Bill Cammack

in: 161.5
out: 162.25

I knew this morning that something was “wrong”. I was actually fully recuperated yesterday, and could have gone to the gym then, but I decided to hold off until today, just to see the difference. Today, I was completely ready to roll, but I had a hard time getting to the gym.

Physically, I’m doing fine. Mentally, I’ve hit a stage that I had forgotten about, which is “lack of motivation”. I’m basically already satisfied with how I look, which is the purpose of working out if you don’t play a particular sport. It’s like when Fonzie goes to the mirror and tries to comb his hair, but before he touches himself, he’s like “AAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY :D ” and just walks away, hahaha. So I knew I needed to go to the gym today, I knew I could have gone yesterday but chose not to, and still, I just didn’t feel like going, haha. :D

I got a little cardio in, I guess, by walking to the gym. I weighed in @ 161.5 lbs, but like I said, I don’t necessarily trust that scale as far as calibration. Either way, it’s clear that my weight isn’t going anywhere, as my system starts snarfing reserves from wherever to replace the destroyed muscle tissue.

The problem today was that lack of motivation is very debilitating when it comes to pushing heavy weights. I just can’t convince myself that it’s important. I was listening to Gimme Shelter today, imagining being in some war, where everything was SO IMPORTANT, and I still couldn’t motivate myself to lift heavy. For that reason, I decided to do pyramids, or basically, as soon as I felt fatigued at one weight, I selected a lower weight and kept going. My goal was to fatigue on each machine and not go back around like I did a couple of days ago. It’s A LOT easier to lift lighter weights for more reps than it is to lift heavier weights for fewer reps. That seems obvious, but I mean mentally easier, not physically easier.

1. Close-Grip Pulldowns 150, dropping 20 or 30 each time I approached failure. Once I got to the point that the exercise was approaching cardio, I started sweating, immediately. The point being that that’s historically been my body’s typical reaction to carrying excess material (weight).
2. Bent Rows 50 35 25
3. Shrugs 80 70 60 35 – once I got to 35 lbs, I was doing sets of 25 reps each
4. Flies 120, dropping on failure. The way that machine is set up, so stupid :/ is that you’re holding the grips in your hands instead of having pads that sit right where your elbows are. This causes you to have to maintain your arm positioning WHILE you’re trying to pull the grips towards the center. For this reason, my biceps were failing even before my delts (shoulders) were failing, which was WAY before my chest was failing, which is the ENTIRE POINT OF THE EXERCISE!!! :/ I’m going to have to find a location that has the machine I need.
5. Pressdowns – Light work. I totally wasn’t motivated to go heavy on those, as I mentioned before.
6. Curls (Barbell) – I was going to go light, but I decided to step up from the “herb” pre-fab weights to the ez-curl bar with plates on it. I did a few reps with 25 on each side, so depending on the weight of the bar itself, I was either curling 75, 85 or 95, but I’ll assume 75.
7. Weight-Assisted Super-Sets 12 16 16 – Between lack of motivation and pushing towards fatigue on the actual exercises, I was pretty much done by the time I got to the super-sets. Since this is basically cardio, more sweat for me.

I’m thinking I’ll stick to starting heavy and doing most of my workouts light at this point. Obviously, I don’t know what I’m actually going to do until the day & time that I’m ready to go work out. All I know is that without some new form of mental motivation, going heavier is going to be impossible for me.

Another thing is that my recovery time has decreased to < 24 hours. It’s time to push my workout schedule to daily, and eventually twice a day. There’s a crossover between your body saying “I don’t want any more of this” and “I didn’t get enough of this… gimme more!”. Once you get to “gimme more”, waiting longer than your recovery period is only wasting time in achieving the outcome you’re aiming for. There’s the possibility of overtraining, which isn’t a good thing, but that becomes obvious when nothing’s really changing about your workouts, strength or look, and you can make adjustments accordingly.

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