Big man

In the one and a half years since I started lifting weights I have put on about 30 pounds.  Throughout my adult life I always stayed between 165 and 175 pounds depending on how much physical activity I was getting, which generally meant that when I was working and walking a lot my weight was closer to the top of the range just due to muscle mass in my legs, I think.  Recently I weighed myself and I clocked in at 206 which is by far the heaviest I have ever been.  This isn't something I do often - I think I have only weighed myself roughly once every six months since I started lifting.  It is encouraging though, for some odd reason, to know that I have packed that much muscle on.  I keep trying to imagine 30 packages of ground beef stuck to my body and the image of it is absolutely hilarious.

I suspect I will be adding on a lot more meat in the next few months.  Like a lot of men who take up weight lifting I mostly just did upper body work.  I was really wanting to get big arms, more than anything else, and my legs seemed just fine as they were.  However, I recently decided that I should really balance things out more so I started doing squats and other leg exercises consistently.

I figured that I am a pretty strong dude now, so I would need huge amounts of weight.  After all, my benchpress is around 300 pounds now, and squat numbers are usually a lot higher than bench numbers, so surely I must be able to squat a ton of weight.  Right?

Wrong.

I mean, obviously, stupidly wrong.

It turns out if you don't do leg work your legs don't get stronger.  I know, I know, who would have thought?

Anyway I ended up putting 90 pounds on a bar and doing squats with that.  I would have liked to do more but my gym in my building doesn't have a squat rack so I had to toss the weight up over my head, and also that was all the weight available so I couldn't put more on even if I wanted to.  Because the weight wasn't so large I did a ton of reps and my legs *burned*.  I had trouble sitting down on the toilet for two days to such a degree that I had to use my hands to lower myself so I didn't just fall.

It turns out that doing tons of reps on low weight causes soreness that is quite unlike doing heavy weight for only a few reps.  I went back again after three days to do another leg day and ended up having to dial it way back because my legs were in agony after just a few reps.  My ability to recover from my high rep leg workout is just miserable compared to my ability to recover from normal lifting, it would seem.

At any rate I intend on doing a lot of work with lower weights in my home gym until I am in better shape.  Once I really can't do anything with what I have here I will need to get a proper gym membership but clearly I have some work to do before that is necessary.

This does make me wonder how heavy I am going to be six months from now.  I expect my upper body to continue to pack on weight slowly but if I go really hard on my legs I should put on a bunch of weight there too.  It seems quite reasonable to imagine I might add on ten pounds on top and ten pounds on the bottom and end up at 225 by the middle of winter, and somehow that seems absurd to me.  In my head weighing 225 pounds is massive, and it doesn't feel like it is the sort of thing that applies to me, and yet it also seems like a completely reasonable goal.

It is as though the numbers corresponding to my weight both represent me, and are also completely divorced from my idea of who I am.  It is an odd thing for someone who was so consistent in terms of weight for so many years.