Mine is going to be laid back if all goes according to plan. I’m going to do some birding with a friend tomorrow morning, then I’m headed to a used bookstore to buy a copy of “the pricess bride” that I talked myself out of the other day (I’ve never read it). Then I’m hitting the farmers market and then relaxing at home for the foreseeable future. Enjoy your weekend!
Old friends and their kids are coming to visit for about half a week. Haven’t seen them for a few years. No big plans: just hang out and catch up.
Celebrating my anniversary! Going to go do some fun boat stuff on the water. Have a nice dinner afterwards. Also planning a murder mystery birthday party for next weekend.
That sounds lovely, happy anniversary to you and your partner!
Man, you are all such nerds, and that’s why I feel at home here. :)
I’m going to continue playing Tears of the Kingdom and hopefully crush pull day at the gym tomorrow.
I’ve never heard of a “pull day” at the gym before, what’s that mean?
Oh, don’t get me started talking about lifting! You’ll never get me to shut up. :-)
It’s a way to describe the “split” that a person does at the gym. I do the so-called PPL (“push, pull, legs”), split, meaning that on some workouts I’m focusing on the muscles that generally push things away from you (like the muscles of the chest, the shoulders, and the triceps), and on others, I train the “pulling” muscles (the lats, traps, and biceps). Then of course there’s leg day!
All it is is a shorthand to structure your workouts so that you don’t fatigue the same muscle on subsequent days. Hope that helps!
Do you know of any ressources for anyone looking for a new workout plan?
Sure, can you tell me what your goals are? If you can, I might be able to point you in the right direction.
I tried gym subscriptions but I always end up not going. Now I’m doing cardio at home but I would like to lift again. I don’t have equipment yet, but I am contemplating buying a bench and dumbbells. I don’t really want to bulk up, I just want to stay in shape.
I saw Jeff Nippard on YT recently discussing minimalist training (and his The Essentials Program) and it sounds right up my alley, because I don’t want maximum gains (nor maximum time training). But it looks like I would need to go to the gym for a lot of the exercises he suggests.
As I am a newbie for all of this, I would love to know where to look for more info on this. Anything I can do at home a few times a week without it being a major time investment. Thanks for any help :)
Sure, happy to help!
If you’re willing to work out three times a week, I’d say that you could also do the push-pull-legs routine. It’s super simple. On push day, pick one chest exercise, one triceps exercise, and one shoulder exercise. On pull day, do one lower-back or lat exercise, one trap exercise, and one biceps exercise. On leg day, do hamstrings, quads, and glutes. If you structure it like that—just three exercises, three times a week—it should put you ahead of almost everyone. Because most people don’t lift. :)
So here’s a sample schedule. Do 3x 8–12 of each:
Monday (push): Push-ups or bench press; tricep dips or skullcrushers; overhead press
Wednesday (pull): Chin-ups or pull-downs; shrugs; bicep curls or hammer curls
Friday (legs): Dumbbell, bodyweight, or sumo squats; dumbbell deadlifts; dumbbell hip thrusts
The beauty of a routine like that is that you can vary it as you like—there are dozens of available exercises as replacements for the above—and you can make it as intense as you want as well by doing heavier weights, more reps, etc. If you get close to failure at the end of your sets, that’s good enough. And you can completely do it with just a set of dumbbells. It might be handy to have a bench for doing bench press as opposed to push-ups or for tricep dips, but it’s not necessary.
I hope that helps! Let me know if you have any questions.
Edited to add: And don’t feel like there’s a bar to jump over before you can start something like this, either. If you can’t do push-ups, there’s no reason that you can’t do them on a wall or on your knees. That’s just as good!
Thank you for the wealth of information! I will for sure adopt this regimen. Looks like I only need to reinstall my pull up bar and I am golden! :) Thanks again!
Birthday celly tomorrow! Rooftop pool in the afternoon, whisky bar in the evening. Gonna be the BEES knees baby
Happy Birthday!
Wife is playing spyro. Kids are play roblox. And I am ready to play this.
Lol are you me?! Small world when our entire families are playing the same games!
Hah!
It’s a small world, what are the odds.
I’m sick. So I’m just passing time on my bed, setting up a new laptop I just got. Not super exciting, but it’s always fun getting a new toy.
Drinking, smoking, and trying to convince myself that “ok, tomorrow is it, stop drinking and start walking”.
Maybe jump on a bike or e-bike? It’s like walking but gets you further. Maybe ride to a nice lunch spot so you have a ‘reason’ to go?
Depends a lot on what your neighbourhood is like.
I hate anecdotes so I’ll make this quick: grew up fat, weighed 315 at age 19, got to 165 by 23, maintained ~190 until covid.
It’s not the work, it’s the lack of motivation. But I think I’m close again to finding it. He says, as he’s sipping a drink that’s literally 50% vodka. Ugh.
Oh gosh, it sounds so similar to my past I wish I could give some advice to get you to a sober version of yourself.
I guess one thing I can say that maybe is not a commonly expressed opinion, is to acknowledge the positives of drinking, specifically for you, and then find something else that can replace drinking. Provided we realize that anything we do as a routine over and over is likely to have negatives, and that the degree varies widely, all we would need to do is switch out drinking with a less dangerous routine.
Ill give myself as the example here though. For me, drinking was a social thing. I was increasingly forced to socialize more and more as part of my day (work and starting a family) and I at least when I was younger was someone who preferred long periods of time alone, and longer periods of socializing would leave me exhausted. Alcohol made me the star when I was socializing, although I would realize later on that I only thought that in my head and I was making a fool out of myself far more regularly.
That was the main trigger that lead to drinking, and then I was convinced also that “there are definitely people who can drink one or two a day and be fine”, so that was my goal of “healthy” drinking. Anyone who has been through addiction will quickly realize what dosing your drug of choice every day without fail is going to lead to tolerance and addiction in most cases, which is what happened.
In a twist of horribleness, I would use alcohol itself to cover up the negative side-effects of alcohol. I know that sounds ridiculous at first, but for example after about 6 months of the casual daily drinking and I had moved on to daily binge drinking I would drink to deal with the hangovers immediately after waking up. That ones common, hair of the dog right? But also if I had a headache because I was dehydrated from drinking only beer or liquor, I would try to drink that discomfort away. Must just need more alcohol right?
Anyways, a less dangerous routine right? If you get to the point I was, someone had to stop me physically to sober me up for at least a handful of days before I could get a handle on it. Hopefully you are far earlier in this process where the discomfort caused by swapping out drinking for another routine will be bearable. For me unfortunately I was only able to switch to something that I am sure many would say is just as bad as drinking, and that is smoking recreationally legal marijuana in my state. I can’t say what it will be for you of course, but for me and dealing with the amount of socializing that’s required working a full time customer service job and having a wife and two kids it is a world of difference, as my wife can attest to.
Final thought: Drinking is the worst solution to almost every problem, pick something else, ANYTHING ELSE. You would literally be better off if you went to a methadone clinic tomorrow and switched to that. I am NOT advising that is the ideal way to get off of alcohol, I am saying its a routine that could replace alcohol that would be healthier for you by leaps and bounds. My point is that baby steps can work here, just go with something just a little less bad, and then when you get used to that in 2 or 3 weeks make another baby step if you still don’t like where you are.
TLDR: Drinking is the worst solution to almost every problem, pick something else, ANYTHING ELSE. You would literally be better off if you went to a methadone clinic tomorrow and switched to that.
I posted a reply about the drinking part of your post but I also wanted really quickly here to post about the motivation thing. Something helped me a ton was realizing that we aren’t meant to feel motivated before doing things usually, unless we have already developed a good routine with it and at that point you aren’t going to worry much about motivation anyways.
I am sure I am explaining it poorly, but the idea is “Do not wait for inspiration, inspiration is a result not a pre-requisite”.
This article explains it far better though: https://www.entrepreneur.com/living/dont-wait-for-motivation-do-this-instead/232349
Yeah
Tonight was trans march. Tomorrow is dyke march. Then, time to sleep :)
Pride that shit up!
Racing a sailboat from San Francisco to Half Moon Bay, spending the night there and motoring back on Sunday. We’ve been doing well in the ocean races so far this year, so I’m hoping for a good result tomorrow.
Enjoy the book! I’ve not read it yet either, though I plan to some day. :)
Greetings from Oakland! Hope you kick ass!
My husband and I have decided to start our own book club this weekend. We are nerds and both enjoy reading but he has limited time and I have limited patience with it because I had a stroke a few years ago and it’s not as easy as it used to be for me. We’re starting with short stories and we’ll just read one at a time ad discuss when we’re done. I’m hoping it will improve my skills over time and I know we’ll enjoy the extra bonding. We’re reading A Knight of The Seven Kingdoms by George R R Martin. He’s read all of the ASOIAF books and I’ve not read any of them. We’ve both watched both of the related TV shows.
That sounds like so much fun!
That’s really cool. Tried to do something similar with my partner, but we didn’t end up sticking with it. We tend to have different reading habits. I like to read one book at a time and he always has a few he’s actively working through. The timing was just always off.
I was a voracious reader for most of my life and it never occurred to me to read more than one at a time. was thinking of some other options earlier tonight for if’m into it this weekend and I finish the first story long before my husband. He has to work tomorrow and I do not. I have some options.
The Princess Bride is as wonderful a book as it is a movie! You’re gonna love it 😊
I’m gonna be cleaning my apartment because we’re finally getting a couch!! And I need to get the place in order so it’s easy to maneuver it in. We’ve lived in our place for a few months already but still in box city… so it’s nice to have something to force me to unpack and make it look presentable.
I think it was nearly 3 years in our new house before we finally opened the last box and sorted it all so don’t feel to bad!
Thank you!! That’s very validating to hear 😊
I still have things in boxes from 2 moves ago, maybe I don’t need them…
Ha! That really is the other side of it. Done a ton of spring cleaning this year, which is just code for garbage, garbage, garbage.
I just finished watching the first John wick while having a beer! Going to pour myself a glass of wine and watch the second one now
At that rate you’ll be hammered by the fourth one
I’m seeing lots of videos of soldiers on streets in Russia and feeling uneasy.
It’s the first day of the new Russian civil war.
I really got the feeling when I read about this, that this is going to be a major turning point in this conflict, I just don’t know what that outcome will be unfortunately. I hope it’s things getting better rather than worse :/
Getting an MRI to see if my prolactinoma has shrunk.
Oh god, good luck!!!
Eh, MRI’s aren’t bad. Just lay in a tube for 45 minutes while giant magnets whir around and take images of the brain / body.
The prolactinoma is benign, but screws with hormones a lot. Prolactin being the inverse of dopamine and testosterone explains a lot about the last several years, so glad to be getting back to normal. Thankfully, the excess prolactin has never caused me to lactate either, which is a common symptom of high prolactin.
Thankfully got to spice up the weekend with a guys’ night, so that was fun.
I really hope you recover completely and have many more guys’ nights ahead of you. :)
Aww thanks! Back is already feeling better, though still sore.
Aww thanks! Back is already feeling better, though still sore.
Probably hitting up some stores with the wife tomorrow. We looked at paints last weekend for the house and found them to be a bit dark, so we’re going a little lighter! May wash that down with some Korean BBQ and then probably spin up some characters on Diablo 4 with the wife too. Guild Wars 2 has had my attention lately too, so I may farm achievements on that
It’s kinda funny to me, that the day you described sounds like an amazing day to me, mostly because my 3 year old and 10 year old boys are still turning every day into chaos lol
I’m taking notes for when they are out of the house though and it’s just me and my wife finally!
Aww!! It’ll happen soon enough before you know it. Hope you get some quality time soon!