You have so much insight and self awareness that instinctive training would probably do as much (or more) for you than following someone else’s plan.
Totally with you. It’s great to have a healthy marriage and a wonderful work life, but you can still feel isolated without enough meaningful friendships. That’s been a priority for me too. If you and your fam ever find yourselves in Colorado let us know.
I believe it! Once you get to a point where improving your body any further won’t really improve your life that much, it’s time to look for other things that’ll make us better. Meeting with other people on a regular basis does something special to the brain. I think it’s an antidepressant that has the potential to make people better spouses and parents.
That was a lot of good stuff! I’m stoked for you and your sweet family.
Oooh this is such an interesting scenario. So many coaches emphasize ROM over everything else, but that thinking doesn’t work with this particular lift. I’d love to try this adjustment next time though.
One option would be to use the greater ROM (leaning forward) for a lighter ramp-up set, then go back to normal reps with your working weight.
I used to be a Full ROM nazi and honestly it held me back. I’m on a private forum that’s got a bunch of dudes as big as me (or bigger) and they talk about this stuff frequently - the consensus is as follows:
-Newbies need to go full ROM. They won’t be using weights heavy enough to warrant sacrificing ROM, and they need to understand the full movement of the muscle first.
-Intermediates should be toying with partial ROM for certain lifts like Kroc Rows and Lat Pulldowns. If sacrificing 10% of your ROM equates to a 15-20% working weight increase, then the decision is pretty obvious (go for load).
-Advanced+ should know what lifts they need to go partial ROM, and can operate near exclusively in this zone. You’ll have the mind-muscle connection developed from using full ROM so you can identify where the best contraction is within the rep, and where that contraction stops, so you go partial ROM to keep tension on the muscle.
I do full ROM for my warm up sets, and full ROM with strict form for back down sets, so we’re on the same page here. I also follow my back down sets with occlusion/extreme/KAATSU stretches as pointed to in DoggCrapp and Fortitude.
But yeah, the partial ROM and sacrificing form for weight stuff shouldn’t be done until the trainee has the experience to intuitively know when and where to apply it.
Love this. There are just too many instances where you can feel the muscle working harder during a certain range of motion, so it’s only natural to want to use that to your advantage on occasion.
And also, back when people didn’t give a crap about the research, lifters just tested stuff out, then went with what seemed to work. Maybe I romanticize that too much in my head based on pics and videos of legends like Rachel Mclish.
The first time I saw footage of Ronnie Coleman doing dumbbell overhead presses, I was shocked! No locking out at the top, no lowering all the way down.
I also suspect that sometimes the fullest range of motion can put the joints at greater risk depending on their leverages. Lee Boyce once had me use a shortened range of motion with certain exercises – I forget which ones – and they immediately felt more joint-friendly. Hopefully I’ve incorporated those.
This last thing was a sushi taco and despite all the made up etiquette dining rules, I think a lot of food is better when eaten with fingers. (Maybe not soup.) Though I did use chopsticks for the traditional, non-taco sushi.
How do you eat sushi?
A. Fork
B. Chopsticks
C. Fingers
And do you take multiple petite bites or do you shove the whole thing in your face? I used to take tiny bites, but then realized that it ends up kinda messy. You gotta go for it. And I’ll use chopsticks in public, but sushi at home? It’s a finger-food.
Happy belated birthday and welcome to the 40’s club!! And, just so you know every food can be eaten with your hands/fingers if you try hard enough and believe in yourself! So, my answer is definitely - C. Fingers.
Don’t change and don’t even think about slowing down. I am in my last year of 40’s and it has been full on decade that’s for certain. But my only advice would been to keep hitting life hard. So many of my friends are going to hit 50 broken lazy people mostly because they hit 40 and slowed down. Happy birthday young lady welcome to the naughty forties.
This is great advice! I read it right before dinner last night and then ate steak with fingers, like an animal. Actually, that’s a lie, I had to slice it up into little pieces first. Luckily it was thin-cut sirloin. So freaking good.
This discussion has taught me how overrated forks are.
It seems like there are all sorts of ways anxiety shows up for people. For me, it’s some form of social anxiety. My biggest fear is making waves or being thought of as a nuisance.
But the problem with that type of thinking is you often end up feeling like a doormat. And feeling like a doormat leads to passive aggressive behaviors, negativity, and general nastiness… which is a worse outcome than being annoying to someone momentarily from the start.
So assertiveness is everything. And fun fact: you can be sweet while you’re being direct too. They’re not mutually exclusive.
So when the contractor was finished with our backsplash on Saturday, I had to override that anxiety, and tell him that he’d somehow knocked out all the electricity in like 7 outlets on one of our walls when he removed the faceplates and pulled the outlet thingies out of the wall.
I went back and forth with him on Saturday, and then had an edible, which is probably not the healthiest way to deal with strong emotions, but it sure helped me sleep.
And then on Sunday he came over and replaced our GFI device. So, that worked out. I also overpaid him by a couple hundred dollars for the job he initially did. And he wants to come back for more work, so all in all, that was a win.
Note to self: it’s easier to be assertive up front than to deal with the consequences later.
RIGHT!? But when it comes to electrical issues, I leave that up to the pros.
If there’s a project in the house that’s safe enough to do, like sanding/painting/drilling/hanging curtains/ decor, I’m all in, but anything that goes behind the walls or into the pipes, I’m out! Too risky.
I’ve developed some real unearned confidence with electrical work. I find the feedback is immediate (either it hurts or the lights don’t come on), so I at least know I screwed it up.
Plumbing I’m eh… I’ll do a couple really straightforward things, but I’m not willing to try to mess with copper pipes or anything (the newer flex pipes make me feel like a genius). My reasoning there is I won’t know I’ve broken it until the upstairs bathtub falls through the living room ceiling.
Gas I’m just a hard no; even just cutting it off to try to move something around, I’m not willing to do. All I can picture is an explosion.
Decor is a no, because I don’t know what I’m looking at, and tile is a pass because I hate doing it.
HA! I can’t think of anything more immediate than electrocution. LOL
There are a couple things I’d love to learn, like installing light fixtures but I always chicken out. According to YouTube it’s easy, but that fear of doing something wrong with wires scares the heck out of me.
LOL that would definitely be a memorable day. Having even basic plumbing skills would be amazing though. So it’s awesome that you’re comfortable with the straightforward things. Knowing how to fix your own house is basically a super power.
Same. Yikes!
Decor is always evolving too. What’s considered in one year will be out the next. Or even if it’s not out, something that’s too trendy might become unpleasant later on.
When we first moved into our house in 2017, gray was on-trend and I loved it and abused it that year.
And then we had to undo a lot of it, like this custom built table. We had the builders stain it gray, which looked cool for about a year but then felt kinda drab.
