Why I Shouldn't Tell You About My Exercise Routine, Part II
My high school exercise routine ended in my senior year with the final whistle of our football season, a whistle unheard beneath the roar of 8000 fans losing their **** over our epic last minute goal-line stand to hold out against our bitter rival on Thanksgiving day.
A game winning goal-line stand was about as good as it got for a defensive lineman like myself. My counterpart on the D line had made two sacks that season, but the coaches had yelled at him for both of them.
In high school an interior defensive lineman's job is to plug up the line. If he's instead lumbering around deep into the opposing backfield trying for a sack, it means there's now a big hole back where he should be, something for the faster, more agile opposing running back or QB to run or pass through for big yardage. Pro defensive linemen are allowed more leeway in this matter, as they are the fastest and fleetest 320lb (145kg) behemoths in the world over short distances.
Anyways, we won the game, but I could not celebrate at first because the crowd stormed the field and jumped on our backs. I was not worried about myself, being heavily padded up, but I soon noticed that a boy--probably around 10 or 11 years old--had gone down a few yards away from me. He was starting to get stepped on, and my blood went cold at the sight of a kid who was about to die from being trampled at a high school football game.
On average, I had 3 or 4 people hanging off me at that time. I say on average because each person would stay on for just a few seconds, but as soon as one person slid off me, a new person would jump on, forcing me to fight to stay standing while being smacked into several different trajectories.
To go after the kid, I put forth possibly the greatest physical effort of my life, lurching myself and my jumpers-on through the scrum and over to the boy, who was curled up and feebly trying to roll away from the kicks and the stamps he was collecting.
I couldn't free my right arm from a hanger-on, and bending over to grab the kid by his collar with my left arm was prohibitively tough with several people jumping on and off me. I came perilously close to toppling over, but somehow I kept on my legs and I caught hold of the kid's shirt and I managed to straighten up, hangers-on and all, while pulling the boy up to his feet.
Once we were up, the jumpers-on had either gotten their fill or had finally realized what I was trying to do. They all slid off of me, and I was able to frog-march the kid out of the turbulent scrum. The boy ran off without glancing back at me.
You're welcome, kiddo.
Did I appreciate then how being fit and strong could have lifesaving benefits for myself and for others?
Not at all. I had recently found a new place to hang out and smoke cigarettes after school that wasn't the gym--a friend of mine, a fellow smoker, had turned 18 and had gotten his own apartment--so I was done with working out. I was too slow of foot to play football at the college level, so why bother with the workouts?
I was working at a low-level retail job, and in between shifts I took classes at a university that routinely made Playboy's annual list of the top party schools in the nation. I fit right in on campus, and my heavy drinking and routine drug use showed on me.
I wanted to start working out again, and to get back to my old form. My old strong and fit form had taken me a year of steady workouts to achieve, but I remembered that I hadn't really worked
that hard over the course of that year, so the answer, of course, was to work really hard this time, and in this way I would catch up quicker.
Muhammad Ali was my inspiration for that run. I pushed, and I pushed, and I pushed, and through this work ethic I made excellent progress in only six weeks, and six weeks is also how long my exercise routine lasted. I was sore all the time, and miserable, and as much as I loved planning the routine, I hated the execution of it. I marked it off as an unfortunate failure of will and I moved on.
After years of sitting at a desk and getting zero exercise, I was in my early 40's and I was in terrible shape. I would huff and puff over two flights of stairs. One day I merely rearranged my books, and the next day I woke up terribly sore, and that soreness lingered for two more days after that.
I bought some weights and I started a routine, working hard and gradually adding exercises and reps and sets and weights. After eight weeks of hell, I was stronger and I felt better, but I could barely notice any progress with my look. I still had my beer gut and my set of manboobs. Welcome to middle age, I supposed. I was done. I gave up. I marked it off as an unfortunate failure of will and I moved on.
Two years ago I found myself here in Las Vegas, in my late 40's, and in somewhat bad shape. I walked around 2 miles every day, but it wasn't enough. I had brought my weights with me in the move, and it was time to break them out. This time, however, I was going to act on what I'd learned from my previous failures. I started out nice and easily, this time without any great expectations for a rapid and fundamental visible change in my body.
After two months of a steady routine, I thought it might be safe to start pushing it a little, adding some weight, and some reps, and some exercises. As per usual, I went a little overboard, and I tapped out after another three or four weeks. I marked it off as an unfortunate failure of will and I moved on.
Do we see a pattern here? I am not Muhammad Ali. None of us are him. Muhammad Ali was one of the most remarkable athletes of the 20th Century, of any century. He was wired differently. Pain was an incentive for him. It is a disincentive for most of us.
Every time my routine has started to get tough, I've started to hate it. Why should I make it tough, then, when my longest run and my greatest success by far came from my year in high school, a year when I was just going through the motions at the gym so I could have a smoke break afterwards?
Many of the exercise mottos and affirmations out there have to do with minimizing or mitigating the pain of working hard in order to get us back to the routine the next day, and all the days after that. I say that this way of thinking about exercise is fundamentally flawed, at least for those of us who do not sit on the far right of the pain acceptance bell curve.
At this point, I would like to draw attention to the title of this post, because I'm not an expert and I'm probably wrong, but in any case I am experimenting this time around with a routine that is short and easy.
As it goes on, I will add to it, but I will do that very slowly and carefully this time, and if at any point even the slightest amount of dread of the routine starts to set in, I will be dialing the routine back, rather than writing it off as an unfortunate failure of will, giving up, and moving on.
Six weeks ago I started out by doing six (6) push ups. If I'd pushed it that day, I could have done perhaps eight or ten, but I would have been much more sore the next day, and the dread would have set in early, and I would have had to talk myself into doing the push ups again the next day, and then the same again for every day after that.
Instead, I did just six, and the next day I did eight push ups, easily, and without having to talk myself into it. The day after that, I did seven, as an eighth one seemed like a stretch on that particular day.
Today I did twenty five push ups, easily and without strain. If I'd been pushing myself, I might instead be up somewhere in the low thirties, but I know myself and my history very well by now. If I'd been pushing myself again, I would be dreading the exercise, all day until I finally did it, and every day I would be trying to talk myself into taking days off: first one day a week, then two, then all of them. As it is, I have not missed a day of push ups in six weeks, nor have I wanted to miss one.
Last week, I added a few dumbbell curls to my routine; nice and easy. I will not add another exercise to the routine for at least a month. If at any time a new exercise causes strain, I will drop it immediately and without regret.
The goal is to still be doing this routine in a year's time. If I take it easy, I will not be surprised to find myself doing fifty or sixty push ups at a go, without straining, by this time next year. If I push myself, I know that I will be doing zero pushups a day by this time next year. It's a certainty, given my history. An easy fifty will be much, much better than a guilty zero.
Arnold's philosophy here gets me away from Muhammad Ali and leaves me closer to what I'm attempting. If I'm successful in the long run, it will be due to a change in how I think about approaching exercising, which is one level up from merely psyching myself up to perform an arduous task every day, a task which I have previously found myself unable to do over a long period of time.
Gain without pain. Is it feasible, and is it sustainable? I am on the case.
Last edited by suitedjustice; 04-28-2021 at 08:07 AM.