This is It….My Obnoxious

I don’t know how many others have experienced this phenomenon, but whenever I miss a workout I get this strange sensation that my muscles are ‘wasting away.’  My arms definitely feel and look smaller, my shoulders appear suddenly minuscule, my lats look narrowed, my leg muscles seem dwarfed, soft, or as if they’ve completely vanished, and my stomach looks as if it’s never seen a crunch in all of my good days on this earth.  I end up feeling that my physique (in only one short day), has reverted back to it’s former self–leading me to mirror-check and re-check my body obsessively, or to reluctantly seek out the almighty ‘tape-measure validation’ in an effort to ensure that I’m not losing either my muscles or my mind. 

Logic tells me that I shouldn’t feel this way, but the guilt that comes with missing a workout just hammers away at my psyche, causing me to sometimes see and feel things that just aren’t there.  I asked my brother in law (who’s a competitive bodybuilder), whether I’m going nuts or not, and he assured me that he also sometimes feels this way–that he gets anxious whenever he misses a workout, or when he’s on vacation, or anytime he’s too far away from the gym.  My sister also confirms that on these ’skipped days,’ my brother in law will walk around the house compulsively dropping his pants and removing his shirt, then harshly critiquing his physique in the mirror, or even demanding to know whether his muscles have somehow deteriorated or not.  Whew, thank goodness I’m not the only paranoid one!  Maybe this is a typical phenomenon, something we all encounter every now and then in our journey toward a better physique.  Or maybe it’s even a type of override mechanism that ensures we don’t get too comfy with our appearance (or on that couch), and that we keep longing (despite the reasons), for additional workouts and even greater results.  I don’t know what it is, but I’m feeling it now because I’m one workout short this week.  And if it’s guilt (or even fear), that drives me to pick up those weights today, so be it! 

And while on the topic of madness, I’m also experiencing some form of strange supplement-induced mania (if there is such a thing).  I was sure that I had a half container full of whey tucked in the back of my cupboard for use in case of an emergency.  Well, the emergency struck this morning when I realized that I’m down to my last few scoops of my favorite goat whey (not available here in Hawaii).  And why didn’t I notice this earlier?  I went looking for my back-up stash, but it’s mysteriously vanished!  And silly me, for a moment I actually believed that it was stolen, or that maybe my roosters took it and that’s why they look so big these days and are fighting all the time.  I then rushed over to the BB.com store to place an order before it was too late to get it sent out today, but now I’m already feeling somewhat anxious that it won’t arrive in time before my last precious scoops run out (in fact I know it won’t).  So again, will my muscles shrivel away in the meantime, will I revert back into a wimpy girl?  Should I call my bother in law for psychological reinforcement?  Do I have rabies, or could it be that I am indeed going crazy?  Hopefully not, lol!

Demetria

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 23rd, 2008 at 5:51 pm and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.