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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   1151 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for November 5, 2025

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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So, my birthday is tomorrow. Any advice for fighting the "birthday blues"? Particularly around feelings of having wasted one's life, being an utter failure as a human being, and yet likely still having so many more (pointless, futile) years ahead to suffer through?

I'm not sure this will actually help your situation, but I'm still going to suggest birthday squats. Whatever scheme you want. The formulation I think of is (BW + BW load) for one giant set of (age) reps. So a 185 lbs 40 year old would squat 185 lbs of external load for 40 reps. Pause at any point, but don't rack the bar until you've finished the set (or collapse). It seems unlikely you will be worried about future suffering after finishing, with any luck you'll be in so much pain you won't have any spare capacity to worry about anything else.

The formulation I think of is (BW + BW load) for one giant set of (age) reps. So a 185 lbs 40 year old would squat 185 lbs of external load for 40 reps. Pause at any point, but don't rack the bar until you've finished the set (or collapse).

This smells of https://xkcd.com/2501/

The number of BW + BW load reps your average American can do can be counted on the fingers of one carpenter's hand.

It is decently advanced.

That being said, a 2X body weight squat is a pretty achievable strength standard for most men. Very roughly, about 50% of a 1RM is a weight you can do indefinitely. It is supposed to be a challenge though. It's also about half of the 405x50 mark set by Tom Platz. So if the left tail of the log normal stops at 0, and the right tail is Tom Platz, halfway in-between doesn't seem that far out there for the average person to shoot for as a benchmark.

Very roughly, about 50% of a 1RM is a weight you can do indefinitely.

Hm, my squat 1RM is 1xBW or so, and I think I can squat 0.5xBW with rest, but without racking not literally indefinitely, but 40 times, so the math checks out.

I have no idea where the median of the distribution lies, so I can't say how reasonable your goal is.

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