Gym Routines

This should be one long saga.

My body has embarrassed me all my life. I’ve fantasized about being Jacked & Tan™ since my prepubescent days. I gathered the courage to accompany a couple of my other chump friends when I was around 14, I’d say. It was pathetic. I then fantasized for a couple more years, until I was 16 or 17. After that, I went pretty regularly (all in secret, of course), and plodded along following whatever nonsense the trainer there told me to do. He was waiting for me to pay him extra to get a little of that good advice, but little did he know I was too shy to greet him properly. How the hell was I going to negotiate a training session?

Disclaimer: I am not ashamed or embarrassed of anything anymore, and if I had been like that since the day I was born, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this stupid post. The best thing you can do is stop being shy, as soon as possible.

I then went off to Turkey at age 18. Here I went very regularly. I also went hard. I also stopped asking anybody for tips and just did it. This worked for me, because I had over the past half-decade built up a reservoir of exercise knowledge that would make a savant jealous. I just never acted on it.

I followed Starting Strength for a while, the only difference being I went every day instead of M-W-F. I got bored soon, and it wasn’t stressing my body enough, so I added a bunch of accessory work. This template, I never really dropped since.

When I was 19 or 20, my knee was fucking up bad. I had a friend of mine check me out while squatting, and he said my knee movement was whack, which was fucking it all up. Luckily for me, I was young, dumb, and full of cum so I just took a short break (by short I mean like two days) and jumped back into it, slowly building up to my old weight, but this time with correct knee placement. I’ve literally never had a single knee problem after then, but I have always been unfairly lucky. Be super paranoid about form in the beginning. Once that mind-muscle connection is established, you can loosen up a bit and follow your gut more.

As for food, I ate a lot by volume, but in terms of calories and such, I was barely touching the bar. That explains why I had the strength of Hercules, with the size of an Indian coolie at the railway station. Both of those are direct quotes, by the way. One guy said my strength was “Herculean”, and another said I looked like some colonial farmhand. Not bad, but nobody would say Arnold was colonised, and I don’t want anyone saying it to me.

It did hamper me, though. Calories and macros are important. A cucumber does not have the same number of calories as a steak. It has barely anything. Measure your TDEE, try to go to the gym hard, and increase or decrease your caloric intake from the TDEE to get the results you want.

Now I definitely made routines that were way too ambitious. This happened because I would go HAM for months on end, build up to a point where my body was a machine, then Party & Bullshit™ for an even greater amount of months, and piss everything away. And when I started again, I was of course not about to stop going HAM. Problem was, my body physically could not handle that. I wasted many weeks running in this stupid hamster wheel.

Lesson: Keep track of different iterations of routines. Keep a basic one for when you’re getting back in. And keep a mid-level one for when you’re in the groove again. I never got to an elite level where I really needed advanced programming to keep track of what I was doing, so I can’t advise on that. Follow the routines online, they are way better than anything I can tell you.

Remember me comparing the cucumber and the steak above? Well, in 2020 I had a big steady income because of my job, and I had shaken off my obsessive aversion to spending money. In other words, I was finally okay with eating chicken every day (not every meal, though). Three months of that had me looking like Adonis again, after fucking up my body during the lockdown months. Diet and HAM are the real combo.

I’m in Germany now, and it’s the second-last day of September as I finish this sentence. I’ve been here since mid-June, and unfortunately my body just didn’t hit that sexy level despite hitting the three-month mark. I blame it on hobbies, socializing, commuting, trying too hard to set up a “diet”, and - in true German fashion - on beer and Kräuterlikör.

I’m going to close this on one note: You need time to recover. Even I do, and I’m apparently supposed to be some sort of colonial-era Hercules. When I used to go to the gym almost daily for months at a time, I would sometimes be forced to take a week gap for this reason or that, and when I returned to the gym after that, my strength would have popped like the pussy I was smashing in those week-long sabbaticals.

So, instead of pouring one out for all that deceased vag, I’m going to adjust my routine. Tentatively, it’s going to be 3 weeks of my personal 6-day variant of Metallicdpas' PPL, and then one week of a Beginner 5/3/1.

Let’s see how it goes.