes are things I can't see or measure.  Given that, I might as well think of my neverending, unquenchable need for progress as a useful tool for getting me into the gym day after day.  It is foolish and puts my irrationality front and centre, but it does make my life better, so I might as well run with it.

My nipples are a terrifying thing

Today there were new signs in my building's workout room.  They said all the usual things about being quiet and not damaging stuff, but there were two new clauses tacked on at the end.  One said that everyone must wear proper shoes while using the equipment, and the other said that everyone must be properly clothed in a Tshirt or exercise clothing.  I HATE the word proper.  It can die in a fire.

My nipples are at fault.

I have been working out barefoot for almost three years now, so that isn't the thing that has prompted this new grasp at power by a bored bureaucrat.  The difference is that over the past few months I have occasionally gone shirtless while lifting in the weight room.  Normally I am alone, and sometimes I get so sticky and hot during my routine I shuck my shirt.  A few people have walked in, and while none of them have said anything, obviously somebody was extremely frightened and offended at my nipples and they complained to the authorities.

Nipples are terrifying as fuck, y'all.

Before anyone starts excusing this nonsense let us be clear:  My shirt, by the end of my routine, is soaked.  My bodily goo is getting all over everything no matter whether or not I have a shirt on.  Women often wear sports bras as their only top, and nobody is complaining on that account.  This is purely a nipple issue.

I know what will happen if I protest this.  I have been down this road before.  They will make noises about 'safety' and cluck disapprovingly about disease.  This is the standard nonsense people spew when anyone does something outside social norms, because it masquerades as concern, when in fact it is purely classist bullshit.  We don't want *those* sorts of people in our building, they think, and those undesirable types must be full of disease and filth.

It is the same whether or not I am trying to go without shoes, be polyamorous, or not wear a shirt.  People assume that because it is weird that anyone doing it must be filthy and dangerous, and they don't even bother with a cursory examination of their reasons.

But you can't fight city hall.  They can enforce any bullshit ruleset they want, and nothing I say is going to convince the condo board that my right to dress how I like is as important as other people's right to tell me how to dress.

One good thing though is that when you are replete with rage, full to the brim with fury, and consumed with a desire for righteous vengeance, doing your workout routine is easy as hell.  I tore through those reps like they were NOTHING.

80% more strongness

For the past six months or so I have been doing the same workout regimen.  In March I realized that I had been adding too much to my routine and it was really starting to cause damage so I stopped increasing weights and reps and just did the same thing over and over.  I acclimatized, and eventually it became easy, but I never got back into the pattern of constantly pushing myself to do more.  After coming back from WBC this year it hurt to get back into my routine because 10 days off caused me to lose some strength.

I have realized that the hurt and soreness I was feeling back in August as I built myself back up is something I miss.  Probably not the pain itself, but the sense of improvement, of becoming more through suffering and difficulty, has a lot of appeal. 

I decided that I need a new goal, and that goal is to increase my lifts by 80% by the end of the year.  I am not trying to increase my strength 80% in that timeframe (if that were even possible, which I doubt, it would require massive amounts of steriods); rather, I want to increase the total number of reps per day by 80%.  That should naturally lead to strength increases, but I don't know how much.

Even then 80% sounds like a ton considering I already put in 40 minutes a day of lifting.  However, the first thing I am doing is going up from doing a three day routine where I do 1 hour of lifting for 2 days then rest the third day, to just lifting every single day for an hour.  That is a flat 50% increase, so I will only need to raise my actual reps by 20% over current values in order to achieve an overall 80% increase.  Hopefully by next summer I can get up to a full 100% increase over the previous year.

Over the past couple weeks I have put this No Rest Ever theory to the test and it has actually been a lot easier than I ever expected.  I even find that the individual sessions are easier than before for some reason.  It sure eats up a lot of my time but my body seems perfectly capable of sustaining this level of output.  I am feeling that background pain in my muscles though, which tells me I am getting closer to my limits.

It seems weird but I think that low level pain is a big motivator.  If my routine is easy it hardly seems worth doing; somehow knowing that I am really going to the maximum makes putting in the time feel worthwhile.  It isn't how strong I am - because honestly, my life is barely any different - but rather the process of improvement and the struggle therein that is the thing I want.

Time to get HUGE!

Five figures of steps

People really want to get their 10,000 steps in.  My father in law has a fitbit and aims to get his 10k a day, Wendy has her phone tracking her steps, and lots of other people I know do the same.  Of course there is nothing magical at all about 10,000 steps.  People have all kinds of different needs and capabilities and there is no reason at all to assume that 10,000 is somehow the 'correct' amount of exercise.  10,000 is just a thing because it is a big round number and we humans really like those.

I read an article talking about this, and it managed to really miss the point.  The article pointed out correctly that there isn't any hard medical science suggesting that 10,000 is the optimal number of steps for health.  But was anyone really thinking that?  With all the confounding factors going into it it seems blatantly clear to me that 10,000 is just a convenient round number that happens to be attainable for a normal person with an interest in walking.  1,000 is clearly trivial for most people, and 100,000 is near impossible, so 10,000 it is.

Here is the trick.  Sure, there isn't any medical evidence that 10,000 is correct.  But if you stop there you are missing something big.  There is plenty of evidence to suggest that walking is good for you, that people stick to walking regimens if they have clear goals and can treat it like a game, and that one major barrier to sticking to walking regimens is consistency.  10,000 isn't some magical thing that comes from physiology, it is a magical thing that comes from psychology.

We aren't doing 10,000 steps for medical reasons, we are doing it because fitbits and step trackers and big round numbers help us keep to a healthy routine.  We are using brain hacks to get ourselves to do things we know we should do.

That is a good thing!

And by we, I don't mean me, because I don't walk that much, and I don't track my steps.  If I need more exercise I go to the gym and lift more and harder, because I like tracking those numbers a lot more.  Doing 28 pushup sets or 30 pushup sets isn't something medicine has an opinion on, but I use the numbers to motivate me to healthy behaviour.

Our society so often seems to get caught up in which exercise is perfect, and what exactly we can do to sculpt our bodies just the way we want.  We shouldn't be bothering.  The trick is to find something to get yourself moving that you will enjoy and stick to.  The details of the exercise are unimportant, all you need to do is do something, and keep doing it.

The downside of fun

From July 22nd to 29th I was playing a lot of board games at the World Boardgaming Championships.  This is a good thing for my happiness, but it is a killer on my routine.  I got home thinking that I still felt pretty good and perhaps ten days of sedentary behaviour, lack of sleep, and subpar food (which is on me, really, the food at the resort was fine) hadn't really impacted my body much.

I was so wrong.

I did my usual workout routine on Monday and Tuesday this week and I am sore all over, particularly my lats for some reason.  For months now I have been feeling good, rarely with significant soreness, and now I am not sure that one day of recovery time is going to be enough for me to get back to feeling healthy and ready to work out again.

I suppose this illustrates that in order to maintain my strength I absolutely have to be constant in my routine.  Even ten days of slacking dramatically was a huge blow, and will probably require significant time to recover from.

I have been curious for quite a while now how much an interruption would cost, and whether or not my relatively good discipline mattered; now I know.

No more days off, not until Christmastime at least.

Dream chasers

I have watched a couple documentaries this past week about MMA fighters and bodybuilders.  It is always interesting to me to examine the extremes that particular cultures will go to when you examine the most ardent members of those cultures and these did not disappoint.  The shows were full of examples of champions bragging about their victories, desperate to convince the world of their superiority, and down on their luck people struggling to stay in the game despite losses, injury, and despair.

It makes me think that chasing your dreams is a terrible way to live.

Probably more accurately, chasing the wrong dreams is a terrible way to live.  Looking at this reminds me of the Stoic philosophies I read about a lot years ago.  One of their core ideas was that you should strive to compete against yourself, not against other people.  There is no happiness that comes from measuring your self worth by how many people you defeat - there will always be people that beat you, no matter what you do, and then you are betting your happiness on random chance.  You might lose via your opponents cheating, you may lose by genetic lottery, or you might lose by any number of other instances of pure back luck.  Why stake everything on luck when you don't have to?  Measure yourself against yourself, and no one else.

All the people in these documentaries who were struggling to defeat others in competition got their quick highs of victory, but then they had to deal with crushing defeat.  They also inevitably end up broken, damaged, and out of the game.  The ones who actually seemed happy were always those on the fringes of competition, just doing a job.  The people that found joy in these communities seemed to be the trainers, judges, referees, and other behind the scenes types.

The trainers didn't end up getting an injury and then spend years desperately trying to get back into fighting shape, suffering constant sadness and frustration, to inevitably fail anyway.  They just did their job as well as possible and lived their lives.

I have made this choice in my life.  I could have chased Magic, poker, or professional game design, trying to make it in a field full of desperate people.  I don't think that is the way to be happy though. 

There are times when the shining lights and glitter of stardom pulls at me.  I absolutely get the appeal of being one of the names that everybody knows.  But the world isn't fair.  Even if I was excellent in terms of skill and work, even if I gave it my all, plenty of other people are too.  There would be any number of reasons why I could and would lose even if I do everything right.

I am not special.  I have talent, sure, but there is nothing in the world guaranteeing my victory.  The fact that I am the star of my own story means jack shit to the universe at large.

When I look at people like those MMA fighters and bodybuilders I see desperation and misery.  They struggle so hard to fill a hole in themselves and they refuse to see that no matter how many wins they rack up that emptiness will never be gone.

Pick something you love.  Do it a lot until you are great at it.  Become the best at it that you can be.  Forget about how good other people are at it, because that doesn't matter.  Stake your happiness on the striving, not on the victory, because striving is something you can succeed at forever.  Beating your opponents is not.

My fun, don't spoil it

On the weekend I was up at the cottage.  The tradition is that on the May long weekend we go up there and do all the setup - put the dock in, set up the swimming raft, etc.  The dock is always the biggest part of the project as we have to haul the board sections to the dock once we have lifted the metal dock structure into place.  Normally the metal structure is moved with three or four people as it is quite heavy.  Last year I wanted to try lifting it myself but everybody refused to let me attempt it and insisted on helping.

This year though I got em.

All the other adults left to go to the farmer's market early Saturday morning, and as soon as they closed the door I ran to Pinkie Pie and told her that I was going to do the whole dock by myself.  I knew that the others would try to help me if they knew I was doing it, so I deputized her as my lookout so I would have warning if they returned from shopping.

She LOVED this.  She knows that her daddy is a big fan of doing difficult things by himself just for fun, and tricking other people out of helping me was just her jam.

I rushed to get changed and get to work.  Lifting the metal structure was quite a challenge, but I was able to get right under the centre of it and hoist it up.  It was pretty close to my maximum weight allowance but not quite there so I carefully walked it out to the lake and dragged it to the end of the dock.  Being as I was solo it was more difficult that usual to set it exactly in place but eventually I just dumped it in the water, changed positions, and got it to work.

By the time the others returned I had managed to fix the metal in place, put all the wooden sections down, and do the extra bits required to finish the job up properly.

Wendy was quite surprised to see it done, but after a moment's reflection realized that she should absolutely have expected this.

My inlaws... were baffled.  They couldn't quite see why exactly I would lift a heavy, enormous object over my head just to prove that I could do it without anybody helping.  Wouldn't it be safer and easier to wait for help?

Of course it would be safer and easier!

But since when has safe and easy been as fun as pushing yourself to your limits?  Never, that's when.  Maybe lifting for a few years has changed me, I am not sure.  But now I have this intense desire to try to do really difficult things that my strength can barely managed.  I spend so much time hoisting things for no reason that an opportunity to test my abilities in a setting where the work is actually useful feels wonderful.

I feel so happy that I tricked people out of helping me with a task.  I do not always make sense, it would appear.

Suffering for my art

I thought that I had a handle on the downsides of weight lifting.  Mostly it is a massive sink of time and money, in that you have to not only work out but also cook and eat a *lot* of eggs.  You know that your routine is burning a ton of calories when you need to schedule extra time in just for eating all the eggs you need!

But the month of March taught me a new lesson.  I have maxed out all the weights in my gym so increasing my difficulty is a matter of doing more reps.  Throughout February and early March I added on reps for all of my exercises and then found myself feeling positively ill for most of my workouts.  Sore muscles, this is normal, but working hard not to barf for forty minutes a day is not fun.

A sensible person would probably decide to dial back the reps a bit.  After all, nearly vomiting from working too hard is a pretty good sign that the exercise you are doing is not healthy.

I am not as sensible as that.

The only concession I was willing to make was that I stopped adding on reps and purely focused on improving enough that I could do my current sets without constant nausea.  It took a month, but by the end of March I was able to do my regular routine with only minimal complaints from my tummy.

In April I added on a few more reps but only on a couple of exercises.  I seem to be hitting a plateau where increasing gains are becoming difficult to come by, so I will need to be gentle with my increased demands.

Still, I am not capped out.  I have added 20% more reps across all my exercises in the past six months, which is a pretty substantial increase. 

The weird thing is that although I am obviously still increasing in strength I am no longer increasing in size.  I am the same weight as I was half a year ago, hovering right around 205 lb, (93kg).  I don't know if my extra strength is me converting my relatively sparse body fat to muscle, basically just shifting percentages, or if I am getting more efficient somehow without adding muscle mass.  Possibly some combination of both explains it, though I have no good way to be sure.

Quite some time ago I had thought that if I ate a lot and worked really hard I could add on a ton of muscle and maybe get my weight up to 250 lb (113kg) or so.  Now I don't think that will work.  I could probably eat a truckload of sugary calories and get my weight up by adding on fat but my muscle gains seem to be capped, barring heavy drug abuse, which isn't part of my plan.  There are probably some marginal gains over time that I can achieve, but most likely I am as heavy as I can be while staying lean.

This is a fine thing really.  I like the way I look now and I am plenty strong for all practical purposes.  I even had a bit of a moment the other day when I lay down on my back, putting my arms beside me on the floor, and my elbows couldn't touch the ground.  Too much tricep muscle on the back of my arms, apparently.  RAWR /flex whoot! and such.  These sorts of small things drive me on ever further, even through great suffering.

A couple of years

I have been doing my weightlifting regimen for 2 years now.  I figured it would be a good time to reflect on the changes that have occurred and think about what goals I might aim for in future.  When I started out I had a few benchmarks that seemed difficult but possible - primarily I wanted to be able to bench press 250 pounds.  That was the maximum weight possible on the bench press in my high school and it seemed like a nice round number to aim for.  I started off maxing out at 140, and for the first while I was able to consistently see the numbers go up.  However, the machine at my place maxes out at 200 pounds so I can't actually test myself properly this way anymore.  My best guess is that I am maxing out between 300 and 320 pounds at the moment based on ratios I found were consistent in the early going.

There was a point awhile ago when I thought I might be able to triple my original value and end up at 420 pounds.  I am no longer convinced this is possible, barring heavy drug usage, and there is no way I am going to do any of that.  My new round number to aim for is 350 since that is 2.5 times my base strength.  While it is probably a while off yet I think it is a reasonable goal since I am still making gains even though they are much slower now than they were at the outset.

One of the difficulties here is that I am on the downslope in terms of strength training capability.  Bodybuilders can have pretty long careers as far as athletes go, but once you are in your 40s your body's aging imposes too great a penalty to overcome.  It takes years to build up muscle, which I think is why bodybuilders can go a long time, because at 20 you simply don't have enough years of lifting to have achieved your full potential.

I am turning 40 this summer and that means I am rapidly going to be hitting my peak possible strength and then will begin the slow but unstoppable decline from that top point.  Probably I have at most another 3 years of potential consistent gains before the marginal benefit from another year of lifting becomes less than the marginal penalty of being another year older.

The question of how I am going to maintain my motivation once my numbers start dropping is a good one.  I like levelling myself up and seeing progress - when that progress becomes negative it may be difficult to find the desire to keep hitting the gym as hard as I have.  I have years yet to figure that out, but that point is coming.

I think if you had told me that I would be able to bench press 310 pounds by this point when I started I would have been impressed with that value.  I am quite happy with that progress.

But hey, the main reason I wanted to start doing this was to look big and ripped.  How is that part coming along?

The answer is partly good, partly bad.  The bad part is that I want to be bigger, and when I look at myself I still see myself as the skinny kid is who is far behind me.  That muscle dysmorphia hasn't suddenly gone away because I put on 35 pounds of muscle.  I can measure myself and compare pictures and see the differences, but that fundamental view of myself as not quite measuring up is mostly unchanged.  This isn't surprising, as most bodybuilders continue to compare themselves to others and find themselves lacking no matter how big they get.  Much like many eating disorders it is all about the brain, not the body, and no matter how big or small you get the brain seems to think the same way.

I don't think my muscle dysmorphia is serious, or a problem.  It makes me want to work out which is honestly a good thing for my health and I haven't taken on any bad habits because of it.  It is just a thing that is there, and it doesn't seem like it will change.

On a more upbeat note I would say that my muscle gain and appearance change is really positive.  The people that habitually see me naked seem to quite like the changes, and the people that don't see me naked are impressed, or at least notice.  When I can manage to be objective I like the extra mass and I like the way I look more.  I like the shape of my arms a lot more now, even if there is that voice in my head that keeps on telling me I am still way too skinny.

My upper body changes seem positive, to me, but honestly the lower half of me isn't particularly.  My legs and butt are bigger, but they don't actually look better.  I don't think it is a bad thing, but it is kind of interesting to me that my arms, chest, and back got a lot of definition to go with their size, but my bottom half just got bigger without any other changes in shape.  I can see the beginnings of a bodybuilder's physique on my upper body, but the outrageous quads on a bodybuilder's legs are nowhere in sight.

As far as actual utility goes the strength is rarely used.  I can lift and break things better than ever before, but the world is largely speaking designed for people much weaker than me so it seldom matters.  I am healthier and in better cardiovascular shape too, which will make me live longer and be able to better flee zombies.  One of those things is likely to matter.... the other, not so much.  I am more useful when doing labour up at the cottage, and occasionally I hoist a lover up in the air just for fun and they seem to like that, but honestly when I consider the amount of time and effort I put into lifting the benefits don't seem quite worth it.

Still, even if the benefits aren't all the brochure said they would be I intend to keep going.  If nothing else I may keep myself health enough that when we finally do invent something to make humans immortal I may still be in good enough shape to use it.

Getting big like a cat

I have spent a lot of time over the last year and a half looking for ways to get cheap protein in my diet.  The trickiest thing about this has been the struggle between ethical meat consumption and cost because the cheapest meat is never the kind of meat that has 'ethically raised' stamped on it.

Last night though Wendy and I were talking about this and the idea of cat food came up.  Cat food is advertised as being high in protein and is cheap on a dollars per gram metric.  What could go wrong?

Comparing cat food to normal human food is tricky though.  Cat food doesn't have the same nutritional information panel that most human food does so I have to make some guesses about what I would get out of it.  The first thing that struck us when we started evaluating the cat food bag for weight lifting consumption was that the protein content was *really* high.  36%, in fact, which is higher than beef, pork, or chicken.  That seemed a little bit ridiculous but then I realized it must be due to water, or lack thereof.  Slabs of meat have a ton of water in them but the dried cat food doesn't so even though it has all kind of random stuff in there like corn the protein content is still fairly high by weight.

The ingredients in cat food read kind of sketchy though.  I don't know what "chicken by product meal" actually is but I bet it is all the worst parts of chicken that humans would never eat ground up into a paste.  One of the ingredients is salmon though, without any modifying words like "meal" or "by product" so maybe I can think of it as a fancy fish meal.  I could pretend that the crunchiness is like tempura coating!

I am not actually going to try to gain muscle mass by eating cat food, even though it is the cheapest protein I have been able to find.

I know that cat food has stuff in it that isn't good for humans in large quantity, particularly the high Vitamin A content that apparently can cause "nausea, vomiting, irritability, headaches, and blurred eyesight" and eventually death.  Good for cats, bad for people.

It does seem like there is a real market possibility out there though.  There are people like me hunting for cheap protein who are willing to eat whatever gross parts of animals nobody else wants, and if you don't put toxic levels of cat specific vitamins in the food I would totally eat it.

Now if only the invisible hand of the market would supply this particular need!

What I really want

Recently I decided I should go look at gym memberships.  The Good Life gym right beside my place was the obvious choice, as I certainly won't commute serious distances just to work out.  A crappy gym right in my building is far better than a great gym a long distance away.

I knew that the salespeople you talk to when you wander into a gym were aggressive and usually annoying but this experience was weird.  The woman trying to sell me on a membership referred to me as a monster on two or three occasions - in a complimentary sort of way, suggesting that I am strong and powerful, but it was offputting.  I don't want to be buttered up like that.

I didn't buy right at the time, but the sale was ending in 1 day so I was under pressure to sign up to get a free month.  The next evening just two hours before the sale would end I wandered into the Good Life to try to sign up.  I had finally decided that despite the annoying salespeople I should bite the bullet and get a gym membership.  Unfortunately all the salespeople were gone by that late in the day and they couldn't sign me up so they promised to extend the sale for another day for me.

I wasn't shocked that they could randomly extend the sale - I am quite used to prices being flexible and vary by the whim of the seller.  It sure did take the pressure off though.

But I felt crappy.  I went home and played my semi final Blood Bowl match and my terrible mood caused me to play badly.  I just felt all out of sorts.

Finally I figured it out.  Though I logically had reasoned through why a gym membership made sense, I *really* didn't like the idea emotionally.  My money demon is stronger than my desire to get big, it would seem.  More importantly though I realized that if I am going to spend $830 on a gym membership maybe I should figure out if there is anything I would rather spend $830 on that isn't a gym membership.

If the gym isn't even the top of my list of priorities then I ought to buy whatever is on top instead, and stop when my purchases stop making sense.

When I looked at it like that everything changed.  I can think of lots of things I would rather spend $830 on!  I would rather buy a bunch of board games and computer games.  I would rather buy flights to visit people far away.  I would rather get an awesome tattoo.

So if I have not yet done those things, then getting a gym membership makes no sense.  Once I reasoned this out and decided to just keep going to my building's crappy little gym I felt lots better.

Sometimes raw emotional reactions are a good clue to lead you to the correct decision.  One day I hope to be better at the skill of figuring out when to trust my impending sense of doom and believe that there are good reasons for it.