Flutterby™! : Yeah, I'm into fitness...

Starting a new cycle of workouts: We've been doing this MindValley "10x" program for like 60 days now, and they've gone to the "design your own" portion of the pain, so... The idea is you take an exercise that takes 5-7 seconds to do, and weight it so that you get failure after 12 reps: You can do rep 12 with good form, but number 13 fails.

This started with 2 different sorts of "integrated" (multi muscle group) exercises, rounds of squats, pull-downs, and push-ups on Mondays, and rounds of hinges, rows, and presses (dumbbells from shoulder height to together over the head) on Thursdays, with some "isolation" exercises on Wednesdays and Saturdays (eg: dumbbell curls, tricep extensions, various leg lift and ab kinds of things).

So at this point we hit the "okay, design your own workout for the next 3-8 weeks, do it, see the results" stage. I've gone from 20 to 30 lbs in each hand for each of squats, hinge, row and row (and, actually, I fucked up my form on hinge and row and injured myself, so did 8 lbs each hand on those for a while and now am back up to 30). My press is still 20 lbs (each hand), I think largely because of where it comes in the sequence. I've altered the difficulty of the pushups by moving where my hands are so I'm lifting more body weight (and using those slight grips that raise the "down" point a bit), and the pull-downs are... well... it's hard to say what "50 lbs" or "20 lbs" means on a band because it depends on where in the extension range of the band you're pulling on, but I'm up to the "almost floating at fully concentric" for 12 reps of that (170 lbs on the bands).

And my second round of each of the 6 I went down to 20 lbs each hand because my recovery time was getting too high.

I should weigh myself, see how if I've lost any weight, but that hasn't really been the point. I do need to figure out how to up my protein intake a bit; I eat a *lot* of vegetables...

Anyway, if there's one thing good that's come out of this isolation it's that Charlene and I are doing conscious workouts, and while I've always been in generally okay shape because of my interests, this is really the first time in my life I've worked out in a dedicated way. And it feels good to start the day in pain.