I’m derailing this conversation with exercise, injury, and appearance stuff.
Chiro Results and Appointment
It’s a mild shoulder impingement. No biggie. Doc (also a lifter) encouraged me to do bottom-half lateral raises and bent over lateral raises, but said to avoid overhead work for now. He also recommended banded external rotation thingies, which used to be a staple but I got out of the habit.
Limiting the range of motion during lateral raises sounds like an ineffective way to hit the delts, but that’s where lateral raise machines and cables come in.
You can get the same amount of tension in the bottom portion of a rep that you would at the top. So this is not bad news at all. It’s absolutely possible to hit your shoulders with just machines.
Another fun thing about the appointment was that I walked in with my neck feeling kinda stuck. I couldn’t turn my head all the way to either side. So he adjusted it and I basically grew an inch and got all my head-turning capabilities back.
Some people don’t believe in the whole concept of chiropractic adjustments, but I’d rather not live without them. That would be miserable. You can have that life if you want it.
Today’s Workout
Lower Body
Main thing that was new: seated ham curls. It’s been ages. And I could feel the musculature that got strained last June. It was somewhere between irritated and stimulated, so I adjusted my form until there was no irritation.
This means isolating hammies is back on the menu!
Abs
It’s been about a year since doing anything for abs. Why? No idea.
The problem I always have with abs is that hitting them is highly stimulating for a while. There’s a strong mind-muscle connection and an awesome burn.
But then after training them consistently, the effectiveness goes away, and adding weight doesn’t seem to help. It may even cause you (and by “you” I mean me) to use improper form and mess up your (my) low back.
Even so, there’s no excuse for waiting a whole year. What the heck? Maybe the solution is to do it in cycles: two weeks on, two weeks off, or maybe a month on and a month off. Something like that.
The cool thing is, it was very easy to stimulate them today because they’re so undertrained. Tons of volume wasn’t required. Nor was it necessary to do anything fancy or heavy.
- Bodyweight ab work: 8 minutes, 40 seconds on, 20 seconds off.
During the 20 seconds off, I used that time to stretch those abbies. Felt amazing!
Traditional Cardio Attempt
If you’ve spent any time on my log you probably know that cardio has been a no-go outside of hikes, walking, and relatively intense supersets. So today I wanted to test things out and see what just 15 minutes of effort (not crazy intense) on a stationary bike would do. I feel really good right now, but if there’s aching and ripping pain in my lungs after 8 hours of sleep, then that’ll let me know if it was okay.
Color Season Analysis Results
The Fiverr analyst says I’m a “true autumn” which is different than what I expected. And that’s good because it means my auburn-ish hair isn’t clashing with my face. But I’m going to avoid all the Ronald McDonald shades I loved so much in my early 30s.
Autumn seems like a fitting category, but the subcategory true autumn isn’t quite right. I can’t pull off yellow or orange.
So this “soft autumn” might be a better subcategory.
The woman who created this infographic has an in depth article called, Ultimate Guide to Color Analysis: How to Determine Your Best Colors for Clothing and Makeup
Again it’s possible that this is BS. After all, someone did just make it all up. There is no scientific law of nature that tells us who looks like trash in pink. While there’s a little more history to it than the 1980’s book I posted above, even those sources seem relatively silly.
What’s clear is that some colors look amazing on people and some colors aren’t as flattering. But categorizing everyone definitively within a color palate is kind of wacky. Apparently as an autumn I should wear brown instead of black. But I hate wearing brown, it makes me feel like poop. And Chris’s reaction to me in black tells me everything I need to know.
There are videos of women saying, “You can’t ever wear that color” to other grown women, and that’s exactly why I went with a virtual analysis (this one) instead of an in-person one. I don’t like being told what I can’t do when it comes to things that don’t matter.
But, maybe there is something to the color season thing because here I am in one of my bad colors:
And miraculously, here’s how much better things get in the warm autumn colors.
These are both test pictures taken for Metabolic Drive recipe vids.
