Weight Lifting | garagegym107

Posts Tagged ‘Weight Lifting

Oct

Progress Report 1 of 18

Categories: Precision Nutrition Certification
Tags: BodyBuilding, Book Review, change, Clean Eating, CrossFit, exercise, gaining self confidence, Goal Setting, healthy-living, Long term weight loss, Motivation, Precision Nutrition, Training, Weight Lifting, Well-Being, Working out, Workout

I started the process of obtaining my Precision Nutrition Certification about a month ago. I received all of my study material and slowly dove in.

After completing the required tasks of the introduction and chapter one, I settled down to complete the questions in the work book.

At my age, things tend to stand out more than they used to, perhaps because I’m a bit more open-minded about myself. I’m definitely one who retains more information if I write it down. And I’m much more eager to learn at this point in my life than ever before.

I realized that I had been sitting at the table for almost two hours answering the introduction and chapter 1 questions when it hit me. TWO hours will be the time limit cutoff for taking the full exam which covers 18 chapters.

When I voiced my concern to my spousal unit his response was simply “It’s not supposed to be easy”.

He’s right. The more difficult this process is for me, the more I will learn.

Oct

Fantastic Friday!

By garagegym107 10 Comments

Categories: Living Fit Daily
Tags: BodyBuilding, Bright Spots, change, Clean Eating, Community, CrossFit, exercise, fat loss, fitness, gaining self confidence, Goal Setting, Motivation, nutrition, Training, Weight Lifting, Well-Being, Working out, Workout

Lets just start the day off here. Old School style.

If this doesn’t make you wiggle a little this fine Friday morning not much will.

This week has been a week of success for myself and quite a few of my friends.

My friend Melanie is seeing progress for the first time in a while, it’s given her hope and the belief that she can make changes… Here’s to you Melanie!

My friend Tami went to the doctor for a check-up and was told she is ridiculously healthy.

My friend Melissa is over her funky cold Medina crud she picked up after the Warrior Dash.

My client Sheena has made amazing progress since coming back after giving birth to her healthy baby girl 3 months ago.

My friend Mary who works out in our parking deck group has made amazing progress on her air squat ability.

My friend Jamelia, also of the parking deck club is shrinking before our very eyes.

Joanna sent the sweetest email of how much she enjoys the parking deck workouts.

My friend Carol came through her shoulder surgery and even though she knows there are months of struggle ahead, she’s up for it.

My friend’s son Jackson in Washington State was overjoyed with a simple box of freshly grown cotton that I sent from the deep south.

Let me tell you folks, it’s the smallest things in this life that matter most. Being healthy, having the ability to move your behind, even if not exactly to the movement you’d like.

But biggest of all is having the ability to stop and be reminded of all there is that is going right in this life more so than complaining about what is wrong.

And on a final note, high-five to the Madison, AL police officer that pulled over the driver that flew past a school bus that had its stop sign out this morning. Happy Friday peeps!! Make it a fantastic voyage!

Oct

Fear

By garagegym107 1 Comment

Categories: Morphing of a Fit Woman
Tags: Body-for-Life, BodyBuilding, Bright Spots, Clean Eating, Community, CrossFit, exercise, fat loss, gaining self confidence, Goal Setting, Inspiration, Long term weight loss, Motivation, nutrition, Weight Lifting, weight loss, Working out, Workout

I had a conversation with someone yesterday and unbeknownst to her I could detect a strong vibe of fear radiating from her. Self-doubt. As soon as the conversation started the list of health issues came tumbling out. As if in some way that list lessened the importance of her overall goals. She said “I just want to be healthy”.

Being healthy is a great goal. In the beginning using the term “I just want to be healthy” is ok.

Fear of thinking too far ahead is very natural in the beginning, especially if you have significant weight to lose. I understand that fear. I’m absolutely certain I emanated that fear myself 12 years ago when I started my journey.

But I learned the hard way that you shouldn’t allow yourself to stay in that zone for very long. If so, you become reliant on your excuses. I remember the big one… “my knees hurt”…yes, when you carry 168# of excess weight everything tends to hurt.

At some point that vague statement of “I just want to be healthy” must transition to a plan. The plan must transition to action. The actions them must provide measurable results. If you can’t measure your success, you are subject to relapse into old behaviors, often.

See yourself as you want to be, not who are today, but as the fit and healthy person you want to be.

Oct

Issues, We All Have Them

By garagegym107 6 Comments

I was chatting with a friend who is struggling this morning. As we chatted, I was thrown back in time to that exact point in my journey.

I don’t know where these things come from, they just seem to come from deep inside somewhere teaching me again, that I have learned some lessons over this journey of mine.

“We all have issues. My issues are not smaller than yours. I’ve learned not to use them as an excuse to crap on my goals” ~Garagegym107

There is so much meat in that statement, I immediately had to type it out and claim it.

For years I allowed my issues to be my excuse for chronically sabotaging my fitness efforts with poor quality food. It took me quite some time to figure out that when I ate poorly, I in turn felt even more poorly and my issues seemed ginormous (yes, I know that’s not really a word).

It happens in the lives of most women who struggle with dealing with emotional eating. You are not alone.

Sooner or later, you must confront your fears in order to move past these issues. It’s not about willpower so much as it is about willingness to change and will to let go.

Our issues can stay buried deep inside and something silly can pull one of them back to the limelight.

In example, I’ve written about the online trainer that literally told me I needed to rethink my goals regarding physique training. In that moment that little liar in my head came screaming forward saying “see I told you so”.

I could have let both the negative self-talking voice and the online trainer derail me completely. The old me would have allowed just that.

The stronger, wiser and much more at peace, and confident me simply said “watch this”. My goals are set, my countdown app on my phone is set and I’ve been busy doing.

Sure, I have issues, we all do. Step back and think things through. If you are reaching for food, you are still allowing those issues to rule your roost.

Oct

Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS)

By garagegym107 7 Comments

Categories: Morphing of a Fit Woman
Tags: BodyBuilding, Clean Eating, Motivation, nutrition, Training, Weight Lifting, Workout

I’ve been working out for a long time. Seriously. Today I have one of the worst cases of delayed onset muscle soreness in as long as I can remember.

Yes the funny holding on to the stall walls, etc. I asked myself a couple of times over the last 24 hours a few questions.

1) Did my minor shenanigans post Warrior Dash wreak that much havoc on my body?

2) Did I do one killer lower body combo on Monday?

I prefer to go with the latter as the main culprit with a kick in the pants from the first option.

You see for me, I’ve learned that when I’m eating really clean, as in, goal seeking week after week goal seeking, clean eating, just the smallest infractions wreak havoc on my digestive system.

I learned a valuable lesson, even on a relaxed day, I need to remember that my body prefers a pretty high standard of fuel.

Courtesy of Wikipedia:

Delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS), also called muscle fever, is the pain and stiffness felt in muscles several hours to days after unaccustomed or strenuous exercise. The soreness is felt most strongly 24 to 72 hours after the exercise.^[1] It is caused by eccentric exercise.^[2] After such exercise, the muscle adapts rapidly to prevent muscle damage, and thereby soreness, if the exercise is repeated.^[3]

What I really need…

Oct

Never Going To Steal My Joy

By garagegym107 22 Comments

Over the past month I have seen numerous postings of one of my best friends before and after photos. Ironically, these photos are being taken by people attempting to claim her success as being a part of whatever fitness and training quick fix they are pushing.

What’s been interesting about the whole thing to both of us is reading all of the comments associated with her transformation. Especially the nay-sayers. One woman claimed to be “a trainer with 30 years experience” she didn’t believe the photos were real.

In my humble opinion, I’d run from that trainer. If she doesn’t believe this type of transformation is possible then you sure don’t want to pay her to convince you that it is not possible.

That’s why I love my friend and I love my life. We live our transformations every single day of our lives. We don’t have to go around using other people’s pictures to build ourselves up. Instead we use our own photos to build others up.

You see, no-one can ever steal our joy, we built it, we earned it, it’s ours to share.

We can walk the walk not just talk the talk. Let me just say this, it hasn’t been a cake walk. It’s much easier now than it has ever been before for both of us. But were it not for the road we’ve traveled, I would not be writing this blog.

People want change but people want change for nothing.

For all the ladies in the house…grab a tissue because this is a good one!

Let me introduce you to my friend Michelle T. . She is real, she is authentic and she is my mentor.

She has listened to me sob over realizing that a goal I set wasn’t going to happen. She never said I wouldn’t, just said maybe now isn’t the right time.

She has stood by me and patiently watched me impatiently struggle with being too strict with food and over training myself in to the ground all the while knowing that in my own time, I would come out on the other side.

You see, here is the thing about all of that weight-loss. Everyone is different. With personal patience, self-awareness and a personal belief that never waivers, long-term successful weight-loss can happen.

Each one reach one…Thank you Michelle for paying it forward!

YES this picture is real! Yes I have seen her in a two piece! YES IT CAN BE DONE!

Sep

Encouragement for Newbs

By garagegym107 8 Comments

Categories: Nutritional Cleanse Experiment
Tags: BodyBuilding, Clean Eating, Community, CrossFit, exercise, fitness, gaining self confidence, Goal Setting, goals, Inspiration, Motivation, Weight Lifting, Working out, Workout

About a month ago I started helping a girl from another floor with some workouts. We go up on the top of our parking deck at work and we workout. We laugh, we play and we work.

I live by the philosophy of “each one reach one” because in my own little naïve way I believe that it can be done.

We started with just the two of us. As of this week, there are now 6 of us. All shapes, sizes, ages and fitness levels.

I want to talk to the newbies out there. All of you new to fitness and getting healthy.

Taking that first step and sometimes that second step is really hard! You might be last when you finish, you might be embarrassed because you don’t yet have a range of motion that you need and you might just have very little belief in your own ability to prevail.

Well let me tell you this, if you really want to make changes in your life, you really gotta work at it. You can’t just say “oh that was hard, I’m going to lunch with my friends instead”. You can’t just say “well, I was last so why bother?”. You can’t just say “I’ll start next Monday”.

You get to go through all of the growing pains of the process for a multitude of reasons.

First off you must prove to yourself that you are willing to change. So get up day in and day out and get busy. There is no quick fix fat fixer.

Secondly, you must get over yourself and any need you have to feel sorry for yourself. You are now making changes and some of them might hurt. Suck it up Buttercup!

Third and probably the most important of all, no negative self-talk EVER. You may not be perfect, you may have caught a bad deal in this life, but beating yourself down day in and day out fixes absolutely nothing.

Everyday find something in yourself to be positive about. If you look past all of the hurt, anger and loneliness, you’ll find the beautiful worthiness. It is in each of us.

Sep

Scales and What Not

By garagegym107 8 Comments

Categories: Morphing of a Fit Woman
Tags: BodyBuilding, Bright Spots, Clean Eating, Community, CrossFit, exercise, fat loss, fitness, gaining self confidence, goals, Inspiration, Motivation, Weight Lifting, Weightloss, Well-Being

No, not fish scales. Weight scales.

I work with so many women regarding weight-loss and fitness. I’ve talked about scale weight before and how it fits in the big scheme of things.

If I could somehow be Glenda the Good Witch for just one day, I swear I’d love to banish all scales from the land!

Have I ever told you guys the story of going to our company “health-fair”? I consider myself pretty fit in the big scheme of averages so the health fair didn’t deter me. They checked both my good and bad cholesterol and both were impeccable. My blood pressure was also in the very good category.

So off I go the new super-duper body mass index machine. To use the machine you must be in your sock feet. I took off my shoes and when it was my turn, I jumped up on that bad boy only to receive this little ticker tape print out showing that I was by American standards “obese”. I literally laughed out loud.

One of the guys I workout with was right behind me. He 26 years old, six feet tall and has six-pack abs. Yes, I saw them during a workout class. You know what? His BMI put him in the obese category as well. I was already skeptical about our BMI standards anyway, but that pushed it over the top. The number one reason is that the technician never bothered to ask either of us if we work out on a regular basis. There is a different selection for athletes. Either way bad data.

Anyway, back to where I was going with all of this. Data is just data. It’s not a sign of success or failure, it’s a number. It is what we do with that number that matters.

If you struggle with getting on the scale to gather data then it’s time to ask yourself “why does this number matter so much to me?”.

What should really matter to you is if you are doing better today than you did yesterday. If you strive every single day to be a better person, whether it’s in your workouts, your finances, your savings, keeping your kids clothes clean and helping someone else out in some small way. You are moving forward.

Progress isn’t about what’s happening on the outside. It’s about what’s happening on the inside. When you figure out why you wrap success or failure around a number, changes begin to happen. You stop paying so much attention to the scale and to your appearance and start focusing on your workouts, how consistent you are, and if you are doing them correctly from a technical standpoint. Suddenly your body image starts to improve as does your ability.

One of the most refreshing things I’ve read lately was Lifting My Spirits about page and reading that she went on stage to compete in her first bodybuilding show without even caring what her BF% was. She just new by looking in the mirror and by doing the right things with her workouts and food that results were there. And that’s how this should be.

Do the right things and results will come.

Sep

I Don’t Have Time

By garagegym107 6 Comments

Categories: Living Fit Daily
Tags: Body-for-Life, BodyBuilding, Bright Spots, exercise, gaining self confidence, Goal Setting, goals, health, healthy-living, Inspiration, Motivation, nutrition, push ups, Training, Weight Lifting, Working out, Workout

I hear this comment often. “I don’t have time to train and eat right. I can’t imagine packing my meals and being at the gym at 5:30am. ” “I can’t imagine doing that with 3 kids”. In reality we all have the same number of hours in our day.

Some days I’d like to be a real hard nose about it, but the old fat chick in my head says “remember when that was you?” so I refrain.

What I would really like to say is this. You have a lot more time than you think you do so stop saying you don’t have time.

Swap half of your social media time for working out. Swap all of your TV time for food prep and you just might find a little extra wiggle room in there. I the beginning it seems like an undoable, impossible idea. It does for most people so you are not alone.

Give it two weeks. Set a timer and limit yourself to 10 minutes of social media at a time. For the next 10 minutes, try doing some air squats or some push-ups (even if your push-ups are on your knees or your leaning against a wall) or some good old-fashioned sit-ups, just do it for 10 minutes.

You will soon realize that you don’t have to move a bus to feel better, just move yourself. Care about yourself enough to do it.

I’ve learned that my commitment to consistency has been the greatest link to my success. Day after day, week after week, month after month and year after year.

Things got so much easier when I quit chasing “the end” of each phase. When the end comes, it’s over but you are not finished. I never imagined when I was 38 and just getting started that I would be creeping up on 50 in the best shape of my life and still working out consistently 5-6 times per week.

Ironically, I’m not finished. Now I see 80 as a new challenge. Just how good of shape can I keep myself in over the next 30-ish years. And even better? What do I want to accomplish?

Getting and staying fit is the greatest gift I could have ever given to myself. Learning to live this lifestyle has taught me that anything is possible. Now go get your greatness!

Sep

Ignorance is Bliss

By garagegym107 1 Comment

Most people really truly don’t want to acknowledge the truth about fitness and weight loss. If they hide behind the veil of ignorance then they don’t have to hold themselves accountable. I did that, for a couple of years, in fact. I managed to pack on an additional 168# in two years. Yes, that’s correct, in only two years I went from a relatively healthy size 10 woman to a grossly unhealthy size 22. That’s an average weight gain of 1.61 pounds PER WEEK.

Talk about a sad sack. But ignorance was bliss. No one really ever said anything about the weight as it progressively increased.

I could have stopped it, I could have changed the course of my life. But instead I used every excuse I could dig up, meds were making me fat, job related stress was making me fat, my obnoxiously nasty divorce was making me fat. But you know what?

I was making me fat. I was the one stopping by the fast food joints picking up a bag full of whatever daily special was going on at whichever place was super-sizing everything.

The beautiful thing in my story is that I truly believe that people can change and those changes can stick, like glue.

I know personally many people who have successfully changed. Taking themselves from being slightly overweight, or emotional eaters, to those like me, who were obese.

They’ve taken responsibility for educating themselves. They’ve put their own ego’s and pride aside to make these changes. They’ve humbled themselves to the point of learning and humbled themselves to the point of DOING.

The most important thing that we’ve all learned is that in this life is: it’s not always about me.

Reach out and do something nice for another person. No need to tell anyone what you did, just do it.

Each one, reach one.

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