The bench press is a lie

Ah, the bench press.

If there was ever an exercise that designated "mandom," it's this one.

I've thought about why that is, and I've basically concluded it's because the bench is where you can thrust as much weight as possible airborne. Not like squats or deadlifts, where you're holding the weight against your body in some way. For some reason, saying, "Yeah, look at all the weight I'm holding against my thighs! Who's yer daddy?" doesn't have the same ring to it.

Basically, what I'm saying is that as a guy, I want to bench press a lot. A whole lot. Like a small car or something. Kidding, but I've developed a point where I'm going to officially be satisfied with my bench at some level: Doing more than my bodyweight. Right now, I'm about 60 pounds off of that, doing 3 sets of 8.

Of course, that doesn't mean I need to add 60 pounds to my bench, since I'm also working on losing weight. But that doesn't mean I'm always patient about this. Especially since I've been stuck in a rut with my benching and haven't made much progress in the past six weeks.

So, anybody have any advice on how they broke out of a bench press rut? I'd love to hear it.

Crawling in my skin...

Yes, the title of this blog is a great Linkin Park song. But that's not the subject.

Something's been creeping up at the gym, and it's starting to affect my routine there. Wanted to see if anybody else has dealt with it.

Recently, whenever I'm about to start sweating, I start feeling what feels like thousands of little needle pricks all over my face and neck. It can be anywhere from an itchy uncomfort to a very sharp, intense pain.

But, once I start to actually sweat, it goes away. It's only a couple of minutes, but a couple of minutes feeling like you've belly-flopped into a pit of cacti is a couple minutes too many.

Tried doing some research, but the only thing I could find that sounded like this was miliaria, and since I'm not really looking into a mirror while this is happening, I can't say what the deal is or if that is what's going on.

So has anybody dealt with this condition before?

Back on it

I just started taking creatine again this week.

And that, quite honestly, is the strongest stuff I take.

I'm Mr. Safe Guy when it comes to supplements. I blame my chemistry class in college. I enrolled in what I thought was the general ed chem class. Bill Nye The Science Guy I'm not; I'm a total word nerd and was a fish out of water in that class. How bad was it? I was the only student that entire semester that had to be warned by the professor to "not smell the beaker" in the lab.

It wasn't until about 12 weeks in and I was fighting to barely keep a C (which, by the way, you needed 73 percent to get, not 70) that I was told I was in the fast-track class for chemistry majors.

Since that experience, I've generally avoided anything that sounds too chemical-ish. An aisle at GNC might as well be the Anarchist's Cookbook or a Rachel Ray cookbook as far as I'm concerned. I comprehend phrases like "plasma volumizer" and "Beta-whatever" about as well as a gerbil reads Chaucer.

So, as a result, I've never really delved into the supplement universe that much. Whey protein and flaxseed oil is about as far as I've gone. And now I'm going back on creatine, since one month benching the same weight will do that to you.

I guess, any advice for maybe expanding my horizons in a way my ultra-safe personality type can handle?

A date which will live in infamy

A quick veer off topic here for something to note...

It's still Dec. 7 as I'm writing this post. Dec. 7 is the day, 68 years ago, that Pearl Harbor in Hawai'i was bombed by the Japanese, triggering America's entry into WWII.

Part of my job involves shooting news videos, and my assignment today was to go to a local remembrance service put on by a local chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association. According to their info, there are 18 members still alive. A half-dozen were there today. Not one of them was under 88 years old.


They raised a flag, then lowered it to half-staff (They were mostly Navy guys, so they were saying "half-mast"). After that, they went in from the cold and shared their stories from that day.

And with that, they became 20-year-olds watching bombs go off a few hundred feet away or getting strafed with aircraft gunfire. It's hard, even after 9/11, to imagine something like that on American soil.


I wonder how much attention we do pay to it. Even to the people who really should. A TV guy that came to cover the ceremony asked the vets if they could "wait a minute" before raising the flag. Problem is, the reason they raise the flag at 5 minutes before the hour is to correspond to it being 7:55 a.m. in Hawai'i, which is the time the attack began. Also, when the same person was asked if he wanted to interview a Bataan Death March survivor, he had no clue what the Bataan Death March was.

So, on my part, a hat tip to the Pearl Harbor survivors still, well, surviving. You have my respect.

Guilty

So, I came across an AOL blog post that was basically a rip-off of a piece Men's Fitness magazine did on "Six Exercises to Avoid."

Ah yes, the dreaded Internet list. This one basically said there are six exercise machines guys tend to use a lot in gyms that they claim actually cause more injuries than using free weights.

So, decided to take a gander through and see how many of the dreaded six I'm actually doing:

Leg Extensions: Well, I'm 1-for-1. The recommendation is to do squats instead. Which quite honestly, I should be giving a try anyways.

Behind-the-neck lat pulldown: Nope. I'm a front guy, and wide grip quite frankly feels strenuous enough on my shoulders. So I switch between wide overhand grip and shoulder-width underhand grip. With that I (and probably you) lift more weight, anyways. Ego boost!

Chest fly: Crap again. But the alternate suggestion is dumbbell flys, and I've honestly never felt comfortable doing those. So I don't expect to change in the future.

Seated hip abductor: Nope. I don't like machines that remind me of medieval torture devices. Even if it's not the really bizarre ones from good movies.

Seated rotation machine: I don't even think my gym has one. If I'm going to do something like that, I'd rather just use a medicine ball.

Smith machine: I'm going to go with a no on this because it's talking about squats. I don't use a Smith for squats, but I've use it for upright rows. And I do notice I lift more weight (like 20, 25 percent more) using the Smith than with a barbell.

So, 2 for 6, and a kick in the pants to do an exercise I probably should have been doing a long time ago.

New low weight

216.0 pounds today. 16 pounds left to 200!

Interesting Gym Habits #1: The Pack

So, the idea of this series of blogs is that I notice some unusual personality behaviors that exist in gyms all around you.

For this first one, I'm talking about The Pack.

You've probably noticed them. They're the ones that are always moving together from machine to machine in the gym. Or they're together around a bench in the locker room. Or they're hanging out in the lobby.

The Pack consists of no less than five people at any given time. More often than not there are at least eight or so members who alternate appearances in The Pack, but there are one or two who are always part of The Pack. They need The Pack like Mr. Freeze needs subzero temperatures. The Pack is also mostly male, but may have a token female member that makes roughly one appearance a week and during those times is usually flanked by male Pack members on at least three sides while using a machine.

There's a difference between The Pack and having a workout partner. Workout partners are perfectly fine and normal behavior. However, The Pack demonstrates the following behaviors:

Behavior 1: Machine hogging- The Pack all take turns going through their sets on the same machine or bench. It also takes them at least two minutes between each individual set to start the next one. Once The Pack comes in contact with a machine, good luck getting to use it for at minimum 20-30 minutes. There are unconfirmed reports one Pack at a 24-hour gym in central Wisconsin has been working on getting their preacher curls done since last April.

Behavior 2: Conversation- The Pack will never fully stop talking. At least three of them are involved in a discussion at any given. These discussions also usually include terminology that would fit in just fine at any sailor bar you could think of. If the token female acquaintance is not present, odds are pretty good the conversation is about her.

Behavior 3: Machismo- Once an individual has become part of The Pack, their ego increases by no less than 124,762.85 percent and any noises they may have made while straining automatically double in decibel level (Note: this will likely receive it's own edition of Intersting Gym Habits in the future). This is all despite the fact they still look the same, they aren't lifting any more than they were before joining The Pack and have probably stunted any gains they're going to make because of decreased effort while at the gym due to excessive time between sets (see Behavior 1)

Prevention: If you are considering joining The Pack at your local gym, ask yourself these questions: 1) Am I an megalomaniacal jackass now? and 2) If I'm not a megalomaniacal jackass now, am I interested in becoming one? If the answer to both of these questions is no, do not join The Pack and take great care to keep the number of workout partners at any given time to one, possibly two. Also, a high ration of lifting to conversation undertaking is extremely anti-Pack and can help ward off Pack-ish desires.

You stay classy, central Wisconsin. (Never been. What's it like there?)

The first post

Actually from October, but this is a good set-up to where I am right now...
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I'm writing this a few days in advance of when I think this will happen, because if I don't, I'll probably chicken out.

But if you are reading this, it means I've lost 50 pounds since I started working on this whole weight-loss thing at the end of March.

When people find out you're losing weight, the two main questions you get asked are "What are you doing?" and "Why did you do it?" The first one's pretty straightforward: Watching what I eat a little closer and exercising. Well, the Readers' Digest version at least.

That second question's a little more complicated, and I've never really been able to give what I thought was a straightforward answer. My usual cop-out is "Something just kind of happened."

How insightful.

The more I've thought about what brought me to the point where something inside me, for lack of a better word, broke, the more convoluted it's become. I'm still not sure whether that's because I haven't thought about it enough, or overthought it. This probably isn't even the whole story, either, but it's what I'm comfortable sharing now, which is a whole hell of a lot more now that where there would have been a few months ago.

Let's go back to January. Or, maybe a better way to describe it, one of the absolute crappiest months of my life. There were a lot of little things that were grating on me, but two big events stand out.

First, my closest friend living where I live had just gotten a great job opportunity in San Francisco and was leaving. This was the fourth time in a span of two years the person I'd consider my closest friend here had left. Once you hit Time #4 on that, it really starts to grate on you. My personal attitude was basically, "Hey, been wanting to move out of the area? Start hanging out with me a lot, you'll be gone before you know it." Then, on a Saturday, I get a phone call from my mom: Three days prior, my grandma was recovering with flying colors from a heart operation. Now she was dead.

Put all that together, and I became a real miserable person to be around. Which isn't a good thing when you've decided to try to give dating a serious pursuit. The fact that I was 25, had never dated, or even been on a date (yes, that's singular), had become a real sore spot for me. That screamed "loser!" to me in my mind.

When you're in doldrums like those, you start to have clouded thoughts about your self-worth, sometimes based in real events, sometimes not.

One event in particular I kept circling back to: A weekend during the summer when I was going for a night out with friends after Second Saturday. One friend had another friend of hers from out-of-state visiting. This girl was absolutely gorgeous. Did I have a chance? No, but you still don't want to embarrass yourself.

Embarrassment step 1: Leave your button-down shirt behind. Embarrassment step 2: Have to stop at Target to get you a new shirt. Embarrassment step 3: Have everything be too small for you. At freakin' Target. So you have to make another stop at another store, and put everybody even more behind for Second Saturday.

I was also having these nightmares that all had the same arching theme: I'd be out in public someplace either with people I somehow knew or I would run into people I knew. But they wouldn't acknowledge they knew me, or even act as if I was there. Other times, I would have these George Bailey-meets-Clarence moments of "Would it really matter if I'd never been born?"

So, in March, I'm at a home group meeting, still in these doldrums. Go to use the bathroom. There's a scale in their bathroom. I think to myself, "What gigantic number would pop up if I stepped on there?" I go ahead and decide to feed that by actually weighing myself. My personal estimate beforehand was somewhere in the 290s.

The actual number: 268.

Something kind of hit me at that moment: My brain, or whatever was behind this crap mood, had been lying to me. There was concrete proof, in an LCD display, that this crap wasn't as bad as I was making it out to me.

So, if the number was already lower than I thought it was, why not try getting it even lower? Not like I had much pride left to lose.

It started with a mile walk. A website that offered calorie tracking. The mile walk started getting some running mixed in. After two months, I was down 20 pounds, and figured I was committed enough to plunk some cash down on a gym membership. And now, it's 6 1/2 months later. Pants are a 36 instead of a 42, and I could probably fit into 34s now if I wanted to. I get the same bagginess level in an XL shirt I used to get from 3XLs. And I figure I'm down to about 1.57 chins. Oh, and I went on a date. Wound up not ending as well as I thought it did, but maybe it won't take 10 months of trying before the next one.

50 pounds down, less than 20 to go to 200. All the health charts and whatever will still say that's too high, but for me, the last time I was that sort of weight was seventh grade. I'll take that, and once I get there I figure out what I'll do next.

This hasn't been the universal solution for me. I haven't had one of those nightmares for a while, but I still battle the "do I matter" moments more than I'd like to admit. I've learned there's still going to be some physical issues beyond weight, some of which can only be corrected with surgery that insurance won't cover and I can't afford on the insane riches you earn working in the newspaper business. But, at the very least, things gave gotten better.

At least, if I ever forget a button shirt again, I know I'll find something at Target- with a couple sizes to spare.