First part from 6 months ago is here.
Now we’re at 2 years and 251 workouts, still motivated.
Parenting has definitely made it harder, and sacrifices had to be made. Not only it’s difficult to find time now, but also exhaustion and stress drive me into compulsive eating. As a person who’s body fat sits above my lower abs I kinda upset about it.
As of now I’m able to carry on 2 days a week.
Shoulders
Worth writing a separate article about it, but I have mostly unfucked my shoulders. Face pulls, and reverse flies did wonders, and I brought them from a lightweight exercise to full stack of weights in both machines. (127kg for flies, 91kg for face pulls).
Face pulls is a wonderful exercise, I can’t recommend it enough. I’m trying to do it every workout now, and I attribute it to my recovery.
Unfortunately, all my physiotherapist told me about shoulders wasn’t helpful. He has successfully identified the root cause (shoulder instability), but prescribed me:
- The wrong weight
- The wrong exercise
- Didn’t factor that I continue training my chest, so my shoulders need to keep up with that growth
What I cheaped out on was lateral raises, I’m sitting at 14kg per hand, and my shoulders agonize when I do them. Cables are the same story, let’s see where I land. Got myself a couple dumbells to do lateral raises home to catch up.
Nutrition
So I’m still not tracking my calories.
Neither I do any supplements. I did 3 protein shakes, only because my breakfast wasn’t good enough these days. Otherwise I don’t do anything. I feel very cautious about protein, and creatine. While neither is harmful, there’s no quality control similar to how EU regulates food. I like to get my biological meat from free roaming animals, and I strongly suspect that protein powders are made from factory farmed animals.
I maxed out on eating raw.
And when I say raw, I don’t mean vegetables.
Steaks tartare, raw eggs, rare burgers. Sometimes I take a bit of minced chicken when cooking.
Besides, I’ve minimized amount of added oils to the food I cook. I eat ton of all sorts of dairy too.
Every now and then I have an emotional breakdown and eat a bar of chocolate. But it’s rather exception than a rule.
I eat a lot of carbs, pasta, pizza, and even McDonald’s. I don’t really think that junk food is that terrible, it’s more about quantity of said food.
Plateaus
I broke through some of plateaus, but not through others.
Got massive gains in everything back-related, all sorts of pulls, rows, lifts.
Shoulders were a great success, as mentioned above.
Legs seen less weight, but larger range of motion, so I’m happy about it too. Finally legs get some attention, because I’ve been skipping them for way too long.
Triceps extensions are great with 73x10 on the cable machine.
But not all is nice and dandy.
I particularly suck at bench press due to shoulders being stabilizer muscles, still sitting at 100kg max weight. For comparison, I blast through 135kg on chest press machine, which isolates the chest muscles much better. But even on machine, I never broke through 135kg, which was already my PR half a year ago.
Bicep curls haven’t progressed either, with 45kg being the maximum I can correctly do for 10 times. I feel like my wrists are a bottleneck.
Challenges
I maxed out some of the machines, and now can only focus on increasing amount of reps / form if I want to keep using them. Among which:
- Diverging seated row (113)
- Back Extension (173)
- Chest press (135) (I reached the maximum amount of plates that can be put on the machine)
- Rear fly (127)
- Leg press (200) (the one where you lay down)
- Face Pull (91)
I’m nearing graduation from around the same amount of other machines.
Then I can focus on free weights for some of the exercises, but these are more sensistive, and I have nobody to advise me on form.
Another problem is that I’ve entered the “play stupid games, win stupid prizes” territory.
Once after doing pulls I vomited all over myself. Couple other times I felt like I’m about to pass out.
You get to be more sensistive with breathing, keeping an eye on how your heart handles the load.
Like… would be dumb to go through all this and then self-destruct in gym.
Peculiarities & Learnings
- Alternating between different types of exercises for the same muscle group helps to break through plateaus
- Order of exercises matters, even if targets different muscles.
- Not only different muscles have different strength, they also have different stamina. I can do 84kg shoulder press 2x10, and then I get to drop weight. Similar story with peck deck. You lose power much quicker there.
- I rarely feel sore after workouts, even though I train to failure, and still have gains.
- I don’t do warm-ups, but rather start with 80% weight as a first set
- I lift more if I listen to melodic death metal or djent. Gym music didn’t do a trick.
- I train alone. I know faces of regular gym-goers. In 251 workouts I had one dude starting to greet me, so I asked his name. This is the only person I know in the gym. If that’s a Dutch gym culture - I’m extatic about it.
- Doing a break from specific exercise for a month is surprisingly effective to progress.
- In 251 times in gym nobody has ever recorded a tiktok in gym
- In 251 times in gym I had no conflicts over whatever
- Sometimes people ask each other about how many sets are left, or if they can take something near me.
- Leav
Conclusion
See you in another 6 months.
Take care of your health.
Don’t fuck up your shoulders.
And here’s an update changing room selfie to wrap it up:
