pussy

Just got back from my first official gym session. Today was all about establishing baselines, and to be honest, I'm still not done doing so.

I had said to myself that I'd get to the gym exactly when it opened at 6AM. I ended up getting there at 6:30AM, by which time the gym was already quite full. I headed over to the dumbbell station to get a baseline on that, fighting an ego-driven desire to start heavy so as to impress people. I needn't have worried: I'm too weak to start heavy with any resistance exercise.

My baseline is the weight at which I can do three sets of eight reps with a modicum of difficulty. Here's what I discovered today:

ARMS
dumbbell curls, standard: 12 kg
dumbbell curls, hammer: 12 kg
dumbbell triceps extension: 14 kg
triceps pulldown machine: N/A (no such machine in this gym!)

SHOULDERS
dumbbell raises: 9 kg
shoulder press: 30 kg

CHEST
bench press, machine: N/A (no such machine!)
incline press, machine: N/A (no such machine!)

CORE/UPPER BODY
seated row, machine: 32 kg
lat pulldown bar, machine: 55 kg

Shameful numbers, but that's where I'm starting. Here's the funny thing: if you look at the exercises that got an "N/A" above, you'll see that they can all be solved by doing pushups: I can work the triceps and the pectorals at the same time. It's a shame that my gym doesn't have a bench-press machine; all it has is a free-weight station, so I guess I'll be plunging into free weights when it comes to benching.

And rest assured, the exercises you see listed above aren't the whole list: I'll be adding as I go, and a finalized list will eventually appear as a spreadsheet, the way my pre-walk workout did. Biggest self-respect goals for this year: being able to do a single pullup, and being able to do twenty decent pushups. (I should probably set some crunch/plank/core goals as well.)

Righto... I'm off to do my morning walk: 29 staircases with the weight vest on. Lovely.