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Brad
Selfish Heathen
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Zone of Pain
 
2020-12-31, 17:53

This thread is fantastic. Good going, Ken, T, Ryan, and Matsu!!

This is also a perfect reminder to put my butt back into action after sitting on it for far too much the last couple of weeks. I also kind of fell into "staycation" mode a week or two ago, and I've been slacking hard. Your posts have inspired me to get back into it tonight.

I've been trying to push myself into regular exercising throughout 2020. In January, I started walking around my neighborhood, aiming for 10,000 steps for at least three days a week. This was a huge change compared to my ~2,000 steps in a normal work day spent mostly sedentary at my desk. No kids to chase around the house here; just lots of hunching by a screen and chasing lines of code with my eyeballs. I was pretty good with those walks until spring and summer hit, and the weather turned hot and humid. I started skipping unpleasant days, and before I knew it, I had totally given up some time in July. But for a while, the charts on my phone were glorious!

Over the summer, I tried picking up more bodyweight exercises, mostly squats, push-ups, dips, and handstand progressions. We used to have a pull-up bar in one of our doorways, but I had to take it down last year because it was visibly damaging the door frame. I have on my long wishlist the idea of building a free-standing pull-up bar using a bunch of steel pipes from the local hardware store. Maybe in 2021 I'll finally do that and share some pics of the process.

FWIW, if you're ever looking for some inspiration for bodyweight activities, I totally recommend the /r/bodyweightfitness wiki. They cover lots of routines for different goals and fitness levels.

Since August, I've transitioned to using some adjustable dumbbells that I've had for about 20 years. I got these in either my first or second year at university, and every few years I flirt with the idea of seriously sticking to a routine with them. This time I actually set up myself a spreadsheet in Google Docs to track dates, moves, sets, and weights, and for the first time ever, it feels like I'm almost being consistent with exercise since I have this document to keep myself accountable.

I maintain three sheets, one each for for Mondays (push), Wednesdays (pull), and Fridays (legs). In each cell, I record how much weight I moved on each dumbbell for each set. I have a column with the header "One arm DB row (12,10,10,8,6)", and on a given day, I might put in its cell "30,30,30,30,30" to record that I actually completed all of the sets of 12, 10, 10, 8, and 6 with the same 30 lbs weight. If I see the same values for the last few weeks, the next time I'll add a small 2.5 lbs plate to each dumbbell and try to progress. If I can't complete all the sets, I'll put a note in the document to reduce next week.

I definitely need to see numbers to recognize progress (and when I should make changes), and I can also totally recommend doing something like this if you want to stick with it for a long haul. I have a very data-driven mind for all things, though, and I'm sure that for many others, the very notion of maintaining spreadsheets in the cloud must seem crazy.

Okay, now I must go make up for lost time and move some heavy stuff...

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