Dumbbells are essential!

If there was only one piece of weight lifting equipment you could own, it would be dumbbells.

Even a single dumbbell provides dozens of potential exercises for your routine.

Dumbbells are not expensive, and you can even get high quality components second-hand. Dumbbells don’t take up a lot of storage space, and you can work out with dumbbells in a very limited amount of space.

A pair of dumbbells doesn’t take up much more room than a single dumbbell, and isn’t any harder to acquire.

Dumbbells are extra effective because they are less stable than a barbell, and require your muscles to stabilize the apparatus at the same time that the exercise is being executed.

I have three pairs of dumbbells that I love.

My light dumbbells are great for warming up and learning to exercises that I want to add to my routine.

My medium weight dumbbells are my work horses. I do most of my workout routine with my medium dumbbells. They are heavy enough to provide a challenge, but not too heavy to do multiple reps.

My heavy dumbbells are a great challenge for exercises when I really want to push myself.

My favorite exercise of all is the dumbbell fly. I use my light dumbbells to do a variety of flat bench and inclined bench curls and flys and presses. I use my heavy dumbbells to do flys that I do lying on the floor.

If you haven’t committed to a weight lifting program yet, go get some dumbbells.

Curls are for girls

Here’s another blog about the opposition I’ve faced.

I just can’t help talking about my weight lifting. It’s something that I’m very passionate about. But talking about weight lifting with the wrong people can bring the strangest reactions.

Recently while discussing weight loss and fitness with a group of young guys, my weight lifting routine came up. Like dogs who had spotted a cat from the front room window, they started to snarl and pepper me with questions.

“What kind of weights to do you have?”

“How often and how long to you work out?”

“How much can you bench?”

So I began to detail my equipment and my workout to these guys. Bench presses, dumbbell flys, lat pull downs, etc. When I got to the part about my military bar, one of them shouted at me: “Curls are for girls!”

What the???

Curls are for girls?

These two guys shared a hearty laugh and a high five. Apparently I had been disproved and humiliated. But I was flabbergasted.

One of these guys was a former college level athlete, and the other had been in the marines.

So I asked them how they went about working their bicep muscles.

No good answers.

Then it hit me: Some guys have lots of opinions about fitness and weight lifting, but don’t know much about it.

Don't get me wrong, if you're a girl, by all means grab some dumbbells and do some curls. I'm just saying that men performing curls with any kind of apparatus is good exercise.

It’s true that it's foolish to lift weights targeting only one part of your body, like your just your biceps or just your abs. But proper weight lifting should exercise all muscles in your body. I just don’t buy the idea that someone would want a strong body, but not want strong biceps, because “Curls are for girls.”

Educate yourself about fitness and weightlifting. More education brings better results, and makes you less vulnerable to dummies with zingers like

“Curls are for girls.”

My first fitness video! Subject: Dealing with Macho!

It's still kind of rough.
But I'm working the bugs out of the process, and I want to put up a lot of these, because I believe the visual aspect of watching my transformation will be very helpful.
So, let me know what works and what doesn't.

A big part of my program is doing your workout at home. There are a lot of reasons for this, and we'll talk about all of them. In this video I talk about the discomfort some of us feel at the gym.
It's just not for me.
I do, however, think that the expert advise that you can only get at the gym is very important, and we'll find out how that all works into my plan when I make an appoint to workout with a professional trainer.
But for now I'm making great progress on my second hand weight bench in a spare bedroom in my own basement.

My Routine

I love my routine. I look forward to it every other day.

There, that’s the first thing to know about my routine, I do it every other day.

I decided on that schedule because it felt right. I liked the “burn” I felt the day after working out. Then I did some investigation and found out that lots of people work out with weights every other day, because weights cause what is sometimes called “the 48 hour burn”.  From what I gather, working out with weights burns calories for two days.

The next thing you should know about my routine is that I’m not a professional of any kind. I’m not a trainer, I’m not a therapist, and I’m not a doctor. I could be making lots of mistakes, and doing some things wrong. If you’re going to start a workout program of your own, SEEK OUT SOME PROFESSIONAL HELP. I’m just telling you what seems right to me right now. Later I’ll share some of the resources that have been helpful to me.

So here’s the actual routine:

I start by warming up and stretching. Jumping jacks, stretches, wind mills (from elementary school PE class) and windshield wipers (look it up) I’m mostly worried about my back (remember, I’m old) but I also don’t want to hurt my arms, elbow, or shoulders.

Then I hit my weights.

Here’s a couple of terms you hear a lot in weight lifting: “Three sets of eight”, and “reps to failure”.

As I studied weight lifting routines those two terms popped up again and again. I resist both of them.

I do two sets of 15 on most of my exercises. At least that’s my plan. Sometimes it’s one set of 50 reps. Sometimes it’s even one set of 15 reps. Depends on the exercise.

More importantly, I’m doing a kind of a circuit or complex.  Maybe I don’t do it completely right, but the point of my routine is that it lasts for 30 minutes to 45 minutes and I move from one exercise to the next with very little rest in between. If heart really starts pounding and I’m gasping for breath, I rest a little more, or even better, I drink a little water. I’ve learned that staying hydrated during my work out is better than resting.

I’ll need another entry to talk about specific exercises and equipment, but what’s important to say right now is that the feeling is EXHILLERATING! My muscles turn red and I am quickly soaked in sweat. It feels great!

Do I do reps to failure? This means doing reps until you absolutely can’t do another, and you’re lifting absolutely as much weight as you can. At first I didn’t think so. Sometimes I feel like I could squeeze out one more rep if I really tried, but I’m working out alone, and I don’t have a spotter, so I don’t like to risk it. But I’m doing as many reps as I can.

Do I lift as much weight as I can? Some of my detractors have told me that I need to be lifting the maximum weight possible.

Well for example, I’m sure that if I had a spotter, I could bench press more than I am currently pressing. But it would just be a couple of reps.  Right now I’m pressing as much as I can for 2 set of 15 reps without a spotter.

So I feel good about the maxims, “3 sets of 8”, and “reps to failure”

Opposition. (these are true stories)

No one wants to hear about your new fitness program if you’re over forty.

When someone asks me: “What’s new??” I tell them that I’ve been working out.

That’s when they glaze over.

If I was young and handsome, then talking about exercise and fitness would be cool.  But that’s not my story.

So some people politely ask me if I mean that I’ve been jogging.

No.

Maybe I’ve been going to the rec center to ride the elliptical machine?

No.

I’ve been lifting weights.

That’s when they snicker and shake their heads and try to change the subject.

Later they’ll ask me sarcastically: “Still lifting those weights?”

True story:

Weights and benches and other related equipment really hasn’t been in my budget, so I’ve been watching the classified ads, and I’ve been frequenting a second hand store in our area called “Deseret Industries”

Recently I was at the D.I. and found a couple of great 25lb barbell plates. There was an old man looking them over, and when he saw that I was interested in the plates as well, he backed out of my way. As I picked them up to leave, he started to talk.

“Those are nice ones! I had a friend. I worked with him. He retired. After he retired he bought one of those. A real nice one. I think I remember that it was 300 lbs. Every morning he would jump out of bed and lift that thing into the air over his head and hold it there for several minutes. It worked great for him. He got real strong. Then one morning, he jumped out of bed, and threw that thing over his head into the air, and ……. CRACK!”

The old guy pointed to his knee.

“He hurt his knee?” I asked.

“No! His WHOLE body! CRACK! He broke his whole body!”

I’ve heard many crazy old men tell many crazy stories, so I didn’t mind asking.

“Did he go to the hospital?”

“No! CRACK! It killed him! He was DEAD!”

Yep if your over forty, you’d better not get involved in that weight lifting. Just as any crazy old man.

To heck with crazy old men, and to heck with rude turds who don’t want to hear about my new passion for weight lifting when they ask me what’s new in my life.

I winked at the old man warning me about those 25lb plates and said: “That’s great!”

They’re my plates now, and my weight lifting routine gets better and better.

Educate yourself! (and happy new year!)

There are so many great resources out there that will help you learn about diet and fitness! If you’re going to embark upon a new exercise program, you have the responsibility to know about the right and wrong way to do things.

There’s no excuse for doing things wrong. There’s just too much information about exercise on the internet, and at the library, and at the gym.

You can choose to be Tubby, (and yes, it’s a choice)

But you can’t wonder why you’re tubby.

So the search for information quickly became a part of my routine once I started to lift weights regularly. I found great books about weight lifting at the library.

Youtube was one of my greatest resources. There were endless videos about specific weight lifting exercises and techniques, and I quickly learned new exercises for my routine. I learned that squats and lunges were very important and should be added to my routine. I learned about rows and lawnmowers and kickbacks and pullovers and shrugs. All these exercises are FUN and they fill GREAT and they’ve made my routine more dynamic.

I learned from my library books that Olympic weight lifting exercises are great for my routine. They are explosive and good for the entire body. Yes, the people competing in the Olympics lift incredible amounts of weight, but when I do the same exercises with a more manageable amount of weight, several reps make my muscles burn and my heart pound. So I’ve added Cleans and presses and even Snatches, just because the name makes me giggle.

Diet education has changed everything for me as well. I listen to Dr. Oz. I don’t agree with everything I hear, but I listen for things I can try that will help. For example, I heard one doctor say that the best health advice he could give anyone is to start the day with a very large drink of water. He said that water should be the first thing that enters our bodies each day, and he was talking about a lot of water.

I can honestly say that drinking water first thing every day has changed my life. I feel better, and I eat better because of it. Now, some of the diet advice I hear just rubs me the wrong way. Maybe as I learn and continue to educate myself, my attitudes and habits will change. I’ll give anything a try. But I’m not ready to grouse through the underbrush for grubs yet.

Well, the time has come. I’m putting my money where my mouth is. You’re here to see if I’m really successful. So I’m putting up some pictures of myself doing my workout. I’m still tubby, but I’m making progress that I can see and feel.