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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1091 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for January 7, 2026

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:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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).

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New Year's resolutions check-in (mainly just to keep myself honest, but feel free to post your progress as replies):

  • Posted my first blog post of the year on Monday, about what the recent Bondi Beach shooting implies about the efficacy of Australia's gun buyback programs in preventing mass shootings. One down, twenty-five to go.
  • Went to the gym twice last week and on Monday, going again at lunchtime today: can deadlift 1.68x my bodyweight, squat .77x and bench press .64x.
  • Have not consumed any alcohol, fast food, fizzy drinks or pornography since waking up on January 1st, although I did unfortunately snack between meals on Sunday and Monday.
  • Have completed the first of 11 modules in the SQL course.
  • Have practised guitar for roughly one hour every day since January 1st.

Went to the gym twice last week and on Monday, going again at lunchtime today: can deadlift 1.68x my bodyweight, squat .77x and bench press .64x.

And I thought I had a weak bench press. My 2RIR is 2*0.84x. My deadlift is puny in comparison, 2RIR is just 6*1.1x. I think I could go to 1.2 if I did fewer reps and dropped the bar, maybe 1.25.

Bench press is weird. There's a lot of delta that depends on training it specifically.

I rolled at BJJ with a random kid the other week, and I was tossing him around pretty good all round, and after he asked me how much I benched. I told him I could do 225 (1.1bw for me) for maybe 3 reps, and I could probably do 235 if I tried, but I hadn't trained bench a lot in a while. He looked at me stunned and told me he just did 225x10 for multiple sets.

I'm quite far away from pressing 100kg. I got to around 80kg 1RM after concentrating on it, but right now it's probably 70kg.

It helps that I'm like 10kg heavier than you. Anyway, the whole point of the story was that bench isn't that predictive an exercise anyway.

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