Monkey Blog

A giant bag of candy has been taunting me all week. Inside it contains delicious bite size morsels of peanut butter cups, kit kats, chocolate bars, etc. I’m already drooling thinking about it. Putting it out of sight didn’t help either.

I’m really good about sticking to my food plan, but if I was to open that bag early very, very bad things would happen.

I still consider myself a noob when it comes to lifting, but at the same time I also do appreciate that I’ve come a long way since I started.

I’ve read that animals/humans have a “flight or fight” response when they’re confronted with something threatening.  I will never, ever forget the first time my personal trainer had me do a drop set with dumbbell curls.  That definitely set off my “flight” response.  If you could have peeked inside of my head at the time you probably would have heard something in the neighborhood of “STOP STOP STOP OH PLEASE GOD MAKE THIS STOP!”  I remember that it was such a shock, especially for someone who had never properly trained before.  My arms felt like they were on fire.  All I wanted to do was drop those dumbbells but the large man yelling at me wouldn’t let me.

Yesterday I was working my arms and I did four sets of the same drop set (obviously with more weight).  It still hurt like the devil near the end of each set, but my attitude was totally different.  Instead of counting the seconds until it was over I had different thoughts running through my head:

“Sweet!  This will help my arms grow.”
“I’m going to feel this tomorrow!”
“You can do a few more reps.”

I’m not sure when the switch happened, but I like it!

I’ve got 200 workouts under my belt!

When I first started working with my trainer I needed to keep track of my sessions with him.  On my calendar I marked “workout #1 3pm”, “workout #2 9pm”, etc.  For some reason (OCD? LOL) I kept up with this after I started working out on my own.

When you first start out it sucks so bad and you’re just thinking to yourself “I just have to get through this hour somehow.”  Then that becomes “Just one more workout and I’m done for the week.”  Onto “One more and I’ll have been doing this for a month!”  After several weeks it becomes second nature and it became something that I enjoy doing (except leg day). 

Tonight’s chest workout was number two hundred.  That’s hard for me to wrap my head around.  It doesn’t seem like that long ago when I was just a bundle of nerves for session #1.  Now I’ve done 200.  That’s just nuts.  Sometimes I can’t believe how far I’ve come already.  Tonight I did dumbbell benching and I started with weight that I used to really struggle with.  Even better, for the first time I used the 75 pounders and got nine reps out of them.

When you start progressing towards a long term goal it can seem insurmountable at first.  I guess the old saying is true.  A journey of a thousand miles does begin with a single step.

Looking forward to 200 more!