I am doing something this fall that I am really excited about: I am getting stronger for SCIENCE. A professor on campus recruited faculty and staff to participate in 20 sessions of personal training focused on building strength, and I said SIGN ME UP.
My trainer is a pleasant undergrad who wants to become an athletic trainer someday, and yesterday he was testing my current abilities. The message to the students must have been very explicit: do not let your participant get hurt before they even get started. At first he was treating me like the most delicate of delicate flowers.
He brought me a 10-pound dumbbell for goblet squats, and asked me if I thought I could go heavier. I suggested that he grab the 50, and he couldn't bring himself to do it. "Let's try the 40," he said.
Happily, he realized pretty quickly that I do have a decent sense of how much weight I can move for a specified number of reps with adequate form. He was encouraging in a way that felt genuine, and even though I had told him that I'd been lifting pretty regularly for two years, he seemed pleasantly surprised by my starting abilities. He was complimentary about my bench and deadlift form, which also made me happy, and I left feeling enthusiastic about the program.
Today, though, my quads are screaming. He had me do a bunch of sub-maximal reps on both squat and deadlift, and I kept going until he told me to stop. My upper body is a mild and familiar kind of sore, but my quads feel like someone drove an excavator across them and stopped in the middle to dig for a while. I really don't think I'd be this sore if I'd moved the same total tonnage with fewer reps of heavier lifts. I'm not sure that makes sense, though.
Anyway: it is much less lonely to lift with company. I am optimistic that I can connect with other participants who might be interested in lifting together after the program ends. I'm especially excited to have a regular spotter for bench, and I am hopeful that the Gains Fairy will bestow some new PRs on me this fall.
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