Eurydice

So... I'm not sure what to do about this. Saying that I'm feeling uncomfortable and unwelcome participating in the challenge at this point is sort of an understatement. There are a lot of reasons for that, but I'm not going to go into them because (a) it wouldn't help, and ( I've about reached my tolerance for the kind of reaction that's been going around. Either way, I'm calling a time-out on this and turning my attention to my own lifting and health goals for a while. If a challenge comes up that requires participation from everyone with a thread, let me know and I'll revisit where I am and what level of participation I'm comfortable with.

Ow, I feel like I've been hit by a truck. Moving 8K of weight not counting bodyweight work plus five hours of not-great sleep is a bad combination. I may have to kill my upstairs neighbors. At least the pain in my shoulder is back down to "O hai, heavy weights" instead of "Alert: Snapping Shit Up is imminent." I have a lot of complaints to make about my form and the amount of weight I can do in sets. I may start a battle log so I can make them somewhere less transient. Ha, so far I've wound up squatting every gym day anyway. Just empty-bar squats as a warm-up, but still. That mental transition is going slowly.

>.> I didn't even think to look for a sticker or something. I'll check again when I go in this weekend and update my results. Thanks! I swear that's one of my biggest gym issues. I rage at myself every time I pull something or miss a lift, and every time, as soon as it heals I'm right back to going "Surely one whole minute is long enough between my work sets, jeez."

Okay, this is stupid, but I don't know how to log leg press weight. Is it just the weight of the plates or are you supposed to take the sled into account like you do with the bar? Edit: counting just the weight, my weight moved for tonight is 8440. This completely unprecedented (for me) number was brought to you by the leg press, the stupendous number of empty-bar squats and good-mornings I did, and the kettlebell I swung around after I got home and realized that my dips didn't count toward the total. I tweaked my stupid shoulder again, too. One day I will learn that just because the weight feels light doesn't mean it's okay to cut the rest periods short, but it doesn't look like today was that glorious day.

She said the denominator this time was the number of people participating, though, not the number of people in the guild.

I wondered about kettlebells too. And leg presses. Even I could probably move a reasonable amount of weight on the leg press

I'm glad now that Deadlift Day is toward the end of the week.

Okay, but... just like how you eat is none of their business, how they eat is none of yours. Just saying.

I got mine today. It is awesome. AWESOME.

Yes, this. I also favor the advice of Miss Manners when people ask about things that are no business in the world of theirs: give them a blank stare and say "Why do you want to know?" And keep asking. "Yes, but why do you want to know? Yes, but why do you care? Why is this such an issue for you?" Eventually they usually get the message that they're being nosy and astonishingly rude. Primal isn't some sort of weird all-kelp diet. I honestly don't even know why you'd have to defend it to anyone, unless you were taking the bacon thing a bit too far. If all else fails, just nod and smile, say "Yes, I'm sure you're quite right," and go on eating the way you want to eat.

Oof. This doesn't have anything to do with your question, but I'm going to advise it anyway: if good lifting form is important to you, for the sake of marital harmony in your home do not go to Body Pump with your wife. It's great fun in a lot of ways, but generally speaking, Les Mills classes are to good form as Twilight is to The Grapes of Wrath. It's just going to annoy you.

Anyone else hovering over the mailbox waiting for your Paperwhite? Mine's supposed to be here tomorrow.

Ooookay, yeah, I should not have looked. Their model is doing like 1/4 ROM squats while facing the wrong way in the squat rack.

Man, by halfway through all that I was going to finish my damn workout or close the wall up with curlbro dead. But I was sort of proud of myself, given that I didn't want to go to the gym today to begin with, so thanks!

Today at the gym: 1. I realized as I was walking in the door that I haven't shaved my legs in like a week. 2. I realized in the locker room that I didn't have socks like I thought I did. 3. I didn't get there early enough so I hit the after-work rush and had to wait half an hour for a bench to free up. 4. I got a freaking shard of the True Cross under my contact halfway through my glute ham raise sets, which cost me ten minutes while I stood there blinking frantically, sniffling, and wiping away tears, my eye turned redder and redder, and people looked at me like I'd suddenly gone into an ebola crash right there on the weight floor. At least I made all my lifts.

If I look at their image of "proper form with the barbell", am I going to be mad for the rest of the morning?

It tasted really good, even with the wrong kind of mustard and only marinating for an hour. Definitely something I'll have more often. I'm definitely liking 5/3/1. It's easier to recover from the shorter sets so I'm not in the gym for an hour and a half, I still have energy when I get out, and I still feel like I've accomplished something.

Deadlifts totally are awesome. I haven't quite gotten to the point of trying snatches, but hopefully I will this week. So I only managed 50 on the burpee challenge. I shouldn't have even done that many; it aggravated my RA flare, just like I was afraid it would, and now my hands are right back to being sore after they were almost over it. I wish everyone hadn't gotten so pissy about the people asking for accommodations or alternatives, but I did what I could, and if anyone gets pissed off at me for not doing enough - well, it won't be the first time, and it hasn't killed me yet. 5/3/1 is going well, anyway. Friday was deadlifts and OHP and I managed all but the last rep on the OHP set. Assistance exercises were good mornings and dips. Assisted dips, because omg my upper body is so weak, and even those were a misery. We'll see how they feel by the end of the cycle; I'm hopeful there'll be some improvement. Gym-Free Friday, which was put off until Saturday, was pretty low-key this week - just an hour of yoga and some negatives on chin-ups and pull-ups. Again, trying to take things easy until my joints feel better. I also hit Ikea yesterday and got some decor, though I'm not sure I'm entirely happy with the outcome and may rearrange things. This week's primal recipe was balsamic mustard chicken. It was quick and easy and miraculously involved only ingredients I already had. Seriously, that never happens. I did have to swap in honey mustard for hot brown mustard, though, so I'll have to make it again with the right kind of mustard. I also baked it for 20 minutes on 350 instead of pan-frying it. It turned out pretty well, though not quite as attractive as the photo.

I lurked on Sparkpeople for a while and I still check into the forums when I'm in the mood for a train wreck. It's a very, very, VERY different audience from people who train seriously for strength, or even from Nerd Fitness in general. You're talking about people, mostly women, who weigh 300+ pounds and have not a clue in the entire world what to do about it or even what constitutes healthy behavior. Some of them literally cannot do more than walking out to the mailbox and back without having to sit on the couch and recover afterward. One of the things that makes me absolutely rage about Sparkpeople is how horrible the advice is that people are given not just by other members but by the mods and the site itself, but I honestly don't think this is a particularly egregious example. If a completely sedentary woman thinks she's going to lose an entire person's worth of weight by lifting three-pound weights for seventy-five reps a day while she watches TV, and this gets her lifting enough weight to do at least some good, I'm not complaining. I'm a lot more disturbed by the fact that the place is a giant marketing scheme for the registered dietitian trade.

Bears are great, much better than doing nothing, but Phi's right - you don't get good gains without putting in a lot of hard work. It's almost October and you're looking to pack on 13 pounds of mostly muscle by Christmas? That would be a bitch to do if you woke up tomorrow afire with the drive to spend five hours a day in the gym. Iron's pretty unforgiving of shortcuts and "I don't feel like it"s. I tell you that from personal experience. If you want uncomplicated, there's good news - almost no beginner weightlifting programs are complicated. Starting Strength and Stronglifts do not require you to engage your brain on any level that involves programming. You go into the gym three times a week, do one of two three-lift workouts depending on the day, and leave. Basically, like anything else, you'll get out of lifting what you put into it.

Well, that is awesome. I'm so glad you got another job. Well done, and congratulations at getting out of that cesspit while you still have your sanity.

Welcome! I'm 43, also arthritic, just got into weightlifting earlier this year. Good luck on the pull-ups. I'm working on those too, slowly but surely.

If the number of threads in the guild is an accurate measure of who's registered, we're like the fourth most populous, so we do sort of have an edge in that respect. No burpees for me today. I'm going straight from work to deadlift day to the opera. I'll have to make it up this weekend.

I've only done them with the empty bar, and not a full complex. One of these days I'll find a good way to work them into my programming, though, because I love them. They're like barbell kata.

I'm doing squat thrusts as best I can with brittle wrists and epic lower-body DOMS. Maybe if I do them in small enough sets I won't break anything. Edit: Okay, fifty is all I'm going to be able to do. Now I'm going to go to bed in true Achilles-in-his-tent warrior fashion. Next time we should do bears instead.