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Wellness Wednesday for April 17, 2024

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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To silently encourage my wife to achieve the female ideal of “be slim,” I must reach for the much higher male ideal of, “Fully develop every muscle group.”

Of note on this front - the equivalent isn't actually fully developing every muscle group, it's just developing biceps, triceps, pectoral muscles, and lats. Sure, the ideal is higher than that, but the equivalent to "be slim" isn't being a Greek statue, it's just being lean and lifting enough to have noticeable upper body definition.

Am I being mind-blowingly vain?

Absolutely not. Maintaining your body and expecting the same from your wife is perfectly reasonable, particularly if you entered your relationship with that as a shared understanding and it's just degraded over time. I genuinely don't know how I would handle it if my wife just decided to let herself go. I would be thoroughly annoyed and looking for solutions - I think it's great that your starting point is focusing on what you can do directly.

biceps, triceps, pectoral muscles, and lats.

You really just gonna skip delts like that, damn.

Thinking about it, I don't know if I've ever looked in a mirror and thought I wanted bigger pecs. But I've definitely wanted bigger shoulders. A guy could go quite a ways with just supine-grip chins (on a fat bar, for forearms) and ohp variants.