Monday, October 12, 2015

Perhaps a flame...maybe mostly smoke...

I did stuff tonight. Just enough to get moving. It was a fight....and I wasn't exactly focused (thanks to the usual suspects offering entertaining conversation)....but I managed to get through it. And that old feeling of accomplishment afterward returned. I was proud when I sent a text to my coach reporting a completed training day to start off the week. Success! Walking that fine line between giving myself a bit of understanding and still a kick in the pants to get moving.

Presses used to be my least favorite movement. My upper body was so disproportionally weak, it felt like torture to make myself press. I'd beat myself up over low numbers and do the bare minimum, just to get to the lifts I enjoyed (read: lifts I was good at). Meanwhile, I'd jealously eye women with gorgeous arms, round shoulders, and broad chests. How on earth did they get their upper bodies to cooperate enough to build such muscle and strength?!

Enter strongman. No choice but to learn to press, efficiently AND heavy. To be fair, heavy is relative....but I can put my body weight over my head on an axle now and that's pretty damn decent for someone who struggled to press the bar a couple years ago. Not to mention my lucky fin and its insistence on lagging, no matter how much dumbbell work I do. Get with the program, fin. Though I maintain a strict tolerate/hate - I'm not about to call it anything near love - with the log, pressing has become a movement I enjoy. And it turned out tonight that db jerks were the thing that brought back that joy. Ohhhhh. There it is.

The reality of needing a new wardrobe to accommodate broader shoulders and bigger arms....that's another post for another time.

Turns out, the catalyst to this entire deal today was to change the way I was looking at going to the gym at all. It used to be a non-issue.....not going on a training day wasn't even a consideration. But these past few months....meh. It's become a "yeah, I'll go, if I still feel like it later...". Today, I stopped that story in my head. Going to the gym after work was a fact. It didn't matter what kind of day I had, what time I left work, how I felt. I was going. And I did.

Tomorrow's task: Focus.

Off to charge my headphones...

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