I hadn’t lifted free weights in about 1.5 years.
Ouch.
However, I’ve done this before. As a full disclosure, I once almost hit 180 pounds. I wasn’t exactly rippling, and beer had given me that inertial advantage, but still I almost hit 180. Now the story is a little different. Due to working night shift at my last job, stress in my personal life and other factors (mostly lack of grocery shopping), I dropped to under 150 for the first time since high school. It wasn’t pretty and I’m not too proud of myself for letting it happen. However, all of that has changed, hopefully for good. I’m back up to a healthy weight at least (well, for my body type and historical weight).
Anyway, Jess and I joined the JCC back in March. And since today is May 1st, I thought it was a good time to talk about my goal of gaining 10 pounds of muscle by April. Basically, yeah, I’ve failed. But really that goal wasn’t practical. I once read that a guy can expect about 2 pounds of muscle a month with consistent lifting and a high protein diet. Since we only really started working out again in March, I really should have only gained 4 pounds of muscle. And I think I have! Really, I stopped weighing myself, and that’s the really important thing. Now it’s more of a subjective gaging (how I feel right after working out and the next two days) and objective gaging (did I go to the gym). So here are my new goals for my personal health, which expand beyond just the gym:
- Work out 3 times a week. This is also tied into a workout competition at work. If we don’t do our workouts, we have to give money to charity each time we miss. My goal is to do two or more of the following per workout:
- 20 minutes running
- 20 minutes swimming
- 100 pushups/250 situps
- 30 minutes lifting free weights
- Eat a low fat, high protein diet. Also try to maintain some semblance of a budget while doing so.
- Drink in moderation and be sure to workout the next day after having a drink.
Also as a long term goal, I’d like to run another 10k, bench press my own weight and be able to swim 1000m without stopping (swimming is really hard). As a really long term goal I’d also like to run a half marathon and a full marathon.
So that’s my story for working out. I think about my blogging and am interested to think about who might be reading it, but really this post is for me. I sometimes need reminders and I figure I read this site more than most.