The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
Yesterday I went for a bench PR with my friend, who I started going to the gym with. I did 175lb for 1 which I'm pretty proud of. When I first started benching four months ago I could barely do 135x1, the empirical growth in strength has been really neat to experience. The experience of benching is so different from everything else I do in day-to-day life, the absolute physical struggle, with very little way to cheat form-wise feels so pure in a way that very little else does.
Congratulations, savor this period of rapid progress.
Just make sure you're being honest with yourself on this one. It's easy to get carried away as progress slows. Make sure you're keeping you elbows tucked to protect your shoulders, especially as the weights start approaching the 200# mark. Try not to cut ROM on the bottom, only count reps where you touch your chest as PBs. It's probably better if you keep your butt on the bench too, though I have to admit I've counted reps in training where my butt came off.
Don't do anything stupid, like going to failure alone in the gym. Bench is the only lift that regularly kills people.
On that front, deadlifts are probably the hardest to cheat. My deadlift comparatively sucks to my bench though, fortunately "how much ya' bench" is a much more common question than "how much ya' dead."
This was why deadlift was my favorite lift initially, prior to inevitably injuring my back...
Ugh, I saw a girl in the gym doing deadlifts and she was shaped like a question mark when pulling. What's worse, her personal trainer was right next to her and didn't give a damn.
There's some new stuff coming out saying that rounding is ok for low weight high rep training. I still won't risk it but maybe in 5 years the standard advice will change.
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