My gym has one flat bench and 4 squat racks. I dont feel at all bad benching in a rack.
@suzzer99 are you familiar with the roll of shame? Will that work for you?
It would be more like the call out for help of shame. There’s always plenty of people around.
I’m more worried about panicking in the moment and going for the lower pegs again like I’ve done twice before, and crushing my skull.
Practice the roll a couple if times. It feels pretty safe, if unpleasant
Aren’t you supposed to throw the bar off of you onto the floor?
This covers it pretty well.
He does it much more dynamically than me. Probably because hes benching embarrassingly more than me.
I just roll. Then when it’s on the hips stand up and reverse DL the bar down to the floor.
Either way. Try it with medium weight a few times to get confident.
Man seems like 350 pounds rolling down your body and over your genitals could end real bad.
It is definitely not completely safe. Your putting some pressure on some ribs and organs there in a way that is not ideal.
Got a 24hr fitness membership 1 year for $250 and went yesterday for the first time, holy shit is the gym absolutely mobbed by people, can’t even really get a real workout in unless you go between 9pm and 7am, probably.
I have weights at home and at work so I just got it for a pool, yoga and for cardio, but damn I’d be so bummed if I had to try and lift weights at peak times at a 24 hour fitness, seems like hell.
At the 24 Hour Fitness in the gay neighborhood of San Diego where I used to live, this was literally true.
Not gay myself but there were some beautiful men there, and I wasn’t one of them.
Just restarted a modified wendler 531 plan. (Closest to boring but big)
I forgot how fun and efficient this feels.
Smash one lift. Heavy sets plus volume. Minimal fucking around. Work in some other stuff in between.
Also feels more flexible with my work routine. If I’m doing full body workouts, I have to avoid consecutive days. This gives me more options.
I’m signed up for a marathon in November, and I’ve already started researching training plans. I know it’s a little far out, but these are the kinds of things I like to obsess over.
So far these are the plans that I’ve been looking into, with their average weekly mileage (excluding the marathon itself).
- Pfitzinger 18/55: 43.8
- Hanson Beginner: 39.0
- Higdon Intermediate 1: 31.4
- Higdon Intermediate 2: 34.3
- Daniels 2Q (with 40mpw max): 36.8
All of these are 18-week plans. I also considered the BAA level 2 plan, but tossed it out partly because it’s a 20-week plan.
The Daniels plans always seemed a bit intimidating to me because he only gives the general structure and leaves the rest up to you. But after comparing the mileages, it looks like his plan might be a good fit for me. Of course, average mileage is just one feature of plans, but I also like some other parts of the 2Q plan.
I’ve averaged 30mpw over the past month, and I plan to increase and sustain at least 35mpw for a few months prior to starting training. When I get closer to the beginning of the training block, I can reassess based on my fitness level. With Daniels, it’s easy to tweak the overall mileage of the plan because each week is based on a multiplier (e.g., 80% of peak mileage). So I may end up doing that or picking another plan.
ETA: this site has some interesting data relating marathon training to results, and it’s given me a little more confidence in selecting a plan that’s appropriate for my goal: Marathon Time Predictor - Fetcheveryone.com
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I casually ran three marathons in my 20s/30s. Nothing impressive in terms of time. My only advice is don’t do many training runs over 20 miles and don’t do them within a week of the actual marathon. Those long runs are hard on one’s body and they’re not really effective training. Psychologically it’s good to be able to know your run that long before you get to race day, but those long runs also require significant recovery time.
I agree on both accounts. One of the currently popular plans (Hanson) doesn’t have any runs longer than 16 miles. The reasoning is that the risk of injury from runs longer than 2.5 hours exceeds the training benefit. And they argue that they can still build endurance for a marathon with shorter long runs because you will be doing them still somewhat fatigued from runs earlier in the same week.
That plan’s a bit of an outlier, though. Most plans have at least one long run of 20 miles.
I’m signed up for the Chicago marathon this year, but haven’t decided if I’m going to go all out or just run it more casually. I’m leaning towards taking it seriously and using the Pfitzinger 18/55 plan, but man 18 weeks is so long.
I will say that the one I ran last year was probably the first one that I actually felt prepared for rather than feeling like I was hanging on for dear life. I mean, it’s so obvious, but there’s really no substitute for just getting in a high volume of miles.
Also recently found out that Clarence Thomas was apparently a superjock when he was younger, and ran the Marine Corps Marathon in 3:11. In case you needed a goal.
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Anyone here doing the Wim Hof Method (WHM) cold showers/ice baths?
Just started doing daily cold showers and have to admit though I hate cold water (though starting to get used to it) I feel great afterward.
You’re an old like me and i guess ~ everyone on UP, leaving a few reps in the tank is a good thing anyway.
I think it’s the opposite. The last few reps are where you get most of the benefit. I’ve been doing one set of each exercise, very slow and to failure and I feel like I’m getting better results. And there’s a big difference between when my brain thinks it needs to stop and when I’m actually at failure.
I’ve switched from free weights to machines when I started this strategy though. I think machines are the proper old man move, not leaving reps in the tank.
Don’t really feel like getting into a big argument, but it’s pretty well established that recovery gets worse as you get older, and pushing to your X rep max is generally a bad strategy. It takes a lot out of you for comparatively little benefit.
I can’t recommend these podcasts enough. Lots of solid stuff on the benefits of gaining muscle mass and the best ways to do it into old age.
Key takeaways:
- Gaining muscle is by far the best thing you can do to increase quality of life getting older.
- Once you reach a certain age (70s), if you lose it, it’s hard to get back. Even two weeks bed-ridden can be a disaster.
- According to Layne, the best way to gain muscle mass, roughly, is volume of sets close to failure (a few reps away I think), but don’t need to push to failure.
I try to get at least 4 sets in, somewhere close to failure, on the main muscle groups. For bench I sometimes do up to 6, which includes a rep set.
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