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Showing posts from December, 2024

A workout room to age in place in

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When I first set up my workout room, the intention was to supplement going to the gym, with a special emphasis on injury recovery, but nowadays I'm redesigning it as part of my project of being able to age-in-place in my house. I don't have a gym membership anymore, and I'm fully recovered from my accident, which was over twenty years ago. As you can see, it's mostly dumbbells, resistance bands, and most importantly, floor space. I do a lot of training while lying on the floor, and the last thing I need would be a room so crowded that I would trip over things, or stub my toe. The north wall is where I have my lighter dumbbells, and also where I hang my resistance bands. The table there on the left is where I have my little aquarium for my triops, and although the drawers don't open all of the way, it doesn't matter as I mostly use it as a small table. The drawers do open, but only a couple of inches, which is fine. I have heavier dumbbells, but from now on I...

Redesigning my workout room, and why

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I just did the first major redesign of my workout room in many years. The logic for this has to do with how annoying I found moving my heavier dumbbells off of the racks was, positioning them on the floor, and then racking them up again. So I'm leaving them on the floor. The heavier weights will just live along the edge of the east wall of that room. If I need something from the closet, like my tennis racquet, I'll just have to step over the dumbbells, or on them. I press from the floor, so all I gotta do to get them in position is roll them over a bit. Then I tip them up so that they stand on their own, I squeeze myself between them (being careful not to knock them over) lie down, use a leg to kick them up into position, take a deep breath, and then press. And repeat. I like to do between 5 and 10 reps. When I'm done with the weights I just have to roll them back over to the wall. Easy on the lower back, which is my main concern nowadays! The lighter weights will stay on t...

Goal: gaining ten pounds of muscle weight

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My goal for the upcoming year is to gain ten pounds of muscle weight. It's less than a pound a month, which doesn't sound like much, but since I failed last year I thought I'd share with you some of the hazards and obstacles that I failed to navigate. My biggest mistake was straining my shoulder this past April, and then not giving it time to heal, being unable to do much training, but continuing to eat as if I was. I very quickly put on ten pounds of fat, which took me until the end of the year to get rid of. It's December 27th and I'm just now getting back to my serious muscle-building workouts. I also fell into doing a "dirty bulk" even though my goal was a lean one. That is, I was stuffing my face with KFC, and just generally not really paying attention to my calories. Big mistake! Nowadays I'm back to watching them, although I won't track every meal, I just can't live that way. I've weighed in at around 162 pounds for the past several ...

Keeping your weight within a five-pound range after weight loss

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As difficult as losing weight is, keeping it off is equally challenging. And if you've lost weight, and want to keep it off, you need to say, "Challenge accepted!" And it will mean making a change from just moving the numbers down on the scale (which is impressive, make no mistake) to other ways of managing how you see your body. And the first thing to do is to look at it, which many people just can't do (in spite of mirrors being common and inexpensive). After that, if you're brave enough, you can take off your shirt (I'm assuming that you're male like me), stand in front of a mirror, tense up your abs, and take a selfie (no, I'm not going to show you that, it's for my eyes only). After you've done that, staying within a five-pound range will be fairly easy. As of this writing, I'm within my range, which is between 160 and 165 pounds. Less than that I'll save for if I get the part of the next Wolverine (which ain't gonna happen!), ...

Beginning a lean bulk

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It's December 13th and I've officially decided to do a lean bulk through the end of this month and on through January and February. This may, or may not be right for you, I'll see if I can explain. For reference, there are two ways to gain muscle (or to "bulk up"), the first one being what's usually called a "dirty bulk", which is what I did very successfully at age 27. And it was wonderful because I gained weight very quickly (which was my goal as a skinny guy) and got to eat a LOT of wonderful food. It was the best of times - I discovered Mexican Food, and Prime Rib, among other things. My weight skyrocketed, and I went from "skinny" to "lean and mean" in a matter of months. I can still remember the magical moment when the scale went over 150 pounds, and I was able to hit my goal weight of 165 soon afterwards. I don't have any written records of my weight when I started, but my best guess was that I was a little under 130 - ...

Beginning my New Years resolution to build muscle, on December 12th

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My goal for the New Year is to build some muscle, and I've been pondering it, and have decided to start today, December 12th, right after I've have some breakfast. Because I'm no spring chicken anymore, I've discovered that I need to increase my recovery time, so in addition to doing less training during the week, I'll be taking a full month of for recovery after two months of intense muscle-building. And that means that I'll be pumpin' iron (and resistance bands) from now until the end of February, at which time I'll ease off a bit, just kinda going through the motions, and let my muscles (and especially my joints!) fully recover for a full month. This past year I've scaled back my calories, and have found a comfortable amount of food that keeps me from gaining weight and still is satisfying. My famous "Brad Burgers" have gone from 150g to 75g, and I'm fine with it ("Where's the beef?"). Back in my twenties I figure that ...

Beginning a New Year's resolution to build muscle without hurting yourself

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It's December 11th and I'm thinking about what I want to do with the New Year regarding my fitness, and there are two things that I want to accomplish 1) build muscle and 2) not hurt myself. Yesterday I ran into the bodybuilding coach at the gym where I used to go and we compared notes on our respective year's progress. And while he gained a fair amount of muscle and lost about thirty pounds of fat and is doing great, I had to admit that it felt like I hadn't made much of a change, and I mentioned that I had managed to hurt myself this past summer (neck and shoulder strain, nothing serious, but it held me back). But I'm older and wiser now and I will be sure to warm up thoroughly before any heavy lifting (a mistake that I made last summer), and will continue with the program that he suggested for me last year, which is two months of muscle-building followed by a month of muscular recovery with the emphasis on watching my weight, and then back and forth. I liked doin...