This week I find myself in a situation I have not been in since I moved from Georgia: a new gym.
I have been feeling stagnant and not sure what direction to turn. Both my doctor and I agree that weightlifting, especially anything moderately competitive, is not going to be the route for me. After losing about 50lbs and 3 weight classes, I have not wanted to test any of my maxes for squat, bench, or deadlift (Although I know it is beyond time to do it). I will never have on the bar what I did when I was sitting around 300lbs bodyweight. I shifted my training from a 60/40 split favoring powerlifting to a 60/40 split favoring bodybuilding. However, the CF gym did not have all of the equipment to really do this program the way that it was intended. I scaled and modified as much as I could, however, it just felt as if I was spinning my wheels in mud and not going anywhere. If I did manage to increase weight on a dumbbell movement, we didn’t have the next weight up for me to use, so I was somewhat stuck.
This week that changed and I have been training at a gym that has just about every piece of equipment that I can think of. So much so, that I have purposely selected exercises in the Juggernaut app that I have not been able to do until now. That alone has changed my view of training entirely and made it way more fun. Rather than work on bent-over rows until I die, I have access to lat pulldowns. I have access to tons of equipment, most of which I have never truly tested my strength with. Anytime I select a new movement in the app, it will want me to find a 10RM, so that part has been pretty fun.
I also was able to shift from bumpers to calibrated, something I have never lifted with. Should I ever find my way onto a platform again to compete, this is a step in the right direction for my training. Today I was able to use one of the benches and it was great (up until now, all of my bench was done with j-hooks on a rig). I felt pretty secure in the setup and overall was just pumped to be doing it. Tomorrow, I have deadlifts, which will be my first time using those setups, and again, it feels like Christmas Eve for me thinking about trying something new, even though it is a lift I have done a million times over.
Normally, I don’t go back into Garmin and enter my workout since it is already available in the Juggernaut app. Not to mention the Garmin interface is cumbersome. But given that I have been doing new movements, I thought it would be interesting to track the entire workout and entire everything into Garmin. Of particular interest to me is the diagram that shows the muscle groups targeted for the workout. I had tried to do this in the past, but skipped so many movements because I was tired of modifying or just didn’t have the equipment.
I noticed that it tracks PR as well. Something I wasn’t expecting for some reason. Even though the weight is not really a PR because I have done sets with that on bench a million times over, I have never recorded them in Garmin. Since Garmin has none of my past lifts, this might be a great place for me to track progress at this bodyweight.
Right now, the biggest drawback is that I have to wake up about 15 minutes earlier than I am used to. Normally that might not be a big deal, but at 4:00 a.m., every minute counts. I have a little further drive to and from, but so far, that has been manageable.
With all of this new equipment and renewed excitement about my training program, it has also sparked a better look at my nutrition. A month or so ago, I started to apply what I have learned from Precision Nutrition to my own diet and it made a tremendous impact. I strayed a bit after we went on vacation, but this week have started to get back to what I was doing. Oddly enough, I am not eating as much as I should. That strikes me as strange given the amount of activity that I am doing (Anywhere from 1200-1400 active minutes per week). There are times when it feels like I am forcing myself to eat, but I know that I need the calories. I just have to make sure the calories I am getting are good ones.