There is a book by Eric Maisel: Why Smart, Creative, and Highly Sensitive People Hurt. I have been wanting to read that. I doubt you are blowing things out of proportion. More likely you are reacting to the meat grinder that some of us have to negotiate daily. My meat grinder growing up was: I was afraid to go to school, I was afraid to go home after school. That is a combo. Anyway enough about me. Bottom line, there are people who are scheits. I do not think you should assume you are blowing things out of proportion if a Scheit is being a prick.
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. . . struggle with boundaries and tend to accept behavior from others to avoid causing them pain. Hence the concern of blowing things out of proportion.
Then, accepting insults, real or perceived, causes cognitive dissonance and internal conflict, resulting in stress and anxiety.
Avoidance is good. At some point, getting comfortable with establishing and enforcing boundaries is better.
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How did you do this?! I feel like someone just opened up my brain and made sense of it in a way that I never could. Thank you. Your comment means a lot.
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I’ll have to look that up!
Oh my goodness that sounds really hard. I’m sorry you went through it.
Maybe so, but I’d love to have a thicker skin. And that’s on me. Isn’t there some type of cheesy quote that’s basically, “nobody can make you feel bad without your permission” or something like that?
So if I were living at the top of my potential it wouldn’t have had an effect. But feeling excessively chastised in one class actually made me more timid and hesitant in the other.
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Lower Body-ish Workout
Apparently Monday is leg day for everyone at Crunch. But the gym was delightfully empty despite not being able to get a squat rack.
- Hip Thrust
Joints were achy so I started light, used a ton of pauses at the top, and played with tempo to get the knees and hips lubed up. Then went heavier and lower rep for the next 3 sets.
- Trap Bar Deadlift + Alternating Curl (superset)
Love the trap bar. If all the squat racks are taken, you’re crazy not to just switch to this. It doesn’t require a power rack and you don’t have to wait around for it because nobody uses these things.
As for the curls, dry firing might be messing with my bicep work. Ugh. My hands are feeling a little arthritic today, and forearms didn’t feel great. More on this later.
- Back Extension Dropset (25 pound plate → 10 pound plate → bodyweight)
Massive pump in the lower back and glute medius.
- Leg Extension Dropset
Went low rep (5-6) and heavy with a slow eccentric and a more explosive concentric. Then did a drop in load by about 50% with smooth/even reps.
Weekend Things
Steve Anderson, the expert I talked to on Friday told me to compete out of town the next day. So I did and got spanked. But the good news is, I’m improving. And I see a path toward even more improvement. I can feel it. My performance and understanding turned a huge corner.
It’s exciting to be on the bottom when you know you’re going to get better. It sucks to be on the bottom when you can’t tell what you’re doing wrong. I can tell now! Things are clicking! I got a ton of advice between stages and made notes on what to do for literally instant results.
Also…
Steve’s advice: 30-ish minutes of dry-firing a day, 10-12 drills, 3 minutes a piece using his book, Refinement and Repetition: Dry-Fire Drills for Dramatic Improvement. His book won’t get here till Saturday so I used Chat-GPT to help me predict what the drills are and I did them on Sunday. I even set up a dry-fire dojo in the basement.
The only problem is, even when I don’t grip the gun hard, just handling it aggressively for that many consecutive minutes starts to hurt my hands and forearms. 36 minutes in a row doesn’t feel sustainable.
So I have two timers now: a par timer to help me decrease the amount of time it takes to draw from a holster, acquire sights on target, transition to other targets, mag change, and all that stuff.
And I also have a WOD timer (thanks Crossfit) so that I can train 2-minutes-on, 1-minute-off Tabata style. Then from there I can work up to 3 minutes for every drill. Hopefully breaking it up like that will fix the hurting-hands problem.
So here’s what that would look like on the SmartWOD app:
And then on Sunday we cleaned the house. Because this meme is reality:
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We’ve got an Igniter review thread going on our site already, but the more I use it, the more I notice what it does.
Yesterday I didn’t think I could dry-fire because my hands still ached from overdoing it on Sunday. But then I saw this bit of info from one of our upcoming articles:
This is obviously about the ingredient UMP, which is in Igniter in abundance — 300 mg per serving. So I took a full dose, waited an hour or so (just worked at my desk), and then went to the basement for a dry-fire sesh.
And what’s weird is that my hands did NOT ache while dry-firing; to be fair I stuck mainly with the draws from holster and transitions which are less hard on the hands than the one handed dry-firing. Though I did spend a couple minutes on those too.
Results: I thought for sure I’d wake up regretting that practice session. Because usually, when I press my luck while in a recovery hole, the pain just gets worse. I dig deeper into a physical debt and then end up with a chronic injury.
But this morning my hands feel great! 
So I have an outdoor session today and you bet I’ll be using a full dose of Igniter.
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The trap bar is one of the best pieces of equipment in the gym. Easy to use straps on it too. And since the racks in my gym are almost always in use, a great alternative.
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Absolutely – great points!
I needed this reminder! I might have to start using them if my hands start acting up again.
Love those things. I’ll have to rummage around in our fitness gadget closet.
I did some type of weird instinctive full-ish body workout yesterday mainly just to avoid irritating the things that hurt. I got way too overzealous with dry-firing the other day when the pain subsided.
So while the hand-pain situation isn’t too bad right now, I don’t want it to get worse, so I’m holding off on any gun handling… even though I have a competition tomorrow.
Had to steal this from the memes-only thread.
Leg Press
Ham Curl
Box Jumps
Banded Upper Body Activation Drills (these feel like legit exercises)
Neutral Grip Cable Row
Lateral Raise
Tricep Pulldown
No biceps or chest work because holding anything to hit those muscles puts too much tension on the part of the hand that’s already ticked off. Quads were still sore from things I did earlier in the week, so I didn’t isolate them.
I might create a workout plan for people who want to lift but accidentally jacked up their hands with dry-firing. This does not exist, but it should. For all 3 of us.
And on that note, if I were a superhero my name would be Unrelatable-Problems-Girl.
I would “help” people with the dumbest things, like how to overshare with the wrong people, overthink every situation, fixate on niche hobbies until your body hurts and you can’t have any other hobbies, and do hodgepodge workouts that make no sense to anyone else. I will save you from normalcy and productivity.
What’s fun about the competition coming up tomorrow is that it will be the middle of shark week. So there won’t just be mag changes, there will also be tampon changes at the disgusting porta potties because I didn’t check my period tracker before signing up for this thing. GAH!!!
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How’d it go?? I’m sure you killed it! (Like, literally.) lol
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I joke about this all the time, but only with the guys at work, when we’re supposed to be working.
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HAHA!
Oh you know, just… fifth from last! Out of 85 people, I think I came in around 80th place. So that means I’m improving! LOL
There’s no community of people I’m this delighted to get smoked by. About a quarter are really sweet retirees, a good chunk of them are military guys, and the other portion are super nice guys in their 30s and 40s. This time there were only 4 women, and they were all incredibly supportive.
There’s one lady who basically coaches me, so I try to get on her squad. But if you enjoy being a token female, this is the sport for you.
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LOL yet again, I think we might be the same person. 
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Lower-ish Body
Hands and wrists have been inflamed since Saturday’s competition, so on Sunday, I decided to assemble a large cabinet to really hammer that in.
Needless to say, today’s workout had to be lower-body focused.
- Front Squat: 4 x 6
Another fun thing was struggling with the black out dizzy spells. Between every set I had to hold onto the racked barbell to keep steady. My sight went away completely a couple times… just after standing up from reaching in my gym bag, luckily not from rising out of the hole during squats. That would’ve been scary.
- Back Extension: 4 x Failure
My range of motion is not huge for this. It’s pretty concentrated on just the portion that feels tension in the muscles: spinal erectors + glutes. So I didn’t black out during the exercise, just between sets.
- Walking Lunge + Lateral Raise (superset)
Every minute on the 3 minute mark (EMO3M) starting with controlled walking lunges across the cardio room and back to the starting point. Then lateral raises to failure.
No blackouts here even though this was a relatively intense superset. Great quad pump by this time of the workout. I went light enough with the lateral raise that I was able to use a thumbless grip, which put less stress on the hands and wrists.
- Ham Curl on Stability Ball: 3 x 15, 12, 10
No blackouts occurred with this because you’re basically laying down the whole time. Got lots of oxygen-carrying blood to the head. Hams felt pumped after after the first set.
Maybe the solution is to only work out laying down… Chris probably has a few ideas for that. 
- Machine Hip Thrust: 3 x Failure
Went lighter since the glutes already felt pretty taxed from the squats and back extensions. Another exercise that didn’t cause blackouts.
Other Stuff
Joey Swoll has a hot sauce company, so we got one of every flavor that was in stock.
I’ve only tried the spicy garlic parm so far, but it’s really good!
This was my favorite childhood game. It’s called Enchanted Forrest and I have memories of playing it with my mom for hours on repeat:
I’m trying to figure out how to arrange it, so that I can frame it using a shadow box and display all the pieces. Each of the pine trees has a tiny picture under it.
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Yes! It’s Eleanor Roosevelt’s “No one can be made to feel inferior without their consent.” It’s my favorite quote, although I also deeply love Kurt Vonnegut’s “I urge you to please notice when you are happy and to exclaim or murmer or think to yourself, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’”
Going back to the sensitivity, several years ago I expressed to my best friend that there’s something about me that’s off-putting to some people. It’s a long pattern. And she looked at me like I was crazy and said “does it not occur to you that they may be intimidated by you?” And no, it did not! I naturally assumed that there was something repellant about me that only certain people saw.
I offer this to you because I suspect you may be dealing with this. How DARE you be smart and also pretty and also shredded and also happy and satisfied in your work and marriage?
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Jung said something to the effect, if I remember correctly, when you awaken, others will resent your light.
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Man, that’s good. I’ve been thinking lately that feelings of inferiority (or confidence for that matter) seem context or environment-dependent, but you gain so much more agency by thinking of it as a thing that requires your consent.
If a person can solidify her self worth, it shouldn’t matter where she is or who she’s around. If you don’t consent to feeling less than, you won’t.
And as powerful as that sounds, there are times when I’ve been so mentally weak that I consented to feeling (and acting) inferior just to earn the approval of people who seemed to want that from me.
Also really good! Acknowledging and savoring moments of happiness should be more of an intentional thing. That kind of reminds me of a conversation I heard recently where this interviewer was talking about how “the golden years” only exist in hindsight. In essence, we forget to savor the good times because we’re so worried about everything that might happen, and when we look back on certain seasons we can see how good we had it.
It’s better to notice, like Vonnegut said.
Gosh that’s so relatable. And when I ruminate on it, I get depressed. It feels like a common thread where ever I go… so I think that means I’m the problem.
What an awesome friend! And what an awesome friend you are for suggesting that to me too. 
I do believe I irritate the crap out of people inadvertently (even in volunteer settings where I’m trying my best to be helpful and giving hours of my time). And my brain collects these situations as proof of being unwanted and tallies them up like data points. 2024 was a big year for situations like that.
You are too kind! I am counting my blessings with my job, marriage, and gym situations. Maybe I need to just be focusing on what’s good instead of trying to fit into a community.
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Dang. I’m not sure I know what it means to be awakened but that sounds amazing. Except for the causing others resentment part. haha
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