Get Your ZZZs

What you do in the gym is important. Using good form, lifting with intensity, working a proper split--these things are all going to affect your progress.

But the gym isn't where you build strength. It's where you demand from your body, under duress of torture with strange instruments (Power cage? Not the power cage!), that it build strength. The strength building takes place outside the gym. I've read from several bodybuilders that they'd rather miss a workout than a meal.

So in the morning you do the perfect workout. You eat a proper post-workout meal and follow up on it throughout the day with nutritious food. Then you go to bed late and only get five hours of sleep. You just lost a lot of the progress you worked so hard throughout the day to attain.

Your muscles need recovery time, and the time they can be assured that you're not going to move and mess them up is when you're asleep. Muscle is built at night. You can do everything else right and plateau hard because you aren't giving your body time to do what you're asking of it. And beyond the loss of future muscle (that's like future crime. Ask Tom Cruise about it), you're counteracting numerous other benefits:

*Exercise makes you smarter. Lack of sleep makes you dumber.

*Being fit regulates insulin sensitivity. Lack of sleep causes a resistance to insulin (think type 2 diabetes).

*Exercise reduces stress. Lack of sleep increases it, and therefor cortisol, which reduces your immune system, increases fat, eats muscle, causes heart disease, and messes with your mental health.

You've already made time for exercise. Now you have to make time for a solid night of sleep. Where are you going to get the extra three hours from? I don't know. I just point out problems; I don't give solutions. That's too hard.

How to sleep soundly tonight--and wake up slimmer, happier, and healthier

New Cycle

Today, after a week of recuperation, I went back to the gym. I'm out of my low rep cycle, and started a full-body, twice-a-week, hypertrophy cycle. Today was-- difficult. My routine:

Chin ups (with an assortment of grips and a little extra weight)
Cable row, low and high
Dumbbell bench press
Incline press
Barbell overhead press
Deadlift
Step ups
Chops

I only made it through deadlift. I'm not used to the cardio aspect of this sort of lifting and rested too long between sets to avoid barfing! It may not look like a huge amount of volume, but remember that each is a big lift with a fresh muscle group. A full body workout is intense when you're used to a split, because each group has fresh muscle loaded with fuel, so though I got more and more tired, each exercise is staying at a high level instead of diminishing.

What I like about this cycle is that it's going to allow me to hit every muscle group twice a week, something I haven't done for awhile, and at the same time I'm not going to be spending six days a week in the gym. On days I'm not lifting, I'll be doing yoga and cardio. It should be fun. I hope that it's such a big system shock after getting to rest for 2-3 minutes between sets that I see some real progress, both in size and endurance.

I just have to look at it as a challenge instead of torture.

Enjoying the Fruits of Your Labor

Duders, I'm slacking today. For reasons mysterious and untold, I've just been sitting back and playing some videogames. I have this productivity compulsion that doesn't normally allow me to enjoy that.

I've been slacking this week in the gym. Really slacking, meaning not going. No weightlifting at all. I developed a pain in my bicep from weighed chins that told me that my low-rep cycle is over, and then I realized that I haven't taken a week off in a long time, at least half a year. So, though I feel guilty every day, I just do some cardio at home and I'm not lifting until next week, when I start a full-body insanity workout to shake things up.

So the topic of today is being able to enjoy your well-deserved treats. Mary Anne left a comment last Friday about exercise allowing her to eat what she wants guilt free, and I mostly agree with her. Can you do it? When you know that you've had a great week of both diet and exercise and you know you deserve a cheat, you might even be in a place where a cheat will physically help you, can you enjoy it, or do you feel guilty anyway? Can you enjoy time off from the gym that your body actually needs?

My obsessive nature gives me a hard time. That's normally a good thing, but not in the above mentioned circumstances.

Fear and Self-Loathing in the Gym

Since things are going well with the blog and there are a few people out there who must enjoy reading what I'm writing, I'm going to kick the schedule up. I'll still be posting my main articles Monday and Wednesday with a traditional Friday web roundup, but throughout the week I'm going to post little bits of whatever is knocking around in the old nugget, whether it be something I thought up in the gym or something that bugged me about an article. Rock.

Today was leg day. I do deadlift on leg day because I don't do heavy squat (due to an extreme tightness in my rear-chain that I'm constantly trying to loosen up), so it doesn't conflict, and we all really know that deadlift works the glutes, hamstrings, and lower back, and so better fits into leg day than back day. Anyway, for the fourth week in a row now I've added five pounds to my pull. That's crazy. I haven't had a run like this since I started deadlifting. I made it for a solid five reps (well, 1 strict, 4 touch and go) so I think next week I'll go for five more pounds and then I'll hold for a few weeks to make sure everything is as strong as it needs to be.

But I almost psyched myself out this morning. I do that a lot on deadlift. I know that I should be able to make a pull, and I fail it because some little thing isn't perfect, and then that builds the beginning of a wall and I might fail the same pull for a month straight. The thing that always gets me is that one of the employees always seems to decide to mop while I'm doing deadlift! I admit that I lift during slow times, but still. I feel like he's watching me, just waiting for me to move so he can clean under me, and I freak out and fail my big pull. Today he was vacuuming, and I said to myself, 'Great, there goes my streak.' But I did it. Now hopefully I can use this as proof in the future that he isn't placing a curse on me and I can pull a new personal best even while he's dust-busting my plates.

Today I'm going to try something new; I'm going to ask a question of you, my reader. I hope I get some good replies, because I'd love to have interaction here. That's really my ultimate goal with this blog.
Do you ever feel like you miss a goal because you've psyched yourself out?
Do you have any tactics for overcoming this when you can feel yourself building a mental wall?

If no one comments, I'm going to make another account and answer myself. Look for a name like "Superman's A. Wimp" or "Gym Ninja".