Goals, again

Well, crap, I made zero progress on my Goals for August 15^th and it’s less than a week away now. I gave myself four months and made less than zero progress.

At that time I said I weighed 83 kilos and I could bench­press 55 on a good day. A bet­ter assess­ment would have been 52kg, as I fig­ured out the next day. The goal was to get both num­bers to 70kg.

Last night I went to the gym and, even feel­ing good and hav­ing high ener­gy lev­els, could­n’t do a full set at any more than 95lbs. OK, so that’s 43kg. 9 – 12kg less than I could do four months ago.

And body weight? 82.6kg on the scale this morn­ing. So I’m at the same weight but sig­nif­i­cant­ly weak­er, in just four months.

Now, I’m dis­ap­point­ed in myself for not fol­low­ing through on my com­mit­ment, but I’m not wor­ried too much about the rep­re­sen­ta­tion by the num­bers. I have start­ed to trade fat for mus­cle again and I have not been focus­ing on the bench­press. Since my goal right now is shal­low van­i­ty (Burn­ing Man, no clothes, etc) any­thing that comes off of around my waist is bonus, and for my short-term pur­pos­es, hav­ing good-look­ing arms is more impor­tant than actu­al­ly being able to lift or car­ry anything.

I can bare­ly get into my 31-waist jeans. 32-waist is too small and my gut flops over, but it’s not painful like the 31s. 33s are actu­al­ly com­fort­able, but I have that same effect of my bel­ly and love han­dles get­ting squeezed up over my waist, giv­ing me that apple-on-a-stick look. And that’s true up to my 36s. I have a pair of 38w jeans, and they don’t have that effect on me. But I can take them off with­out unbut­ton­ing or unzip­ping them, so I think it’s fair to say they’re too big.

I’d real­ly like for me 32s to fit me again although I have no desire to get that zom­bie-in-the-head­lights look sport­ed in the pic­ture beyond the cut. I’m pret­ty much resigned to hav­ing the puny arms. I’m built like a tyran­nosaur: thick, pow­er­ful legs and use­less lit­tle arms hang­ing down.

So any­how, what’s impor­tant now is for me to start get­ting real clear about what parts of the body I work on what days so that I can rotate through them and give my body chances to rest while still work­ing out fre­quent­ly. I’m work­ing on the assump­tion that just hav­ing mus­cle tis­sue burns fat, but i should prob­a­bly step up my tread­mill activ­i­ty in gen­er­al, and start look­ing for high­er mileage like Ham­mer­head says rather than my 20-min­utes-at-a-time stuff.