Lifting stuff
Made it to 5!
Monday chin-ups: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1
Long breaks between sets with all of these. (I mean, since I started. The whole “minimum 10 minutes between sets” thing.)
I looked at various military standards to figure out a goal: 20 is what I’ll work for. That will be the new “I don’t suck”. Once I get there, decision time. Defer my decision-making for a couple months.
Shoulder/scapular health, elbow/forearm health. And biceps and lat size. That’s what I hope to get out of these.
BTN press: 60# x 8
I had this loaded on the bar already, so I left it. Double progression worked in the past. Probably go 8-16 with these, train it daily, and use repeat/rest/backoff days as needed. Just make it a habit.
Different methods than the chinups, but again targeting joint health/balance and maybe some size.
I might consider a multi-set approach though, given the [so far] success with the pullup program.
Pullup program is basically 5 sets, drop 20% each set. (5,4,3,2,1. or 20,16,12,8,4.)
Then each session, increase the reps. Start with the last set, move to the first set, repeat.
20, 16, 12, 8, 4
20, 16, 12, 8, 8
20, 16, 12, 12, 8
20, 16, 16, 12, 8
20, 20, 16, 12, 8
24, 20, 16, 12, 8
Anyway, maybe try something like that for the presses. We’ll see.
Otherwise, this weekend I think I finally settled on my desk lighting.
The SAD lamp bits are: 10,000 lux at my eyes, 30-45 degrees above horizontal. That’s done with 4x 18,000 lumen LED spotlights focused on my face. I added diffusers that are held on by strong magnets. Not yet settled on the diffuser material yet.
There’s only a couple proper SAD lamps on the market, and they’re very expensive and not covered by insurance. $350 or so.
Proper means 10,000 lux at your eyes. 1 lux = 1 lumen per square meter, and brightness decreases exponentially, like sound. 10k lux at 1 foot is 2.5k lux at 2 feet.
The recommendation is 5,000 lux-hours. 30 minutes at 10,000 lux, or 2 hours at 2,500 lux.
A cool thing though, there are lux meter apps, and they’re accurate enough. The phones already measure ambient light to adjust the brightness. Using actual measurements, I learned that most of the Amazon lamps were useless. (I have a few returns to make.)
I bought 4 of these: 150W LED Outdoor Flood Lights with Plug, 18000lm Bright Work Light with 6ft Cord, 5000K Daylight White Exterior LED Floodlight, IP66 Waterproof LED Security Light Yard Lights for Garage Stadium 2 Pack - Amazon.com
150W of LEDs. Not 150W equivalent. So 600W of LEDs, which are surprisingly not as hot as I thought. But they are still running through their own dedicated surge protector.
$85 or so for the 4 of them. Much cheaper than $350, and brighter and doesn’t require me to dedicate 30 minutes a day to doing nothing else.
Highly recommend this approach.
(They’re on a metal frame I built years ago. I had a TV that came with a wall mount [only], but couldn’t mount on the apartment wall, so I built a frame. I also added a top bar for accent lighting. It was neat.)
So, that meets the SAD light requirement, and lets me still use my desk and computer and stuff. Go on with normal life while getting the benefits.
However, it’s not quite the feel of sunlight. Too much contrast. “Contrast glare” is the term. A really bright spot in the vision, while everything else is notably darker.
With real sunlight, there are some bright spots, but everything else is also usually bright. Unless you’re in a cave and direct sunlight is streaming through a hole.
So… after much experimenting, I added two more lights, shining downwards onto the desk. So now it actually feels like I’m out in the sunlight instead of under spotlights.
It feels really nice, and offsets the super dim rainy days. (Not too bad this year, yet, but my desk lights are brighter than it ever got outside yesterday. I measured.)
These lights were a splurge though. Expensive. But better color rendering, and 3 color temperature settings. 4,000K desk lamps with 5,000K spotlights feels like a nice morning/evening golden hour.
Nerding out on this:
Color temperature goes from “warm”/red, like a candle, to “cool”/blue, like a blue sky reflecting off snow. These things are measurable too.
Real daylight is different than I thought.
I thought it was a uniform color temperature, but there’s a huge difference between “sunlight” and “skylight”. Combined, they become “daylight”. So those daylight bulbs they sell, they’re about 6,500K. The sun goes from 2,000K or during dawn/dusk to about 5,500K at noon. Skylight is super blue. Like 10,000K and higher. The only bulbs that do this are made for aquariums.
But, what that also means is that what we see is cool blue light in the periphery around and above us, and much warmer light on the ground and on our bodies. That’s part of what contributes to the “experience” of sunlight.
You can basically imagine this as fluorescent ceiling lights, with an incandescent desk lamp. Anyway, I’ve sort of reproduced that at home.
As far as brightness… the sun is super bright, and inside (under bright lights) is super dim, but we don’t really register it. Our eyes adjust pretty well.
Brightness and sound are perceived logarithmically. So 1,000 lux only feels twice as bright as 100 lux. 100,000 lux (summer day at noon) only feels twice as bright as 10,000 lux (overcast non-rainy winter day).
On the other hand, those circadian sensing cells, those need actually bright light. Not just perceptually bright.
Without the new lights, with a sunny day and a window and all the overhead lights on, it’s only 740 lux.
With the new lights, it’s 10,300 lux. A bit of a difference.
For reference, that monitor is at full brightness. And it’s a sunny day outside.
