I’ve had no period in my life before where I was this consistent and disciplined with my gym and diet.
Usually I get to the point of looking and feeling strong, then routinely miss a few days or a week, and have to catch up again.
What I’m learning is that at a certain muscle building level, the game changes.
Your muscles get so strong that you are at the risk of literally tearing your own body apart. Sports injuries from weight lifting are common. Damage to knees and elbows, tendons, the spine, tears inside muscles, and even ripping muscles right off from where they attach to bone all happen.
I had a day in agony just last week, from damage to my right shoulder. Last month I had left elbow pain. This month my right elbow was making popping noises every time I moved it, and was painful. Two months ago I tweaked my back doing twists on the ab twisty machine.
So I’ve come up with a third stage of weight lifting.
Stage 1: Get big and strong. Find a routine of sets and reps, and stick to your routine. Just show up the chosen number of times per week, and finish your work.
Stage 2: Be more creative and flexible with your routine. You realize that you have strong days and weak days. Days where you have to adjust for injuries. Days where you have recovered faster or slower. Listen to your body and adjust the day to that, plus take on new types of challenges; start playing with more and less reps, and different types of movement.
Stage 3: Artistic yogic dance.
On the butterfly wires, more and more I’m leaning into a type of chi-kung dance. I might start by using the wires to stretch out my shoulders, and slowly warm up my muscles with easier but unusual pulls. I’ll challenge my balance by leaning as far forward as I can, and butterfly one arm at a time. I’ll squat and lean backwards as far as I can, and butterfly behind my back. I’ll bend my knees and lean far right, pulling and loosening the wires in co-ordinated but different angles, then shift to the left and repeat. I’ll pull one wire behind my back and one to the front, for an added an ab twist workout. Instead of just trying to grunt out 10 or 20 reps of a full stack, I’ll use a half stack for a 10 minute set. It’s starting to resemble a tai-chi routine.
I make it about awareness. Feel my body as if I were doing yoga postures. Make new postures. Experiment.
It’s starting to look rather interesting, and impressive.
And I’m doing it a weight that last year I was using for a mere 10 reps of straight armed butterflies. At a weight most guys at the gym use for bent elbowed butterflies. After I walk away from that piece of equipment, there is a long cooling off period for it, as no one wants to be compared against what I just did.
I’m getting more flexible and creative on other equipment as well. Even with dumbbells; instead of just working through 10 reps of one in each arm set of 12s, then 14s, then 16s, then 18s, then 20 kilos of curl and press above the head, I might do some sort of mindfulness body centered meditation using just the 12s. for a while. I try to be more creative in discovering how to move the weights around; move them in different directions and at different speeds, feeling my body carefully the whole time. Then just see where my body is at for further challenges of that exercise; I may or not pick up the 20s on any given day.
Even with the pull downs, instead of working to max out the weight for 10 reps, I might stretch out the shoulders, do some slowly, pull one arm down at a time (our gym has a machine with handles and weights for each arm, not just a wire on a stack), and build up to doing aerobic bursts of many reps, then back off again to a slow mindful pace. Even such a simple exercise can be turned into a stage 3 exercise.
Random Xpat Rantings 
This is going to sound bombastic and attention seeking. Because it is, deliberately.
I did a set with the dumbbells with some girls around, and I wanted to stand out. Doing big numbers or high reps is cool, but I realized that I could add other elements of interest.
I think we can all learn something from the careers of showmen such as David Bowie. Glamor and Flash adds interest to a stage show, but so does storyline. Plot. Dramatic tension adds an element of interest.
So during the set, after a lot of reps, I put down the weights, and rubbed my tired and aching shoulders. Then I picked them up again and did a super fast aerobic burst, pushing past my limits to a near super-human performance.
That added a story line arc, drama, and interest.
Try hard? Well, if trying at all is worse than not trying, then sure, call it try hard.
The goal was to appear like some sort of freaky high performance high stamina super man, without screaming out “hey look at me!”
It’s a strange element to add to lifting weights, but I think that element can be added to most any show of value, including playing music.
To sum up this post: Something as banal as lifting weights can be a performance art. And a body centered meditation. A rhythmic dance oriented meditation, as gyms all have music.
Ya, it’s a bit gay to be so flashy and showy. A bit camp.
There is a lot to learn from the gays in the entertainment industry.
My theory is that if you do your workouts with qigong like energy awareness they will be much more effective. If you do qigong or yoga without awareness of energy the effects after are much smaller. But if you tune into the flow of energy and savor if after for a while the mental AND the bodily transformation seems much greater.
The feeling of testosterone boost after lifting feels largely like kidney energy that I feel throughout my whole body but especially in the kidneys. By resting afterwards in a shavasana type way I find this energy amplifies a lot and feels like it goes into the muscles more. It feels like the more I have of this energy the stronger I get. So this amplification really leads to increased gains in strength not just a pleasurable feeling.
I do the same after Muay Thai. I try to tune into and savor and amplify the warrior type energy I am feeling. And it becomes much stronger.
Do you rest in shavasana position after whole workout or each individual set?
What you are talking about seems pretty interesting. I combined yoga with lifting as well (since beginning of my journey) and It has been few months already.
I am doing Tantra meditations as well (You are focusing entirely on energy there and boosting your sexual energy, taking control of It + later on you can control completely your orgasms, but I’m still not there yet after 8 years off and on doing It)
And I’m planning to start Muay Thai when I become a bit stronger than I am currently.
Currently I am doing StartingStrength and eatting my 4500kcal daily to stop being skinny.
I’m still getting used to my new body shape. I imagine the fascination pubescent girls must feel for suddenly being treated very differently because of a new body shape.
People can be a bit intimidated by my presence now. Just standing there. I suppose I must look like a bit of a wild card. You don’t get this type of body shape by accident, it’s obviously a lot of work. An unusual amount of work. I guess people don’t know what to expect; am I also some sort of martial artist? No one knows.
I kinda like looking physically intimidating.
An ugly face is contextualized. Of course we all know and talk about that all the time. Money, fame, who your friends are, how charismatic you are, all contextualize your face. It’s not an objective thing, a face. It’s a word in a sentence, changing meaning depending on context.
It’s quite shocking how much a body will also contextualize a face. It doesn’t get more handsome, but does take on strong characteristics.
Fast mood changes during a workout:
I’ve been noticing a sort of alter ego, or at least a big mood change that happens early into a set at the gym.
I get pumped up. Sometimes after a set of reps I’ll barely be able to control myself from dancing up and down, Rocky style. So I actually do that. A few days ago I was so hyped up that I actually hop-skipped down the aisle towards the exit as the gym was closing.
I also get a bit competitive. I have to consciously try to reign this in. One guy handled me perfectly.
I’ll explain by remembering how I handled a few characters when I was a teenager.
Character one was a big a bit dumb bully. Eveyoneone was terrified of him, which is what he was aiming for. But everytime he tried to terrorize me I just pretented that he was just being a normal cool and chill nice guy. I acted completely unafraid and unintimidated, and respected him as a person.
So after a while the bully would only briefly test me, then laugh it off, and treat me as a peer.
Another guy was the short guy with short guy syndrome. It was a bit similar. He was full of bluster, but I saw through it and genuinely was not intimidated.
You can behave this way towards barking dogs, by the way. Or bears, from what I’ve seen on T.V. about the bear man. And I’ve heard that this is how you are supposed to deal with semi-domesticated wolves. When they snarl and get aggressive, you don’t do a dominance play on them, you just say “buh”, and look sideways, signalling that you don’t take their threat at all seriously. Yet somehow you still take them seriously. It’s a difficult juxtaposition to explain.
So anyway, this one guy at the gym had to deal with me when I was in my pumped up and competitive state. When I see very big guys near the equipment I’m using, sometimes I’ll overstep boundaries and invite them to try to do what I’m doing. I know. It’s a dick move. Call it short guy syndrome. I’m small, and want to prove myself, publicly, against the huge monster men. I’m slightly offended at their size, and want to pick a fight.
The guy handled it perfectly, with a sort of “buh”. He said sure. Was not at all psychologically intimidated by me. Laughingly moved the butterfly cable weights way down to 60 kilos, and did a simple 10 reps (against my well over 100 of variously shaped reps of a much higher weight.) Then he cheerfully waved at the equipment to let me have my turn.
That really calmed me down. I got my narcissistic supply. We were on the same level, the same footing. He wasn’t beaten down, which was even better.
This contrasts starkly with what happened yesterday. A guy with a gamma mindset berated me for using the equipment that he was just about to use. He said I should pay attention and ask people if they are finished with it. Before giving me a chance to let him use it and apologize, he briskly walked away.
Bad social move. I called out to him to get in my say, but he pretended not to hear me, so I shouted louder and louder. Hey, hey HEY! Then walked up to him, apologized in a very loud room filling voice “I’m sorry for my mistake, please forgive me!” He is Indonesian so my public apology HAD to be accepted, and has the paradoxical effect of making him look small and petty. Which he was deliberately being.
It was pretty obvious to me that he was just angry at me really because when I work out I work out many times harder than anyone else and am many times stronger. I sometimes have to breathe very loudly. It looks showy. People get bitter at show offs, especially when their girlfriend is in the room. And his girlfriend was in the room and actually is a big fan of mine.
So I tried to publicly shake his hand, and patted him on the shoulder, but he snarled at me and was very reticent to touch my hand. Later I went outside to the boxing bag for 10 minutes, then came back to him standing beside his girlfriend (who was trying to calmly explain to him that his social assesment was a bit off) and privately apologized again and said that I should have been more careful and attentive to who was using the equipment. Again with the snarl. He really, REALLY didn’t want to be friends.
It wasn’t about the equipment. He just thought it was. Sort of like a child who “hates” a girl, but really has a crush on her. Explain that to the child, and he’ll think you are nuts. My Dad tried to explain that to me about a girl I “hated” when I was 7 years old. He said that one day I’d understand. I thought he was nuts.
When you are not in touch with your emotions, things like that happen.