cbloom rants: 03-19-11 - Fitness Links

I've started working out again recently. I'm trying to do things differently this time, hopefully in a way that leads to more long term good foundational structure for my body problems. Obviously that would have been much easier to do at a young age, but better late than never I guess. I believe that in the past I may have overdeveloped the easy muscles, which is basically the "front" - pecs, abs, biceps, etc. I'm not sure if that contributed to my series of shoulder injuries, but it certainly didn't help.

My intention this time is to try to develop musculature that will help support my unstable shoulders as well as generally help with "programmer's disease". So generally that means strengthening the back, shoulder stabilizers, lots of over-head work, and dynamic work that involves full body moves, flexibility and extension.

The other change is that the gym I'm going to here happens to have no proper weights (aka barbells and racks). Hey dumb gym owners : if you only put ONE thing in your gym, it should be a power rack with barbells. And of course this gym has no power rack, just a bunch of those stupid fucking machines. That is the most useful and general purpose single piece of gym equipment. You could get a full workout with just bodyweight moves for the small muscles and a power rack for the big ones. In fact I would love a gym that's just a big empty room and a bunch of racks and bars, but that's reserved for pro athletes and nutters like crossfit.

Anyway, the one thing they do have is kettlebells, so I'm doing that. It's pretty fun learning the new moves. If you read the forums you'll see a bunch of doofuses talking about how kettlebells "change everything" and are "so much more fun". No, they're not. But they are different. So if you've done normal weights for many years and you're sick of it, it might be a nice change of pace. Learning new moves gives you mind something to do while your body is lugging weight around, it keeps you from dieing of boredom.

I'm also trying to avoid all crunch-like movements for abs, that is, all contractions. So far I'm doing a bunch of plank variants, and of course things like overhead farmers walks, but I may have to figure out some more to add to that. One of the best exercises for abs is just heavy deadlifts, but sadly I can't do that in the dumb yuppie gym.

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6 comments:

Wes said...: Why are you avoiding contractions for abs? They're not a good exercise?; March 21, 2011 at 11:34 PM
cbloom said...: They're fine if you want to make certain ab muscles stronger.

For most programmers, such as myself, one of the biggest body problems for programmers is tightness and shortness through the front, from the pelvis to the collarbone. Contractions in general contribute to that. You can balance it by doing a lot of stretching and a lot of back extensions, but most people don't because front contractions are so much easier than back contractions, and stretching takes a lot of time.

So if you just go do some ab crunches and then sit at a computer the rest of the time, you are tightening a rubber band on the front of your body which messes up the ribs, tilts the collarbone down, messes up the shoulders, etc.; March 21, 2011 at 11:47 PM
castano said...: MobilityWod is pretty awesome. I also like its sister site: GymnasticsWod.; March 22, 2011 at 12:02 AM
Tom Forsyth said...: It sounds like you want to learn to row.; March 23, 2011 at 10:35 PM
Per Vognsen said...: I did weightlifting in Korea for a bit less than a year but took a long break of 1.5 years because of my travels. About ten days ago I got back into it while I'm waiting to fly to RAD on the 18th.

My gym isn't as bad as yours but it's still pretty damn bad. There's a power rack but it doesn't have safety pins, so I can't really do max-effort back squats and have to be a bit less aggressive with them than I'd like. I'm doing overhead squats but they don't have bumper plates and so I can't really dump the bar. The floor around the power rack is also uneven and wobbly as hell. So, everything kind of sucks, but it'll have to do for the next few weeks.

Hoping to find a real barbell place over there...; April 2, 2011 at 1:41 PM
cbloom said...: "Hoping to find a real barbell place over there... "

It's hard to find. There used to be an *awesome* one in Redmond 10 years ago, one of my favorite gyms ever. Chalk everywhere and huge guys doing 700 pounds and passing out.

Anyhoo, there is a crossfit place right near RAD, and if you can get past the kool-aid drinking and mild cult-ishness of it, they do have proper weights.; April 2, 2011 at 1:44 PM

cbloom rants

3/19/2011

03-19-11 - Fitness Links

6 comments:

old rants