Light and Momentary

The exercise habit, take #756,321

Last week I sat myself down and said, "Okay, self, what does a sustainable exercise habit look like during the semester?" It feels like there are a lot of things to juggle, you know? But this is what I am testing out for now:

1. I am trying a 3-month subscription to Meg Gallagher's Strong Strong Friends program. So far I am digging it. It's a good level of hard, it's teaching me new things in a way that feels 95% manageable, and it's moving me out of the lifting rut in which I had languished for a while. I'm aiming to lift in the basement on Tuesdays, at the gym on Thursdays, and some combination thereof on the weekends.
2. I am going to aim low with running this fall and see how it feels. It is better to run/walk for 20 minutes than to wish I could run for a sustained 45 minutes. If I am run-walking for 20 minutes on a regular basis, it will move me in the direction of 45-minute runs more effectively than any amount of wishful thinking. I am going to try it while the weather and the daylight allow: MWF, out the door at 7am for a low-stakes run.
3. I am also going to add in a little bit of anti-perfectionist yoga. Does it matter that I am less flexible than I used to be? No, it does not. Does it matter that my mind wanders during yoga? No, it does not. Is it a good idea to stretch out my hips and hamstrings and feet if I am going to be running regularly? Heck, yeah, it is. So I am going to add in a wee tiny smidge of yoga in the evenings on the days when I run. A little pigeon pose, a little forward fold, a little up dog. [you say: "what's up dog?" I say: "not much, what's up with you?"]

Back in the winter when I read Younger Next Year for Women it was so persuasive that I was sure I would be exercising 45 minutes per day, 6 days per week forevermore. It is the sensible thing to do; I am a sensible person. The end!

I hope that I am a sensible person, at any rate, but I am also a person with a bunch of stuff on her plate. I'll give it a whirl. It feels optimistic but not bonkers-optimistic. I will report back on the actual state of the bonkers-ometer in a couple of weeks.

The Great Escape

Today is my birthday, when I often I reboot my new year's resolutions, and so I made a special point of going to the gym this afternoon. I had a pleasant lifting session, and afterward I decided to hop on the treadmill and run some intervals.

This decision was prompted by the book I just read, after it was mentioned by my friend Angela in a recent comment. It's called Next Level [affiliate link], and it's about fitness at midlife. I liked it a lot. I was especially taken by their recommendation to focus heavily on intervals, rather than moderate intensity longer distance efforts. 

There were two barriers to doing an interval workout right after lifting. One I knew about in advance: I hadn't taken my beta blocker. "It will be fine," I told myself. Short little intervals, plenty of recovery time. So I climbed on a treadmill for the first time in forever (kind of like Anna, who also failed to anticipate trouble ahead), and warmed up with a brisk walk.

I cranked up the treadmill speed for interval #1 and immediately discovered barrier #2: I had dressed for lifting, not running, and the bra situation is different. Less confining, because there's no bouncing around in the weight room. "Short little intervals," I told myself. "You can do this." But there was an immediate cry of "FREEDOM!" from the chestular region, kind of like Aretha belting it out in the Blues Brothers. I persevered through the interval and recaptured my escapees. I took a minute to catch my breath, and jacked up the speed again.

My escapees did not want to be recaptured. RESCUE ME, they cried as they made another break for it. At this point I was committed to finishing the first set of intervals, and I just hoped that my reassembly maneuvers were not too conspicuous. The escapees would untrammel themselves, and then I would re-trammel them when the clock ticked past the 30-second mark, like a weird and stressful dance. I kept attempting to rearrange things discreetly, though in hindsight it does not seem very likely that I succeeded.

Maybe, I thought to myself, maybe now that I have warmed up a little my stride will be smoother and less bouncy. "Did you hear that in there?" I asked the mutineers. "Smoother and less bouncy!" (All the normal middle-aged ladies negotiate with their breasts at the gym.)

They sang back the very second the treadmill sped up again. "We want to break free," they crooned, like a better-endowed version of Freddie Mercury. "Is this really NECESSARY?" I said with a certain disgruntled emphasis. By this time they knew what was coming. Like the people singing "Freedom is coming!" they got louder and more certain until, by the end of the last interval, I couldn't take any more of the clamor.

The book says I should work up to three sets of intervals, but I figured two was plenty for today.

An underrated driver of the obesity epidemic

If you search Google Scholar for "obesity epidemic causes," you get the same tired stuff you've been hearing for years: we're eating too much hyperpalatable calorie-dense food, exercising too little, and creating a dangerous spiral as we slowly strangle our pancreatic function and bork our bodies' capacities to respond effectively to glucose in the bloodstream. Maybe you'll see some speculation about mysterious environmental factors that we don't understand. Could it be something in the water?

The thing I did not see when I searched "obesity epidemic causes" was a thing that seems painfully obvious to me after reading Intuitive Eating: our go-to remedy, a short-term fix, is exacerbating the medium-term problem. It seems plausible to me that it is significantly worsening the long-term problem. Where's the science on that?

Because it is something in the water, so to speak. Virtually every woman who is currently alive has been hearing for her entire life that maybe she would be better, happier, more pleasing to the fellas-- if only she were a little trimmer. What's on the cover of every woman's magazine? Diet advice. What does every social media algorithm serve you up reliably if you are a middle-aged woman? Diet ads.

But what if mainstream approaches to dieting are the problem, not the solution?

Something like 80% of the time, people who go on diets regain the weight they lost -- often with a few bonus pounds on top, often with a panoply of hidden changes in the hormones that regulate weight. We don't want to think it's true; we certainly don't want to think it's true for us. Because we're going to do our diet RIGHT; we are embarking on a new slim-and-trim life! And yet, statistically speaking -- take it from your friendly neighborhood PhD -- 80% of people are going to fall in the 80% of people.

If we're concerned about obesity, maybe we need to stop recommending a behavior with the potential to worsen it. If the effect of the large majority of mainstream diets is that people wind up at or above their starting point, with metabolic changes that will make it harder to lose fat in the future, it's time to consider some different ideas.

Some time ago I posted a link to Casey Johnston's mind-blowing avocado post on Instagram. If you haven't seen it, it's worth your time -- not just to glance at, but to think deeply about (she has a longer blog post here in which she tells more of her story). As a society, we are pushing women and girls toward a mode of being that is ferociously bad for them. We are telling them to eat less food than their bodies need. A 1200-calorie diet is appropriate for a small child, but it is not enough food for a grownup! Why is Noom raking in a gazillion dollars a year telling people to eat like small children? We tell women to disregard their hunger signals in the name of "self-discipline," and we normalize this to such an extent that even MEDICAL DOCTORS proclaim themselves STUMPED about why their bodies keep taking over and demanding to be fed. I read that Jen Gunter piece when it came out, and I thought, "Oh, that does sound puzzling." I read it again this year, and now it reminds me forcefully of those nights when I have fallen asleep on the couch even though I really meant to get more work done: sometimes your body says, "If you keep refusing to listen to me when I tell you what we need, I'm just going to seize the wheel." A world in which a best-selling diet book suggests that women should tape their mouths shut to keep themselves from tasting the food they're cooking is a world with some serious issues about women and food. (The book, if you are curious, is Bright Line Eating; please don't read it, because it's terrible.)

It gets worse: our most "successful" diets erode muscle, because the pace of sustainable fat loss is too slow to attract clicks and adherents. Which further slows metabolism, which makes future weight loss even harder, which makes a sizable subset of women think they need an even more extreme regimen of low calories/lots of cardio.

We know that the bodies of Biggest Loser contestants were still in "OH NO, FAMINE LOOMS!" mode six years after their bouts of unsustainable public shaming disguised as health promotion. We know much less about what it is like to be an ordinary woman in this deeply messed-up culture, one who has spent literal decades saying, "I just need to lose ten pounds. Wait, twelve. Ugh, now it's fifteen. No, twenty." It seems likely to me that as lifelong dieters approach the last third of their lives, they face a number of added risks. Their fall risk is higher because muscle protects us against falls, and waving 5-pound dumbbells around doesn't allow a person to rebuild muscle effectively. Their hip fracture risk is higher, because appropriately sized muscles are important for maintaining bone density, and because "successful" weight loss in their youth may very well have contributed to disruption of the hormonal milieu in the years when they should have been building bone. Given the morbidity/mortality stats on hip fractures, we should regard this particular risk as a hair-on-fire emergency for aging women. Aaaannnnd because rebound weight gain may lead to more visceral fat storage, which is worse for you than subcutaneous fat, they may be looking at even more health risks connected to cardiovascular disease, the #1 killer of post-menopausal women.

So if long-haul dieting has the potential to raise a woman's risk of multiple life-threatening outcomes, why are women still getting the message that we should diet? It all makes me want to stand up on a soapbox and shout: WOMEN of the WORLD, let's RECLAIM our metaphorical AVOCADOS.

Strength training has made me rethink everything I thought I knew about fitness. It started as a fun summertime thing to do with Joe, and then it changed my perspective on a bunch of stuff. After a year of not-always-diligent work, my scale tells me I am now 40% muscle. (The internet tells me that the average value for someone my age is 30%.)

On the one hand, it's pretty cool. On the other hand, I don't think you can live a half-century in this bizarro culture and not have some body-related baggage as a result. I feel a measure of ambivalence about the new shape of my body. It makes sense, on the one hand, that I would need larger shirts to accommodate the delts and lats and traps I have painstakingly built up over the past year. It does not make sense for me to (1) want to be able to do a pull-up and also (2) feel uncertain about having enough muscle to do a pull-up. 

And yet here I am.

I have also acquired some fat this year, as the avocado diagram suggested I might, and the idea of a programmed cut (planned careful fat loss for a period of time that's short enough to avert compensatory metabolic changes) doesn't sit quite right with me at this point in the process of reconfiguring my relationship with food. So I am trying to practice body acceptance after a lifetime of telling my body that its current shape was not quite acceptable to me, and it is slow. But here is one thing I know for sure: I would rather be this shape and feel at peace with the ice cream in my freezer than go back to my former certainty that I needed to avoid all sweets every day in order to keep myself from eating ALL ALL ALL the ice cream.

Maybe I don't sound like a person who is quiiiite ready to be offering advice. (I suggest Fit is a Feminist Issue and the Progressive Strength blog if you're looking for online conversations about fitness -- this post was prompted by some thoughts from Marjorie last month. And oh! How did I forget Casey Johnston's Substack?) But if I were to offer advice to women in my age range, this is what I would say: let's normalize weight-lifting for middle-aged women; let's protect ourselves from falls and fractures. Let's keep showing up to lift heavy things even though change is slow. Let's make normal eating normal again -- the kind of eating in which we listen carefully to our bodies and make choices that are both sensible and satisfying.

Maybe the heart of the message I would want to share is this: it does not make us in any way "better" to chip away at ourselves with unsustainable New! Food! Strategies! that boil down to "eat less food than you actually need." No one is "better" because there is less of her. Oh, my friends, let's be less afraid to take up space.

Hit by the DOMS truck

So you guys, the downside to whole-body movements is that they make your whole body sore when you haven't done them in a long time.

I woke up yesterday with sore abs, and then it spread. I was sitting on the couch for a while yesterday morning-- I got home from 7:30 Mass and bopped around the internet for a while before my weekly Zoom chat with my college rooommates. We wrapped up the call and I realized I had been creamed by the DOMS truck as I sat there: lats, triceps, biceps; glutes, quads, hamstrings. I joked about it with my family all day. "Would you like to hear about my sore muscles?" I kept asking them. "Oh, yes," they would say, "I'd like nothing better."

I went out for a slow and limping run last night, in which I observed that my calves were weirdly fatigued -- as if I was using more lower-leg muscles than usual because everything higher up the posterior chain was toast. I did a 12-minute bedtime yoga video and it was ridiculously painful. Adriene told me to start with some nice cat-cow stretches and even those hurt. You know you overdid it when cat-cow hurts. In the middle of some hip-opener thing she said, "REALLY FEEL what it's like to be in your body right now," and I said, "It feels like arson, Adriene; it REALLY FEELS like someone committed arson on my middle-aged muscles." She put us in happy baby and I had to wonder to myself if there is an asana called "grumpy middle-aged person regretting her life choices." It would have been more suitable.

That last bit is just me exaggerating, though, because I do not regret that particular life choice. It was so nice to be back in the weight room. I am going again tomorrow. I am looking forward to it hugely. I've missed lifting.

Back at the gym

Yesterday I went back to the gym for the first time since...probably November.

Here is a weird thing: the tiredest muscles were the ones in my hands. This is a thing I remember from May and June of last year, when I first started lifting. My forearms would tire out then, too, which wasn't a problem yesterday. But my hands hit a point where I just couldn't do it anymore. They were still tired when I went to bed last night, actually.

In my home workouts through the winter I had been doing three sets of band-assisted pull-ups from a hangboard, which requires a different grip -- it's a bigger surface, too big to wrap your thumb around. Yesterday I decided I'd do a version of my fall split, which always kicked off with four sets of machine-assisted pull-ups. I think that was a chunk of the issue: higher volume with a squeezier grip.

Deadlifts felt great and bench felt good. My working sets were at about 70% of my November levels, but I'm optimistic that I'll progress briskly once I'm back in the weight room regularly. And I do want to be back in the weight room regularly. I texted Joe while I was resting between sets to say, "Oooooh the dopamine! Barbells 4EVER!"

I had planned to finish up with a couple of accessories, but my hands had had enough. The first set of hammer curls felt great. The second set felt less great. I stopped in the middle of the third set, totally maxed out, and decided to call it good. 

But that's how you tell your body to build strength: you max it out (or come pretty close), and then you offer it protein and rest. I'm feeling optimistic, and happy that I took the plunge.

Dissatisfied

Over spring break, when I was feeling glum about gray skies and endless grading, my daily exercise resolution skidded off the rails and I have not been able to get myself back on track. I am not entirely couchbound -- I'd say I've been exercising a couple of times a week, and my life always has a fair amount of built-in walking since I commute on foot. But I've been in a mental spiral with running (it will be discouraging -> maybe let's do it later -> now we are discouraged about being out of shape AND about procrastinating -> let's eat chocolate instead of running -> alas, everything is discouraging) and also with lifting. I haven't been back to the gym since I un-froze our membership in the aftermath of the omicron wave. (Of course, now we seem to be having a BA.2 wave, so maybe it's okay that I haven't been back to the gym.) There is a part of me that is really eager to get back into compound lifts with barbells. I want to deadlift, in particular -- there's something especially satisfying about standing up tall with a barbell loaded to the very edge of what I can lift with decent form. And I KNOW, I really do know, that "the very edge of what I can lift" is not going to get closer to what it was before omicron if I don't get in there and do the workouts. 

The part of me in charge of actually hopping in the car and driving to the gym does not seem to be as enthusiastic as some other parts of me, however.

I keep thinking that I want to change things up: eat better, exercise more, grade more promptly, write more diligently. I think if I am more focused on exercise, some of those other changes will happen all on their own as the result of increased energy and focus. So here is my plan, O my internet friends: run tomorrow morning, even though it will probably rain on me, lift on Saturday, run + yoga on Sunday.

Unprepared

I am supposed to run a 10K at the end of this month and I am unprepared.

If I run outside in temperatures below 45 or so, my lungs complain bitterly. Running outside has only been an option on a single-digit number of days this year. And running inside has not been an option for most of the year, because I froze our gym membership during the worst of the omicron wave and it remained frozen until just recently.

One of the Run Like a Mother authors wrote about training for a marathon on a bike trainer -- maybe while a stress fracture healed up? I am not finding that bike trainer fitness translates very well at all into running fitness, though. I am such an inefficient runner, you guys.

The other night I was reading the Palliser Chronicles in bed and Amazon suggested that I might like to read Slow Running instead. I skimmed the beginning, where the author was talking about efficient stride, and afterward I dreamed that I had discovered a new way to run. I kept my torso steady, angled way forward like a Warner Brothers cartoon runner, and churned my feet like a duck. "I'm hardly out of breath at all!" said my dream self.

Then I woke up.

It will be fine. I will wind up walking big chunks of the course, but it is better to show up underprepared than not to show up.

[insert exploding-head emoji here]

I've been reading through Casey Johnston's old Ask A Swole Woman columns, because she is smart and funny and she totally gets all the weird complicated stuff about lifting while female, and this morning I came across one called "How to Prevent Debilitating Soreness."

I have been going back through it, trying to find the quote that will spur you to click through and read it, and I just want to share the entire first half. Here's one piece of it:

Soreness is actually more like the gap between what you did to break down your muscles with exercise...and what you gave them to rebuild themselves in the couple of hours and days following in terms of proper food, water, and rest.

In light of this column I am thinking about all my past experiences of painful muscle soreness, some of which are recorded in these pages. (Does anyone remember my first Pilates Reformer class?)

In a culture that tells women "The purpose of exercise is to make yourself smaller," eating for recovery is not a big focus. I absorbed the idea that I should eat some protein after a run, but I had no idea how much protein is recommended to optimize muscle growth. (A lot. A lot a lot: about a gram per pound of bodyweight per day if building muscle is your focus.) There is not a chance I was ever eating that amount of protein in my Pilates Reformer days, and Casey Johnston's take on muscle soreness makes a lot of sense to me in hindsight.

I am so curious about your reactions to her post, you guys. I feel like men get this advice in the gym but women (by and large) hear that it is better for them to restrict post-workout calories so they can chisel away more of themselves. This is bad advice, it turns out. Take a look at the post and tell me what you think!

Every day is easier than some of the days

So you guys, I am finding it easier to exercise six days a week than I thought it would be. I don't have to answer the question "Am I going to work out today?" I already know the answer; the answer is yes. If I don't do it in the morning, I have to do it in the evening.

This means I don't have to deal with Sad Gertrude. Sad Gertrude is a voice I read about somewhere on the internet (maybe the Salty Running blog? maybe five-ish years ago? too long ago to remember the details) and immediately recognized. Sad Gertrude says, "But it's going to be haaaaaard," when you are trying to motivate yourself to lace up your shoes. Sad Gertrude says, "What if we caaaaan't?" as you are thinking about what your workout will look like. Sad Gertrude says, "Maybe later would be better. Don't we have enough suffering in our life already?" And at least sometimes, a person will just sigh heavily and accede to Sad Gertrude's querulous pleas.

I have hardly heard anything from Sad Gertrude this year. In years past, if I were aiming to work out three or four days a week, she would try to convince me on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday that the four days might as well be W-Th-F-Sa. And then on Wednesday she would tell me that three workouts a week is a perfectly respectable amount of exercise. Maybe you can sympathize; maybe you have a Sad Gertrude of your own. Or maybe my Sad Gertrude has gone to live at your house, because she has been very, very quiet lately. 

All of my previous attempts to work out 6 days a week have felt overwhelming to me, but this one does not, or at least not so far. I think a big slice of it is having good options for home workouts, so that I am not braving ice and snow and teeming hordes of January-ites at the gym, and trying to fit in the workout plus the drive to and from the gym where there is no parking because of all the people thinking that THIS YEAR will be the their year to get fit. Another slice of it is doing less running. I am just not a very efficient runner. It feels like I am working stupid-hard to go stupid-slow. But hey! This year I can jump rope and ride my bike and do Jazzercise and lift weights instead.

In my ideal world I would be getting up at 5:15 so I could work out before the kids are awake, but I do not love waking up at 5:15 in January. So I've mostly been working out in the evening. In my ideal world I would be able to do barbell deadlifts, but our gym is pretty much a seething cauldron of COVID right now. I froze our membership until spring, when I hope the crowds will be sparser and the COVID numbers less grim. I can do dumbbell deadlifts for a while, even if they are much less satisfying.

It is kind of weird that Joe turned me into a person who pines for barbells, isn't it? Have I already recommended @megsquats and @swolewoman to anyone who is thinking that her life could use a few more barbells? I'm always happy to hear about new people to follow, if you have any recommendations for me.

Brutal, also fun

My dad was a runner back when it was a quirky thing for adults to do. AND, furthermore, my dad was a runner when we lived in Florida and New Orleans, where the heat requires extra dedication. He also jumped rope, in an era when grown men did not jump rope unless perhaps they were making movies about getting punched in the face until they fell down, which he was not.

[not my dad]

When I was little, little like 4 or maybe even just 3, he resolved to teach me to jump rope. This was a discouraging process for Small Jamie, as someone with a deeper knowledge of gross motor development might have told him it would be, and I labored and sweated and failed to connect consecutive jumps. He used to tell the story of the time I flung the rope onto the carport floor in disgust. (Four, I must have been four. We didn't live in the carport house until I was four.) "I'll never get it!" I said amid tears. (Those of you who have been reading my perfectionist contortions for some fraction of the 17 years in which I have been posting them on the web are nodding along here, saying, "Huh, that sounds familiar.") But then I picked up that rope once more, and LO: I could do it. Mysteriously, something clicked.

That night I jumped my little heart out. I still remember waking up in my bed the next morning, too sore to move. I believed for a couple of hours that I had done some flavor of permanent damage to my body, but I bounced back pretty quickly. And from that day on, I was sold on jumping rope.

I never won anything in field day competitions, except once in fifth grade. There was a jumprope relay, and I headed up the four-person team from my classroom. Each girl jumped until she missed, and then handed off the rope to the next girl. The last team with a girl still jumping won the event. But when I started jumping I did not miss; I kept going serenely until every other girl (except my three teammates, who were standing behind me awaiting turns that never came) had stumbled and handed off her rope. I kept going until they told me to stop and collect my blue ribbon, because jumping rope was my thing.

It is no longer my thing, as I learned when I attempted a 20-minute jumprope session tonight. With a little practice I could jump a hundred times in a row tonight, but doing so sent my heartrate up into the 160s. The rope caught on my ponytail, and my feet weren't always quite where I thought they were going to be. So I would jump until I missed, and give my heart a little time to settle down, and jump until I missed again. 

It was hard, from both a cardio perspective and a coordination perspective. But it was also fun and meditative. There's something joyful about jumping, about knowing where the rope will be and moving your body in time with its rhythm. I remember why I used to love it.

Let's hope I don't wake up too sore to move in the morning.

Still more advantages

That book I've been telling you about, Younger Next Year for Women, was written by a physician and one of his patients. The patient does not love weight-lifting, but he is very insistent about its value. One of the things he said about the importance of weight-training left me initially skeptical. But then we had a round of freezing rain that left us with annoyingly icy sidewalks, and I am here today to tell you that he seems to have been correct.

I had noticed over the past several years that my balance is not what it used to be. It's not that I was falling over on a regular basis, but I am definitely more tippy than I was 25 years ago. Because I walk to and from work every day, over sidewalks that may or not be shoveled after winter storms, I am keenly aware of this difference. I would watch the college students go zipping up sidewalks covered in tamped-down snow, and I would think to myself, "Huh, there is no chance I could move that fast on this sidewalk." 

A regular yoga practice made some difference, but my capacity to hold tree pose in my living room didn't really transfer into a renewed ability to walk confidently on icy surfaces. So when Chris Crowley said that strength training would improve my balance, it caught my eye. He said it would do so through two different mechanisms: first, that increasing the demand on my muscles on a regular basis would improve my proprioception, my sense of where my body is in space. Second, the increase in strength would make it easier for me to salvage the situation if I did stumble. He said 50-year-olds don't stumble any more often than 20-year-olds -- they just can't respond as effectively to their stumbles.

"Hm," I said as I stroked my chin thoughtfully. "Game-changing if true."

As you know (and might even be a little tired of hearing), I started lifting weights in May. I think I had lost a fair amount of muscle mass over the years, you guys. Everybody loses muscle mass across time, of course; the actual numbers are pretty depressing. But women who attempt to lose weight are at particular risk. A determination to shift the number on the scale quickly means that your body sheds muscle as well as fat. And when I wanted to lose weight, I wanted it GONE. Have you seen this Instagram post about the long-term effects of rapid weight loss on body composition? Interesting, right? And maybe a little sobering, even if it's only an Instagram post without much hard data to back it up?

So anyway-- we've had icy sidewalks for almost all of January, and they are not stressing me out. I do not have to think carefully about every step I take. I do not worry that I'm going to concuss myself while walking to the office. Don't get me wrong; I'm still taking it slowly and I did wear my Yak-Trax for the worst of it. But I feel more comfortable walking on treacherous sidewalks than I have felt in years. This morning Stella said, "It looks pretty bad out there, Mom; should you drive me to school?" She was right; it did look pretty bad out there. But I said, "Nah, we'll be fine." And I was also right.

Tomorrow morning I am going to head down to the basement before work. It will be my Day 1 lifting workout: three sets of pull-ups, three sets of Bulgarian split squats, three sets of shoulder press, two sets of incline bicep curls. It won't take me that long; it won't hurt that much. (Except for the incline bicep curls. Those are pretty painful.) But you guys, I cannot say enough good things about cultivating the habit of showing up and moving heavy things around. Give it a whirl! You have nothing to lose but your fear of falling on the ice!

Gains in the mail

I am writing this post with my feet propped up on the coffee table, next to a big jar of protein powder that landed on my front porch this evening.

I fear I have wandered deep into Bro Madness territory now, and if I am not careful I will start sporting tank tops in February (sun's out, guns out!), spouting pseudoscience, and sprouting tattoos of my squat PRs.

But it turns that occasionally, just occasionally, the Beefy Buff Bros are onto something. It is hard to eat the amount of protein that's recommended to optimize gains (oh gracious, I just used the word "gains" in a blog post and I wasn't even joking), and I'm enjoying the gains (twice -- I did it twice in one sentence).

Well, okay: about 85% of me is enjoying the gains (oops, that's three) and 15% of me remains a little ambivalent.

An illustration, if you are not weary of these posts in which my current fitness regime collides with decades of messaging about what's attractive: I was in the bathroom, preparing to jump in the shower, when I caught sight of my shoulder in profile. "Oh, ugh," I thought to myself, "look at that back fat." I took a closer look, and said to myself, "Hold on, fat deposits do not usually end in a tidy visible line running obliquely across the scapula. I think what you mean is 'Look at those REAR DELTS.'"

I have been working for those rear delts, my friends. I do rear delt flies at the very end of my Day 2 workout and they always hurt. I always think about skipping the last set, because they are painful, but I keep at it until all three sets are done. AND LO, now I have an unfamiliar bulge on my shoulder. It's a good bulge, a hard-earned bulge. But dang, I have absorbed a lot of BULGES ARE BAD bunk across the past 51 years.

I am thinking about the gym bros who walked up to Joe over the summer and said, "Dude, you're looking big," fully intending it as a compliment. What would I do if someone walked up and said that to me? My inclination might be to drop a 2-pound jar of protein powder on their toe. But hey, if you're going to eat the Bro Diet you might need to speak the Bro Lingo.

I will continue to provide you with periodic anthropological updates from the weight room-- and, apparently, from the kitchen too.

Back to the gym with Joe

I asked Joe if we could lift together while he was home this weekend, because I was pretty sure I could bench a hundred pounds today, but only pretty sure. It was so nice, you guys. I miss that boy when he's away. He spotted me and -- milestone alert! -- I did indeed bench a hundred pounds for the first time. 

The nice thing about going with Joe is that he will give me as much or as little input as I would like. He has many, many sensible thoughts on how to optimize efficiency, but he also knows that it can get a little overwhelming to hear about 25 things I could do differently. So I tried a wider grip for bench, based on his comments (he was right about that, by the way), and I didn't worry too much about whether I was fully extending my arm for every single rep of incline bicep curl. 

I love having someone to chat with about how much harder it is to do incline bicep curls. 

Bulky

If you are a woman my age you were probably cautioned about the weight room. "Careful," they told you, "you don't want to get bulky." This was said with a twist of the lip and a cautionary tone. You don't want to get gangrene. You don't want to get syphilis. You don't want to get bulky.

The weather has changed and I am making the switch to tops with longer sleeves and more fitted shoulders. And guess what? I have definitely added some bulk.

This is not entirely a surprise. Back in August I tried on a blazer that used to fit perfectly, and it was decidedly snug through the shoulders. But this morning I donned a pale-green blouse I've worn for years. I have worn it happily across a 30-pound weight range, but it does not fit me now. I wore it anyway, and spent the whole day feeling uncomfortable.

I guess this makes sense. Across the past ten years my bust and waist have been different sizes at different times, but never my shoulders. News flash, ladies: if you spend 5 months building your delts (and your lats and your traps), you may find that you need some wardrobe adjustments.

Can I tell you that I am having extremely mixed feelings about this? I love being able to shoulder-press a pair of 35-pound dumbbells for 3 sets. I've never been this strong before. I find it so satisfying to knock out sets of 10 or 12 pull-ups on the pull-up machine. (It will take me some time to do a double-digit number of unassisted pull-ups, but the amount of assist I need is dropping steadily.)

The pale-green blouse is too tight across my shoulders and upper back because I have persevered. I kept at it with deadlifts, even though the form is a total pain in the butt. I did bent-over rows until I felt queasy, and then I stopped and did the same thing twice more. I worked my delts even when I wanted to give up.

My body did what I was asking it to do: it grew me some nice sturdy new muscles. It feels ungrateful to have mixed feelings about this. And yet-- do you know any woman who wants to be labeled "sturdy"? I'm not sure I do. Have you ever heard a woman say, "My fitness plan has been such a success that I need larger clothes!" I have not.

It used to be part of my identity that I was "the skinny one." Part of me wants to say "to heck with that! it's better to be able to open your own jars than to be 'the skinny one'!" It's pretty sad that women so often think they would be "better" if they were smaller -- if less of them existed. If girls and women learn that it's undesirable for them to have visible muscles, then they're easier to push around. And who wants that?

Well. I might want that a tiny bit. I just might.

I am not going to pretend this makes a lot of sense, but I am also going to guess that many of you will find it unsurprising. 

#58

In the spring of 2020 Joe told me I could learn how to do a pull-up in a month, but he amended it to three months when he saw what my actual upper-body strength situation was like in May 2020. I lost momentum with home workouts, though. I reached the point where I could do the two halves of a pull-up separately (from dead hang to 90° elbow bend, from 90° to the top of the bar -- I just couldn't stitch them together), and then I developed a repetitive strain injury in my right elbow.

In May of this year Joe asked me if I'd be interested in lifting with him, and I said yes. I have all but stopped knitting, because I think the combination of lifting and knitting last summer sparked the repetitive strain issue. I have tried to strike a good balance between pushing myself and listening to my middle-aged body. I have asked Joe a kazillion questions, and he has responded with patience and encouragement.

And guess what? Today was chin-up day!

It was kind of accidental. I was using the platform-assisted pull-up machine, and it was slightly broken. I set the pin at 10, meaning it was supposed to offset ten pounds of my weight and I would lift up the rest. But that's not how it worked-- instead the platform lagged down below my knees, offering me zero support. I got to the top, unsupported, and thought, "Did I really just do that?"

Trying to chin myself on a pull-up bar has been frustrating, but today showed me two of the reasons why. With all of my bar attempts I have had too much swing from stepping forward off the box. I can't lift myself and stabilize myself at the same time. The platform-assisted pull-up machine lets me focus on the lifting. There's no swing to worry about.

It also feels easier to do the move with bent knees than with straight legs. I don't know if that makes sense mechanically, but that's how it feels.

So it turns out that I could not do a pull-up after one month, and I could not do a pull-up after three months. I have lifted weights and practiced pull-ups three times a week for NINETEEN WEEKS. On the one hand, I'm proud of that. The weight room hasn't felt like a welcoming space, and I've stuck it out anyway. I went back after the day I left the gym crying. I've learned some of the form pointers and some of the jargon, and I've made gains across the board. But on the other hand, I've been a little frustrated with the fact that I've been trying to do a pull-up for NINETEEN WEEKS. That's a long time! That's 57 pull-up-focused workouts! But today, day 1 of week 20, workout #58-- today I did it.

Almost

Remember how I was going to give an unassisted pull-up a whirl today? This morning I warmed up in the basement, where we have a pull-up bar in front of the furnace. (This is a terrible place for it, because it's way too easy for swinging knees or feet to kick the furnace, but it's also the only place for it. Every other door frame in our house has a lintel that's pentagonal rather than rectangular -- the top, instead of being flat, slopes upward to form a gentle point in the center. You probably wouldn't notice it unless you were trying to hang a pull-up bar.) Then I did a platform-assisted set at the gym: 8 reps, 40 pounds offset. And then I chalked up and faced off with the pull-up bar. 

First I hopped off the step and tried to pull up from the bottom of a dead hang. I couldn't do it, so I tried again. I have to stand on tiptoe on the step to reach the bar, so I gave myself a gentle upward nudge with one foot. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't generate a lot of upward oomph while standing on tiptoe. But that little nudge was all I needed: I swooped right on up to the top from there. So I did a few of those and then went back to the platform-assisted machine to get a bit more volume in.

It makes sense to me that I got nowhere from a dead hang: I haven't been practicing that specific maneuver at all. With platform-assisted pull-ups you always get some help at the bottom; that's just how the machine works. With band-assisted pull-ups, the bottom of the rep is where you get the most help, since that's where the resistance band is stretched the farthest. 

Joe says I should check out "scapula shrugs" on YouTube to tackle that last tiny bit of distance between me and a real true honest-to-goodness pull-up. I guess, actually, I've been imprecise in my nomenclature here-- I almost always use a chin-up grip (knuckles facing me) because it allows me to use my biceps more than a pull-up grip does (knuckles facing away). I mix it up a little bit, but I figure I'll start with a chin-up and progress from there.

I think I'll also try some reverse reps in the basement to see if that helps. I made up that name, I think, but what I mean is this: start at the top, let myself down, and then pull myself back up. It seems like it might be easier to change the direction of the movement than to overcome inertia at the bottom of a dead hang. Maybe? Maybe that just sounds like wishful thinking, now that I've written it out.

Anyway: I'm close! Really close! Maybe I'll post a video when I get there.

More lifting musings

I wish I had some middle-aged-lady friends who wanted to lift weights with me. It's nice to have a lifting buddy. You can cheer each other on; you can spot each other when you're doing hard things. I suspect it wouldn't feel quite as lonely in the Bro Zone if I had a workout pal.

"Everybody's nice in the gym," Joe tells me. "Even if they look scary, everybody's always friendly and helpful."

I am finding this to be a leetle less true for me, though. I was not always especially welcoming to that one lonely guy in Pilates class, so maybe I understand why the weight room guys might seem a little standoffish. 

Lately I've been making slower headway. I've been more cautious about bumping up the weight I'm moving, opting instead to bump up the reps with weights I know I can handle. I don't want to be like "OF COURSE I can bench 90 pounds!" and then get pinned under the barbell, gasping for air while all the beefy bros around me carry on with their workouts, their AirPods blocking out the sound of the sad middle-aged lady wheezing "HELP!" (Why yes, I do seem to catastrophize about any workout regimen I undertake. Catastrophizing is practically my superpower. I'm pretty confident there are no kraken in the weight room, but plenty of other catastrophes loom.)

Still, I'm definitely making headway. I did use the 35-pound dumbbells for shoulder press today. My squat is just barely into triple digits, but I'm pleased that it's there. I look forward to lifting workouts in a way that I have very seldom looked forward to endurance workouts. Today I watched a Jeff Nippard video because it looked interesting to me, not because Joe wanted to know what I thought about it.

It's weird to be the only person in my demographic in the space, though. There are other faculty who use the pool and the cardio machines and the track. The weight room is almost entirely students, the large majority of whom are male.

I'm about 98% certain that I have the strength to do an unassisted pull-up now, but I'm not quiiiite sure how to make the transition away from the pull-up machine. The prospect of going for it on the pull-up bar and failing in public is a discouraging one. I need to figure out how to balance my unhelpful tendency toward self-doubt against the reality that it's not a super-friendly environment. But you know, when I picked up a pair of 35-pound dumbbells for shoulder press this morning, I thought to myself, "This is a bad idea; I can't do it." And I was wrong. I might be telling myself the same false thing about pull-ups. I think on Saturday I'll do a warmup set on the platform pull-up machine and then give it a go on a pull-up bar. What's the worst that could happen? Whatever the outcome, it is unlikely to involve a kraken attack.

The pull-up quest continues

I'm inching in the right direction, friends. On Thursday I did a platform-assisted pull-up with 20 pounds offset, and it was hard but not bonkers-hard. Today I thought I'd try one with 10 pounds offset, and...close but no cigar.

Here is a weird thing I am noticing: when I try these single reps at or near my limit (is "single reps" an oxymoron? what do you call it when you're only aiming to do one because you know you can't do a whole set?), I feel it most in my triceps afterward. This is weird, because triceps don't have much of a job to do when you're completing the first part of a pull-up. Are my triceps working hard to keep me from plummeting to the ground afterward? Are they over-engaging to try to stabilize my not-yet-up-to-the-task biceps?

Do I have any women readers who do pull-ups? Have you experienced this? Joe is a little puzzled about why my triceps are more grumbly than my biceps or lats after these max-effort attempts.

(I guess I don't have to restrict this question to women, but it seems pretty certain that all the men who read here started their pull-up training with bigger biceps than mine.)

Reminder

Hi, did you need someone to remind you gently that it is better to get off the couch and be slow than to sit on the couch and wish you were faster? Consider yourself reminded.

The half-marathon training group is much smaller than the last time I did it, and the 12:00+ group is very tiny-- there were only three of us plus a mentor. The lone male was running a little faster than 12:00, and the other woman was moving slower than I was. But she cut the course short instead of running the full distance, which meant that I was the last person in the entire group to finish. This is not my favorite feeling, but OH WELL. 

I find that the group mentors make a huge difference, and this time it's Denise again-- the same Denise who was SO AWESOME about my brainweasels during the 2016 group. I woke up at 5 this morning and thought to myself, "Why did I sign up for this? I'm going to have to run 8 miles and I can't run 8 miles." But I went back to sleep for a bit longer, and when my alarm went off I got out of bed and ran through my running checklist. It's true that I can't run 8 miles at this point, but I can run 3. And I did!

Also, invigorated by my run, I went to the tire shop when I got home. I am awarding myself some bonus Adulting Points today, let me tell you.

Small victories and backhanded compliments

I went back to the gym today, and it was fine. It is going to take me a while to get an unassisted pull-up, but I am nibbling away at the amount of assist I need. Joe advised me to tweak my bar placement while squatting, and it feels a lot more stable now. I benched more today than I've benched before, and when I cautiously bumped up the weight for French press it felt exactly right.

In the middle of all this, I overheard a man talking to a younger woman as she returned a pair of 30-pound dumbbells to the rack. He said, "That's a lot of weight for a girl!" I limited myself to a horrified look in response, but I have been thinking about it ever since. I wanted to say, "Hey, buddy, don't pretend to pay someone a compliment while asserting your own superiority-- and, by the way, the word you want there is 'woman.'" I wanted to say, "What if someone said to you, 'Hey, you're not bad-looking for a hairy old man'?" Or even "Gosh, that's a long sentence for a man!"

I know that two wrongs don't make a right, and that men are perfectly capable of complex syntax. But I don't know what kind of response might have sent the message I wanted him to hear. The woman in question didn't seem terribly rattled by it. She said, "That's kind of insulting," and he tried to shrug it off.

The gym is a weird place. What would you have wanted to say -- zingy, charitable, or in between?