Week 1489

This week was pretty routine. 

Due to my gym routine last week, I shifted my rest day to Monday so I wasn’t doing my pull day on back to back days which meant that Tuesday through Saturday, I was working out each day. 

I have noticed that when I go to the gym, more and more people stop and talk to me. Sometimes this is great and other times all I want to do is get back into my lift. I love meeting people, love learning about them and their interests but I also like to prioritize myself so when people disrupt what I want to do, I can find myself getting annoyed pretty quickly. 

This generally subsides quickly as well but something noteworthy. 

I love being approachable but sometimes it’s a minor annoyance due to the disruption that can occur.

I have continued to work with Jack at The Bodybuilding Dietitians but am going to pause in January to try the RP Hypertrophy app along with seeing how I can push myself. With this, I am documenting my workouts in both Google Sheets with Jack and in the RP Hypertrophy app to familiarize myself with how it coaches. 

I’m not quite sure how I feel about RPE (rate of perceived exertion) versus RIR (reps in reserve) yet. I guess both are adaptable, I just sometimes struggle with flipping how I do my workouts. Anything is better than targeting x% of your max (this is what we did in college). My logic is that you aren’t always going to function at 100% which means that sometimes 80% is going to be too much where others, it will be too light. 

I ordered Kelly Starrett’s Becoming a Supple Leopard and Chris Kidawski’s The Back Pain Bible during my black Friday shopping spree and they finally came this week. I am still working through the intro/principle’s to Becoming a Supple Leopard but my wife and I have already started leveraging the first release in The Back Pain Bible and have been enjoying the “good hurty” feeling as we call it. 

I am layering this in with the releases from Functional Patterns and have found it interesting how airy my body feels after I do them. I am curious to see the long term impacts of these and plan to do them daily (more or less). 

I am most excited to learn more about why/how these releases work and how interconnected the body is. This has made me reflect a bit on when I was in high school and how I thought it would be cool to major in Kinesiology. 

I am also hopeful that through this I will gain a better understanding of my body and how to help prevent and reduce pain for Syd and I. I currently feel like the tendon on the outside of my left knee has been abnormally tight along with persistent issues with my left shoulder from football that I am hoping to remedy with time. Neither impact my lifting significantly but I don’t want them to in the future. 

Our refrigerator delivery was moved, which was really disappointing as I worked from home this week and it is scheduled for a week that I am in the office. This means that I will be at the whim of delivery drivers while I am already at the whim of our maintenance crew for whenever they can replace our window. 

I was most disappointed as I was excited to get a bunch of food for the dogs and to start applying a raw food course from Will Atherton to how I approach feeding my dogs but I want to wait until I know for a fact that I have a working refrigerator and freezer. My dogs will go through ~180 lbs of meat per month and I would prefer not to have any of that spoil. 

I was also looking forward to our inside fridge not having raw meat in it all the time. Sometimes blood gets all over the place and it’s just gross. 

I am currently writing this on a Saturday and sometimes feel like I waste these days away. I took Truman to play frisbee this morning and I took Ellie on a walk (I consider this productive), I have done my myofascial release, will go to the gym shortly, and have spent a good chunk of the day on YouTube. Some of this is learning but with my car pain point (Subaru Outbacks are solid but when you are traveling with luggage, two cats, two human-sized dogs, a human-sized human and a giant human-sized human - they get a bit cramped), I have been consuming a lot of content on cars… Cars that I can’t reasonably afford… 

Nothing like tempting yourself, right?

In the hours I have spent pacifying myself - I listened to a podcast between Mark Manson and Ryan Holiday where Ryan said, “you can’t miss the things that you don’t know about.” You would think this would help me stop looking at cars. It hasn’t yet, but I’m more conscious. 

I also need to delete Facebook off my phone. I didn’t realize how much I am on there until 

people talked about dogs and I was able to rattle off a rescue with specific breeds recently surrendered to them that they would like. Dakota. 

Back to my productivity - consuming content rarely feels productive. Especially if I am consuming content that I don’t intend to act on immediately or content that makes me want to buy yet another thing that I wouldn’t miss had I not known about it. 

I really need to clear out some of the shit in my house. A lot of shit. My desk is a hot mess. 

Nearing the end of Sunday, my desk is moderately cleaner as I recorded a video for this week for the first time in a hot minute. 

Sunday was lowkey but good and I got quite a bit done. 

Yesterday, I learned that getting meat for the dogs from a local butcher is significantly cheaper than getting it online and I am very excited to mess with the diet for the dogs. I have a transition plan for them and I am really hoping that everything goes smoothly and that it helps both of the dogs put on weight and have healthier coats and skin. 

Our fridge delivery also got scheduled for Monday afternoon. If everything goes well, I will be ordering ~50 lbs of meat for the dogs for the next couple weeks. That sounds like a lot but they will be going through at least 180 lbs a month… The garage freezer is a definite must. 

This will also complete Syd’s Christmas gift! 

Speaking of - I made the ultimate sacrifice of opening her gifts to me so she didn’t have to wrap them. Such a hard life I live. 

She got me more Vivobarefoot shoes, one of which I plan to wear to work. I really like them and I am excited to figure out how to integrate these into my style appropriately. 

I have had a mealy bug infestation in my living room plants for years. I have periodically treated it and I have the biggest outbreak that I’ve ever had right now. I spent the time rinsing all afflicted plants and spraying them with insecticide today. I will need to do this for the next month (which is typically what I struggle to be consistent with). 

I have done a couple of training sessions with the dogs, did my check-in with my dietitian, de-cluttered my office a bit, made and edited a video, and procrastinated reviewing my Japanese all day. There’s still time! 

I find myself avoiding this because it is so intensive that I get exhausted in 15 minutes or so. I used to be able to do this for 2-3 hours so it’s been wild to me but I am also being more intentional with my approach and intensive language learning is more intense that simply getting exposure. 

We have the last two episodes of MHA to watch tonight. I’m excited to see what happens and hope it ends on a high note as this has to be my favorite anime at this point. 

It’s 8:42 PM as I write this. I still have some ironing to do and I will do a dog training session for place while I do this