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.

I give up!

People who take up new exercises always seem to give up eventually anyway. Why can’t I give up?

I’ve always hated running anyway. I’ve always been the worst runner you’ve ever seen. Even as a kid playing little league sports, I was the last little shuffler around the track when we ran laps.
But I’m not giving up on running. I’m giving up my excuses to NOT run.
I wasn’t running at all when I first started working out. After working out for a few weeks, I realized that working out with weights left me feeling constricted.  Sometimes I would get charly horse cramps in the middle of the night after working out. It was suggested to me that I should stretch out after my workouts.  But I instinctively knew the answer to this problem.  I had to face my old nemesis, running.  And I was right! Running after working out with weights felt absolutely fantastic.

A lot of my running is really walking. But I push myself to run as much as I can. I go twice around the mile track at our local park. I go as soon as I’m done with my weight routine.

As much as I don’t like running, whenever I did run I could always feel immediately that running was a great thing to do and has important results.

I’m also giving up on obsessing about doing the exercises correctly. Zig Ziglar used to say that anything worth doing was worth doing POORLY, until you can learn to do it well. Well, I’m going to do my exercises poorly, but consistently until I learn to do them well.

So if I’m letting my body sway too much, or bending my elbows too much or doing the reps too fast, that’s okay. I’ll work on it, and soon I’ll be performing these exercises correctly.  The trick is to keep trying, and to keep increasing the amount of weight I’m lifting.

If I’m going to give up on trying to do my exercises perfectly, I’m going to have to give up on avoiding information, because although I want some lea way in learning to do my exercises correctly, I also don’t want to hurt myself. I need to know when my poor form is dangerous to my body. 

Maybe the next thing I need to give up is my diet. I have horrible eating habits. I need to give up. I need to give up second helpings, and large pieces of birthday cake, and most of all I need to give up cola drinks.

FREE WEIGHTS! This post is about free weights.

Searching for exercise equipment felt right until my friend Dan called one night to chat. I told him my story and how I felt the urge to exercise. Dan said that my idea was all wrong because I have a finished basement and carport. I have no place to stash exercise equipment where I can’t see it.

Dan was right. I was kidding myself.  I had no real interest in cables and pulleys and whirring machines.

Then one day I was cleaning out my garage when I came across my son’s old weight bench.  I pulled it out, dusted it off, and set it up.

I put together the dumbbells and the barbell with different amounts of weights. I started experimenting and playing around.  Suddenly I was having a ball! I was alone so I wasn’t trying to kill myself to impress anyone.  

I tried different amounts of weight on each apparatus until the exercises really felt good.

I played around with the weights and the bench for about an hour. I didn’t know anything about weight lifting exercises, but I tried everything that seemed obvious.  After I was finished I felt really great. I really had fun.  I knew that I had discovered a new hobby.

The next day I still felt great. I could really feel a burning in my muscles, but I wasn’t aching or in pain as I have been in the past when I’ve worked out too vigorously. I just felt a chill and a glow all over. I cleaned out a corner of a storage room in our basement, and set the weigh bench up permanently.

I was on my way.

I didn’t work out the second day because of the time it took me to get everything set up. But the following day, I thought about working out as soon as I woke up. I looked at my day’s schedule and found my free half hour and actually felt excited about my upcoming workout.

We’ll talk about how the process developed next.

I really was a middle aged tub of lard!

I probably still am.
I saw a friend at a recent high school event. Like me, this friend was there supporting his high school kids.
My friend is a career military man, and he's in top physical form! I commented to my wife that my goal is to look like Troy one day. She told me that she understood my goal, but she pointed out that Troy has ALWAYS been in top physical shape, and I've been tubby since the mid nineties.
It's going to take some time.
Exercise programs on tv tell me that I can get "ripped" in just a few weeks.
Maybe.
But what I've been learning this year is another way.
What I've been doing has changed my life in many ways. My experience is permanent. I'm not punishing myself, I'm rewarding myself. I still have some bad habits to overcome, but my motivation is more clear every day.
My body is changing, my priorities are changing, my schedule is changing, and the way I live my life is changing. I've been excited and happy about life again. Even through some really hard trials this year, my new experience has made me feel like things are going my way.

I'm going to explain it all, and with pictures and videos. This probably isn't an program you can follow, but I'll bet that what I've discovered can TRULY inspire you.