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[NRDL]

Does your current situation have any mental health resources/services for you to use, Kagus? As useless as words from an internet stranger are, I'm hoping you're able to talk to somebody or take steps to manage your headspace.

[nenjin]

I don't see myself improving, I just see myself putting in immense effort in order to not get even worse.

How old are you?

I'm almost 40.

For me, part of the gym is now "in order to not get even worse." That is....reality. And it will become more so the older I get.

    Effort = Results
    If you're not vomiting or blacking out, you're not trying

There is surely happy median between "blacking out and puking" and "not being challenged." If you're anywhere near that median, you ARE doing the work. Maybe you could do a little bit more, maybe not.

I think you're just too hard on yourself man, obviously. You sound like you've got general unrealistic expectations of yourself and that's just extended to gym.

The exertion of every rep is failure and humiliation, because it's not the weight/the ease it "should" be.

In the gym, forget about "should be." Focus on "is." The numbers don't really matter, not unless you want some kind of social clout for reaching them. What matters is the internal drive to try, to maybe get better. You need to allow yourself your successes, IMO. Like, actually consistently working out for a year IS an achievement. Your clothes fitting differently (i.e. change) IS an achievement. Hell, getting through your sets when you're tired and part of you wants to quit IS an achievement. Allow yourself that momentary satisfaction. Working out is hard enough, beating yourself up on top of that for not hitting numbers isn't / hasn't made your gym experience better. When it comes to headspace, I know someone telling you a thing doesn't really matter. Telling is not being. But gym shouldn't be about making yourself feel bad.

I kinda realized a while ago that, for men, most of "fitness" comes down to one essential concept: "I can beat you up." That's it. The numbers, the swole, the looks......it's all about feeding our egos that we're strong, that we could kick someone's ass if we had to, that you could kick THAT dude's ass in the gym if you had to. (Maybe not THAT guy with the arms like tree trunks, but surely THAT guy who has no chest.) Tangentially, also, that you're a prime specimen for breeding.

It's bullshit and the root of many men's insecurities. The older I get, the more I realize fitness should be about longevity. You know what's not conducive to longevity? A 400pnd deadlift. A 345 bench. A 350 pound squat. The numbers DON'T matter. What matters is that you move, that you if nothing else KEEP your strength and your mobility so you can live. Looking good, looking swole, looking ripped, those are a bonus for real people with real lives. It may be the primary focus for "influencers" and people who sell themselves on their appearance or their reputation. Their stress to "be the best" and "put up the numbers" isn't going to be helpful to you if it doesn't positively motivate your training.

"Should" being the operative word, again.

You're smart. You can watch some Youtube videos on different exercises to figure out what you should do and how you should do it. If you haven't.....that's simply a lack of follow through, probably stemming from your other hang ups. It's easily correctable. Just spend a week watching a couple different exercise videos a day. Start with the body part or muscle group of interest to you, search youtube and go.

What I need is a damn reboot of my sick head. And I'm working on that.

Working out definitely isn't the panacea for all ills for everyone. For me, my head space was totally fucked from a lot of different things, but gym helped me push out the useless mental wheel spinning by giving me a goal I don't have to think about, I just have to do. But I get that's not necessarily enough for everyone, and after a while, it becomes a routine and other nonsense slips back in. So yeah, I hope you can find some help so you can, if nothing else, learn to enjoy and appreciate training and by extension, your own successes in it.

I'll leave you with this quote from my sig:

Cautivo del Milagro seamos, Penitente.

Let us be captives of the Miracle, Penitent One.

[Kagus]

Does your current situation have any mental health resources/services for you to use, Kagus? As useless as words from an internet stranger are, I'm hoping you're able to talk to somebody or take steps to manage your headspace.

Oh yeah, I've been on meds and in therapy for the past 8 years, give or take. Doing vastly better now than I was back then! Working out at a gym wouldn't have even been a hypothetical concept for me in those days

[Yoink]

A week or two ago I was shocked to realise that I've gained somewhere around twenty kilos in the past few years. For me, this is a good thing.   
Feels like it wasn't long ago that I was pleasantly surprised to discover I'd gained about ten kilos, putting me at a healthy BMI for the first time in my (adult) life. Crazy. But yeah, I feel like I've probably lost some of that again since I last looked at the scales. I haven't been doing even my usual lazy workouts for a while, I've been critically unmotivated, sleep deprived and lucky to do a little scrap of exercise here and there.   
I can do chin-ups now, though! When I got the bar a few weeks ago or whenever it was, that seemed like pretty much an impossible goal. Now I can actually do them - not many, mind you. And my form is probably kinda awful. But the fact that I can do something that not so long ago meant struggling fruitlessly to lift my seemingly infinite body weight, well, that's kinda nice.   
Now I just need to focus on positive things like that, dredge up the inspiration to keep working on adding more positive things to my life.   

[nenjin]

Well my gym has gone to Phase 2 Covid reopening, which means it was open later than 5:30pm so I could actually use it.

And good lord. Have I lost strength since March, even doing home works. My grip was so shot by the end of the hour I could barely hold on to dumbbells while trying to do shrugs. Apparently I haven't done any back work that mattered in the months since either, because today my mid-lower back is super tight. It's going to be a few weeks of "rehab" before I'm back to somewhere near where I was before.

Deadlifts and squats on Thursday. That'll be the real test. Based on yesterday though, I should probably go easy. There's some significant potential for a pull or strain based on how I'm feeling right now.

On the plus side, no commercial gym membership. Their timing couldn't have been better.

[NRDL]

Gymanstic rings are such a game changer for pull ups. No sharp ache when pronating my forearms after a good session. Plus, with a neat stretch I got off youtube ( keeping one's hands locked together behind your back - near your butt - and then protracting/retracting your shoulders back and forth ) most of my elbow issues are nothing.

I'm gonna keep increasing pull up volume until I get to 300 reps in a week ( which should be about 3 weeks from now ), then I'll stop the vertical pulls for a week. Probably spend that week doing some horizontal rowing, then I'll start throwing in weighted pull ups.

[nenjin]

So I won the second round of my weight loss challenge, by .2 pounds. (I kinda just gave up the last week and didn't work out and had a nice pizza and a soda, or I would have beaten him by more.)

16 weeks, ~14 pounds. I went from 206 at the start down to 192 at my lowest.

Orignally the plan was just for cold hard cash, so I would have won $200. But instead I decided we should just have an epic cheat meal that the loser paid for.

We were going to do a massive sandwich challenge at this local sandwich shop we frequent, but they weren't open on the weekends. So we went to Freddy's instead.

Double cheese burger with bacon and fries.
Cheese dipping sauce for the fries.
Chili cheese dog.
5 piece chicken strips with ranch.
Large Soda.
Large strawberry milk shake.

I probably could have packed away another entree if I felt like being sick afterward, but figured $25 of junk food was a pretty reasonable cheat meal.

I plan on continuing to do my weight loss protocol for the rest of the year, and see if I can't get down to 185.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some serious digestion to do.

[TD1]

Congrats! Sounds well deserved!

[nenjin]

Right around Thanksgiving I fell off the wagon. Work has been stressing me out badly of late, the low calories was leaving me feeling low on energy. And with the holidays coming up and all the food and the family time....I figured it was time for a long break rather than trying to cram my workouts in to that.

So I took two months off. Didn't really change my intake that much aside from a couple honest to god "I just don't care today" cheat meals.

Clocked in at 192.8 this Sunday. So for all that not strict eating and no exercise I gained...a pound! Not too bad.

Monday I went back to the gym for the first time in two months. I clearly have lost strength and conditioning because most of my exercises were at lower weights and fewer reps before I hit failure.

But not curls. No, I went straight to curls for my first exercise and attacked the weights I'd been doing before my break.....

Big mistake. I knew it almost as soon as I completed my last set.

Oh man, the DOMs right now are unbelievable. I cannot fully straighten either of my arms. My biceps feel like rocks, and upper forearm muscles near the elbow are so taut that they won't let my arm extend. They're literally throbbing with pain right now. I applied ice packs and that dulled it a little bit but.....hooooooo boy this sucks.

My arms probably aren't going to feel normal until this weekend. There's little to no chance of any more upper body workouts this week. I could probably do legs but right now the thought of deadlifting and holding the bar with my arms is almost making me black out imagining how uncomfortable it would be.

So I guess the takeway is: even if you've been training for years now and think you're pretty well adapted, your conditioning and tolerance to stimuli tanks after just a few short weeks of no activity. I've beat this drum before after previous breaks, but that was usually legs. Which, I dunno, maybe I find easier to deal with. Been a while since I trashed my arms this bad.

If you have stopped recently and are planning on restarting, take those first couple of weeks easy. Build back up to where you were. It was a mistake to go after the weight I was managing prior to my break, and I knew that on some level. But I wanted to see how badly I'd regressed. The short answer is, I didn't regress in strength all that much, but my conditioning and tolerance abso-fucking-lutely tanked, and I should have taken it easier on curls like I did on everything else.

I figure another couple of months on this protocol and I'm going to stop the dieting. And, if I like how I look, I dunno, maybe post a few photos.

[TD1]

Oh man, the DOMs right now are unbelievable. I cannot fully straighten either of my arms. My biceps feel like rocks, and upper forearm muscles near the elbow are so taut that they won't let my arm extend. They're literally throbbing with pain right now. I applied ice packs and that dulled it a little bit but.....hooooooo boy this sucks.

Can relate. I stopped over Christmas holidays because of essays and work and family. Also because heavy breathing aggravated my throat even more.

So I started again recently. Did my normal stuff.

My arms are only now recovering, days later. I'm wondering how I ever did this every day....

[nenjin]

In two weeks you'll wonder what the BFD was. In the end I'm happy that I pretty much completed my curls at about the same amount I left off at. Guess that means I could have done warms ups instead of going for it though, heh. Can't know until you try. Sorta wondering if maybe I pulled something though, because I felt tight pretty much immediately after my set. Which is a little unusual for curls.

[Loud Whispers]

I've been having a great joy slowing all my fitness routine down. It's been a lot more merciful on my joints and a lot more strain on my muscles; I feel now like I'm getting more out a third of the reps I've been doing prior. But I'm in a bit of a pickle; I want to cut down on the processed food but I like supporting my local kebab man

[nenjin]

I draw a line between processed food and hand made food. Like I eat out at least 6 times a week. But I always frequent family-owned restaurants where the food is largely made by hand. I think you can eat responsibly as long as you pick the right places, eat the right amounts. If it tastes unnatural, even if you enjoy it, it's probably suspect.

One of the easiest processed foods to start excluding too is just stuff with sugar. Cookies, candy, ice cream, soda. Substitute with natural sugars from fruits. There's no real mystery to whether those foods are "good" or not.

[NRDL]

Burpees when I don't warm up = pain, old man joints, lower back stiffness

Burpees when I DO warm up = I am a panther, an agile panther


It's actually ridiculous how much better I feel. Been doing burpees nearly every day to get my conditioning back up. That way I can focus on the weight training side of things without having to put much thought into what I'm doing for cardio.

[nenjin]

For me it's not my respiratory conditioning. I've hit pretty stable levels of that over the years. (Within the realm of just weight training.)

For me, it's my muscles' ability to tolerate metabolites, recovery, everything being tight after a couple months of not doing anything.

Did squats and deadlifts yesterday, took it nice and easy, probably 70% of what I was repping out before my break. Feeling pretty good, not crippled but I've got some DOMs and fatigue but just the right amount of let me know I had a decent workout.