miked512’s BodyBlog

For the longest, I never really took an assessment of my training form from an outside perspective while actually training.  I was never even completely conscious of it.  It was me, the weights, and whatever exercises I was either tasked or decided to do ahead of time or that day.  Its always been just move it as efficiently as possible in an effort to trigger growth and/or other metabolic processes I’m after.  It was always fun or not so great but eh, I never wondered much about it and just went through it.  It was like this for years until the beginning of the year when I started reading some of Paul Chek’s philosophies and started taking this approach to my training.  I will say that its been eye-opening and I’ve learned quite a few things about myself and this activity I find myself addicted to for some strange reason.  Thats a different topic altogether, but recently, I had the pleasure of having an epiphany at the end of a training session.  I have to thank the bodyspace member, underrated muscle for this one.  Why?  He made me try changing my music.  I went from some of the silliest, dumbest rap music that I’m sure many of you are fans of to some of the most abrasive, hard, heavy metal (I guess, thats what it is.  I have NO IDEA what genre mudvayne fits under) I’ve ever listened to save for that time in high school when Robert from the Czech Republic had me listening to something just as abrasive.

So during this time, thanks to the harshness of the music I found myself taking the music out of my ears between sets and exercises just because:

1)  The music is disturbing

2)  I find myself ready for another set WAY before I’m usually ready for a set.

Phenomenon 2 is what struck me as odd and my workouts started going from their usual 60 - 75 minutes down to averaging about 45.  I was enjoying myself and the connection with the weights and the barbarism was just awesome.  One training session though, in between exercises I found myself being interrupted by another gym member on my way to the water fountain.  We were talking about my workout and he’s like "What all have you done?  Its like you just got here and sweat is pouring all off of you."  So I go through the workout and he says, "Dang, you’re always like that?" and I nod in agreement and end up saying, "Its like I’m a machine, I get in, get out, and I’m done."  After I left him and finished up the workout though, I thought about what went really happened.  I hadn’t become a machine.  I was playing a piece, a symphony and everything worked out perfectly.  The exercises, the sets, rep scheme, rest time, and the like went from measure to measure in accordance with how I planned the workout to go and it was a beautiful piece to make people wonder "What the hell is he doing?  That is awesome."

Then I looked at the music pieces around me.  There were people going through doing their workouts in a nice, harmonious way.  There were also people playing around, talking for LONG periods of time in between sets and exercises about the weather, their day.  And then there were the ones who were completely confused walking around in a daze wondering what exercise to do next.  Sometimes I have no idea why people do pushups in the power rack or do power swing dumbbell hammer curls.  While paying attention to the discord I began to wonder, "Do people plan this or is this just something they come up with?  Have they been coming up with stuff all their lives and just haven’t taken the time to sit down and learn to put this stuff together or not?"

So I ask, how are your training sessions?  Was your last one a symphony or a cacaphony?  Or somewhere in between?  I mean, not everyone gets them right at first, but how long is too long and when are you going to ask for help?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 at 1:38 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.