I mentioned I would be measuring strength gains on Saturday, yet the holiday weekend and work got the better of me. This past weekend was Memorial Day weekend. The Memorial Day weekend kicks off the summer holiday season, and its parades in my hometown of Rockford, Illinois have been part of my life since my family first moved to town in 1983.
I don’t remember parades in Chicago or the suburbs. What I remember are parades in downtown Rockford and Loves Park. After moving back to Rockford after college, I didn’t attend many parades, in part because of how self-conscious I was about my body.
I should have learned how to communicate with the people who cared about me. I should have focused on finding the reasons behind my actions and my feelings. I could have been healthy much sooner.
It is important to recognize how change could have happened and use that knowledge to help fuel change right now. Don’t mope or wallow. See it, recognize it for what it was, and use it to help you become better today.
Why did I go back to lifting weights? After all, I’m not training to join the military, or to play a contact sport.
Every now and then I’m feeling particularly sassy and respond with an old samurai adage. “A student said to his master: ‘You teach me fighting, but you talk about peace. How do you reconcile the two?’ The master replied, ‘It is better to be a warrior in a garden than to be a gardener in a war.'”
The truth is, I was extremely sore after a few weeks of being a foster dad. Now, I realize that I was carrying my foster daughter everywhere, and holding her from the minute she woke up until I had to leave for work. While I have come to realize such constant carrying probably doesn’t help her development much and adjusted, I also realized I would want to be able to hold her, and any other potential future children for years to come.
That’s why I started to lift weights again. I realized I wanted to be strong enough to be what I consider a good father to be, without hurting myself.
I was listening to a podcast interview of my high school hero, 7 time Mr. Olympia Dorian Yates. His discussion of muscle memory, and his specific training style gave me an idea on how I could train and still prevent injury at 38 years old (more on this tomorrow).
I also knew I would need to be specific in my goals in order to show improvement. In weight training, you lift a specific amount of weight a specific number of times. I measure bench press, bicep curl, and dumbbell military press exercises. I started with a working set of 145 pounds on the bench press, and working sets of 50 pounds for the bicep curl and dumbbell press.
After 10 weeks, my working bench press was 225 or 55 percent more weight than when I started. My bicep curl and dumbbell press were even better, increasing from 50 pounds to 100 pounds, an increase of 100%!
The key is to listen to my body, and incorporate the right diet tricks while also trying to cut fat (more on this later). I look forward to discussing my training in greater depth in future posts. Stay tuned.
