I've been lifting weights with Joe. Last summer I was working on strength training at home, but the combination of upper-body workouts and knitting did a number on my right elbow, and I decided to back off on the strength training. But this summer I decided to back off on the knitting, and I'm going to see how the strength training goes.
Joe says, "You're stronger than you think you are," which is an encouraging thing to hear. He said it in the context of a discussion about dumbbell bench press, which left me worried that I was going to drop a dumbbell on my face. Today he spotted me with a barbell instead, and it went better than I thought it would.
Weight training is such an unfamiliar world for me that I just googled to confirm: barbell is the thing I was using at the gym today; a barbel is the thing sprouting from a catfish's face. It is not a very female milieu. I'd say the man:woman ratio in that section of the gym runs at least 4:1, or maybe 5:1. Joe sends me videos with titles like "How to do a perfect Romanian deadlift" (my Romanian deadlift is pretty imperfect), and they are hosted on channels with names like Beefy Buff Bros or Dudes And Their Delts. If you're calling a video "Get Massive Hamstrings!" you are not aiming it at the average American woman, who is probably balancing a mild interest in working her rear delts against the certainty that her sleeveless blouses will not fit if her shoulders get bigger.
Will Jamie manage to pull off a pull-up this summer? Will she turn into a Beefy Buff Babe? (One of those outcomes is more likely than the other.) Stay tuned!
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