I’m still tubby!

In fact, I’m probably a little tubbier.

That’s okay, Christmas is a wonderful thing. Chocolate, roasts, chocolate, candies of all kinds, chocolate, casseroles, etc.

I’m certainly not going to be the one who abstains. So how do we reconcile our desire for physical fitness with the bounty of Christmas feasts?

We don’t. Who cares? I’m not exercising to lose weight or look better. I’m exercising because it feels so good. So I’m right back at it. Christmas isn’t a set back at all.

So let’s talk about some nuts and bolts. We were talking back a few posts about how I came across my son’s weight bench and weights and put it all together.

Now I’ve got a common weight bench and a barbell and a curl bar and some dumbbells. They’re all arranged in the corner of our storage room in our basement.

That’s all I need. I knew it from the beginning. I had everything I needed for a weight lifting experience.

Bench presses are the most obvious. The barbell rests permanently on the bench press rack and I keep as much weight on it as I can lift. I don’t move weights around from apparatus to apparatus, and I’ll explain why later. But bench presses are simple and straight forward and easy to figure out.

I had an easy curl bar. I love that bar. I keep it loaded up with as much weight as I can curl, but there’s something about that bar that inspires courage. When I feel like I can’t do any more exercise, I can always do more curls on that bar, and then I feel like I can move on to other exercises. I highly recommend an easy curl bar.

On the weight bench is a leg curl, or leg lift apparatus. I faithfully work my legs with that machine, though I’ve seen very little information about whether they are very good machines or not.

Finally, I have dumbbells. If you can get no other weight apparatus, get dumbbells. You can do almost any exercise with dumbbells that you can do with a barbell. Dumbbells are less stable than barbells and therefore make you work harder to steady them. In short, dumbbells are great. Even if you only have one dumbbell, there are countless exercises you can do with it.

Later we’ll talk about exactly what exercises I’m doing, and with how much weight.