The Gym

I just bought myself a gym membership.

By no means am I new to exercise, I'm not, but I feel a profound difference in my workouts these days.

I'm big into strength training. Lifting heavy things off the ground and into the air appeals very much to the man-child in me who's still in love with Arnold the Action Star. No lie, action stars of the 80's and 90's and pro-wrestlers were my idols growing up. In many respects, I still want to be just like them, and like Stallone said (I'm paraphrasing) "that requires work in the gym."

I have a good amount of weights at home. I've been using them to get stronger and I've been having a lot of fun doing it. I try and read everything that Mark Rippetoe has to say on the subject of strength (he's big into being manly, google it) and put his ideas into practice for myself. I've had a good amount of success too, it's been great.

But it's nothing like having a real gym to go to. At home, instead of doing a bench press I have to perform a dumbbell floor press, which is a real bitch to set up at higher weights. At home I can only perform defecit deadlifts and the max amount of weight I can put on the bar is 200lbs, at the gym, on my first day, I lifted 225.

So the strength part is there. Oh, god, just having a squat rack is amazing to me. I love squatting heavy.

And, and, they have cardio machines. Now don't get me wrong, I might like to feel like a real man when it comes to lifting heavy shit in the air, but you ask me to run a mile and I'll turn into a baby. However, I love the elliptical machine. So I get to make my heart stronger, awesome!

Oh, and there are tons of weight machines to play with, guilty pleasure.

They call it a rest day for a reason!

I have a nice strength maintenance routine going on whilst I try to lose some extra fat. It's fun, I enjoy my workouts and I've left a little bit of room for flexibility in there, which is nice if I'm feeling any kind of whimsy at the time, or I just feel like I want to do some more. It's nice, but, dieting means that I don't quite recover like I used to.

Today I was just lounging around the house, not with any real direction to my day, and I decided I wanted to do something active. Specifically, I thought I'd try my hand at EA Active again, since it provides a nice structure wherein I don't really need to motivate myself to do anything. Sounds like a fantastic idea!

But I couldn't do it.

I turned on one of my old boxing routines in the machine and my arms didn't want to throw jabs and crosses at air. It hurt a little bit. So I stopped, I'm not into feeling pain like that.

This dieting thing needs to stop! It's getting in the way of mindless fun! But, really, I should actually get serious and accomplish my goals first, shouldn't I? Dieting isn't hard, not really. So I should just get back to it while I still have some good free time in my life.

Work hard so you can play hard, it's the American way!

This means I should really throw cardio on the end of my weight training, huh? Fuck.