Three Months Lifting
I didn't know I could be a gym rat, nor that my body could feel this good - a retrospective of everything I learned in three months of weightlifting, from theory to building a practical workout program that's sustainable, safe, and fun.
2025-01-21
Contents
Introduction
Three months ago I got the idea in my head that I should do some serious exercise. At the time I was using my bicycle to get around town so I was doing fine in terms of generally “getting some movement”, but I felt like I should take this more seriously again, especially as I’m approaching 40 years now and my body sure doesn’t get any younger.
I then posted two specific goals on Bluesky:
Alright, I’ll put some specific goals on this whole exercise idea.
By the time I turn 40 (about 7 months from now), I want to be able to:
run 5k without my body and soul separating
do 1 full, clean, by-the-numbers pull-up
If I do more, even better.
Let’s fucking go!
I was always the skinny kid back in school, and not in the “lean” way but in the “weak” way, which other kids and also some teachers were very keen on reminding me of constantly. It has been part of my body issues ever since. I never conceived of myself as someone who could be physically strong, so this was quite a daunting idea.
On top of that, our society’s image of what women should be like doesn’t really include being strong or a muscular physique. This was much more of mental a barrier than I maybe would have liked to admit.
Getting off my ass
My previous experience with above-average exercise was mostly road cycling which I did for a couple years but that’s very different from strength training. I also had one failed attempt behind me of building some muscle years ago. Back then I had no idea what I was doing and I fell off quickly. During COVID lockdowns I tried again to at least get a 15 minute general mobility workout in every morning but I only managed to stick with it for a few weeks.
I see three reasons why I didn’t stick to it in the past:
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The exercises themselves weren’t fun.
It always felt like a chore I had to do rather than something I did because I enjoy it.
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I had no specific goal.
Both times I tried, I didn’t set goals. I just went into it, going through the motions and had no way of holding myself accountable. This made it easy to skip workouts, ignore stagnation and eventually drop off entirely.
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Dysphoria
It’s really difficult to see any progress or feel good doing exercise when your body feels wrong in entirely unrelated ways. No amount of training or dieting would have fixed my dysphoria. Those attempts were doomed to fail from the start.
I think I’m not alone with at least some of those issues. And while dysphoria is a somewhat special one and not that easily addressed, there’s things to do about the other ones:
- finding a form of exercise that you actually want to do
- setting goals
- tracking progress
For me the thing I enjoy turned out to be weightlifting, specifically powerlifting. This can be different for everyone. Maybe calisthenics (body weight exercises like pull-ups, dips, push-ups and all their variations) are your thing, maybe it’s long distance running, maybe it’s all about mobility for you. Of course there’s also the aspect of what you’re actually able to do. Sometimes this doesn’t align with what you would like to do.
At the beginning I didn’t have much of an idea about what I really wanted, other than the goals I had set: running 5k and doing one pull-up. So I needed some general strength training and to start running. Another barrier for me at the time was that I didn’t feel comfortable going to a gym, mostly because gym memberships are expensive, and I thought I would feel awkward and self-conscious doing exercise around other people. So I needed a plan that I could follow at home with minimal equipment because I don’t have the space for a home gym setup.
For running that’s easy: go outside. I have a small park nearby that’s perfectly fine for running. I just needed some running shoes and clothes, especially as winter was about to start.
For weight training I found this program that works with only dumbbells. I got a relatively cheap set of loadable dumbbells (more on that in the gear section) and got to work.
I started with three runs of 5km, at first in 400m intervals switching between walking and running and then slowly shortening the walking portion and lenthening the running ones, and four dumbbell workouts per week, which is a lot but also meant very quick progress early on and that really helped my motivation. I supported this with a pretty radical shift in my nutrition, towards a high-protein diet (see food section).
After seeing what I could achieve in a short time, I was hooked and everything after that became much easier. Here’s a quick comparison of my biceps between October 29th when I started working out and December 21st:
That’s progress of less than 8 weeks. If that’s not enough for motivation, then I don’t know what is.
I was on track and wanted to keep going. And because it’s what I always do when getting into something new, I study a lot to learn and understand how it works. So I had some theory to get into in order to figure out how to continue from here because I was quickly hitting the limits of what my little home setup of dumbbells and a yoga mat could do, and also it’s just fun to do a deep dive into a complex topic.
Some Theory
So, I’ve decided to become stronger. How do I do that? I’m going to go into different approaches and what they focus on, but first I need to lay some groundwork about how strength works in general because everything else builds on that.
This collection of knowledge is compiled from a lot of reading and watching videos by people who are far deeper into the subject than I am, some of which I’ll link to where appropriate. I’m not an expert by any means, after all I just got into this three months ago. But I am pretty good at putting things into context and organizing knowledge.
Where does strength come from?
Disclaimer: This is all very simplified and you can spend a very long time studying all of this. I’m trying to give an overview to an extent that helps understand the practical application for the purpose of creating a personal workout program.
Energy
Your body does nothing without energy. It needs energy do move, think, grow, recover, repair injuries, and just to keep everything running. The cells in your body have a universal fuel: adenosine triphospate (ATP)). You can think of it like a very tiny battery and you have a lot of them. When it’s “charged”, it has an additional phosphate group attached to it that can be broken off, turning it into adenosine diphosphate (ADP), the “discharged” form. Pretty much all activity in your body is powered by ATP. In order to recharge the spent ADP molecules back to ATP, your body uses other, slower forms of energy: mostly carbohydrates and fats, sometimes even protein.
Carbohydrates (“carbs”) are the easiest and quickest to use. They include various sugars and starches which get broken down into sugars too. They circulate around your bloodstream, e.g. as glucose which is where the term “blood sugar” comes from, and they are stored in your muscles and liver as glycogen, a molecule similar to starch that is made up of many units of glucose. Glycogen is the first level of reserve that your body has after blood sugar is depleted. It’s relatively quickly available but doesn’t last long. An intense cardio workout like a long run can absolutely deplete your reserves of this stuff. This will become important later in the praxis section.
Fats are the main method of storing energy for longer periods. Fats are either consumed directly or synthesised from other nutrients like carbs. They then get deposited in specialized fat cells which form fat tissue. When your body runs low on energy and glycogen is already depleted, it’ll start converting fat back into carbs in order to maintain your blood sugar level directly or to replenish your glycogen reserves. On the other hand if you eat more total calories than you use, your body will store at least some of those as fat. This is an important survival mechanism because throughout human history food hasn’t always been readily available all the time (and still isn’t for many people!).
Protein is kind of the last resort for your body to get energy, and it’s not its main purpose at all. If both carbs and fats are depleted, it will literally start to digest itself in order to compensate and survive. One of the first things that gets consumed for this is muscle mass because muscle tissue is expensive to maintain and much of it isn’t strictly necessary to survive compared to other organs. This is why an extreme calorie deficit is likely harmful to muscle development and maintenance, as well as to overall health.
Oxygen
In addition to energy, your cells need oxygen, specifically to “burn” sugar in the process of generating more ATP. This isn’t “burning” with a literal flame, but a chemical burn assisted and regulated by various mechanisms. It does generate heat though which is one way your body maintains its internal temperature.
If your respiratory and circulatory system can’t bring enough oxygen to your muscles, they won’t work at their maximum potential. This is why cardio exercise is important, even when you’re solely trying to get stronger. Cardio trains your body to absorb and distribute more oxygen.
Muscle mass
Simply put, more muscle mass means more potential strength output.
This is where hypertrophy training comes in: stimulating muscle growth. It is achieved through continually exposing a muscle to its current limits by getting it close to failure, the point where a muscle can’t perform a certain movement anymore without first resting. A common approach of getting close to the failure point is to repeat a movement for a relatively high amount of “reps” (repetitions) until it’s no longer possible. Because each rep is a relatively small increment, it’s easier and safer to get close to muscular failure. This is then repeated after a short recovery period. These batches of reps are called sets.
Over time the load for each movement insreases, either by adding more reps to a set, or eventually adding more load, resetting the number of reps again, and starting the process over. This priciple is called progressive overload and it’s really important to stimulate muscle growth consistently. It’s also one of the most reliable indicators of progress. If you can add load over time while maintaining form and staying within a certain rep range, that’s a clear sign of the targeted muscles getting stronger.
Hypertrophy is specific to a muscle. Training one muscle group will not result in meaningful growth of other muscle groups. So it’s important to include movements that target each muscle that you want to grow.
Some movements target multiple muscle groups. These are called compound movements and include for example: pull-ups, squats, deadlifts, and rows.
Others are designed to target only one muscle group or even just a single section of a larger muscle. These are isolation movements and include: biceps curls, triceps extensions, lateral raises, and flies.
Nervous system efficiency
Having a lot of muscle mass provides the potential for high strength but all that mass must also be used effectively. The nervous system can undergo adaptations that result in higher utilization of muscles.
The training for this adaptation is specific to a certain movement, e.g. squats, and requires performing that movement with high loads. Necessarily this is done at a lower number of reps per set because the muscles fatigue much faster under those heavy loads. It’s also much easier to accidentally go past the failure point when lifting heavy which can be serious risk of injury and accidents. (Look up “gym fails” on YouTube, if you want to see what can happen, but be warned: it’s rough to watch.)
Compound movements are usually used for this style of training since those are the ones that are tested in competitions like the main three powerlifting movements: bench press, deadlift, and squat.
The principle of progressive overload applies here as well. Your nervous system also needs to continually adapt to higher loads in order to utilize the available muscle mass.
Technique
Executing a movement with better technique can make it easier, more efficient, and safer. It’s a matter of practice and observing your mistakes. For example holding the bar too far forward during a deadlift is a common mistake that severely limits the potential maximum weight lifted.
Sometimes doing a movement without proper technique can feel easier in the moment (doing a “cheat rep” when you’re already at the failure point with proper form) but on heavy compound movement like deadlifts, this can be quite dangerous.
For some safer movements, e.g. biceps curls, it can be helpful to allow for some “cheat reps” in order to squeeze a little more out of a set, but it should be done intentionally and with care and not as result of ignoring proper form because getting used to doing a movement with bad form can result in higher risk of injury once you do it with higher loads as you progress.
Bodybuilding vs. Powerlifting
There’s two main styles of resistance training (exercises using weights): bodybuilding focuses on making muscles larger while powerlifting focuses on maximising strength output on a group of specific lifts: the bench press, squat and deadlift. Sometimes the overhead press is also included, it depends on who you ask. Powerlifting competitions tend to be about the first three.
Of course there’s a ton more things you can do with weights and a lot of athletes use resistance training to support entirely different sports, but I’m focusing on the ones where weightlifting is the primary thing people do.
As previously described in the sections on muscle mass and nervous system efficiency training for muscle mass and for maximum strength are somewhat in conflict with each other. Bodybuilding benefits from higher rep ranges (usually 8-15) while strength training prohibits high rep numbers because the loads are too high, so it usually sits in the range of 1-5 reps per set. Some people also try to combine both into what’s often called “powerbuilding”, to varying degrees of success. Recovery in particular can be an issue when training with high loads and high volume.
Bodybuilding programs tend to feature a lot of training volume, hitting the same muscle group several times per week often with a variety of movements to give the muscle a maximum of growth stimulus and to activate muscles across different states, stretched and contracted, or at different angles like with a bench press and incline bench press or doing different styles of biceps curls throughout the week.
Powerlifting programs on the other hand will usually emphasize heavy loads on the main lifts with low reps and much more recovery time between workouts that contain the same main lift. In addition though they also often feature “accessory lifts” to build up mass in muscle groups that are limiting factors in the main lifts. For example a lifter might be struggling with their deadlift and their shoulders give out while the rest of their body is still good to go, leading to hanging shoulders and a rounded back which is bad form for a deadlift. They might add some accessory movements into their program that target the shoulders and upper back, like rows and reverse flies. Some people will also add accessory movements to train muscle groups that aren’t involved in the main lifts as much, like the biceps.
Some lifters also cycle between these training styles, emphasizing bodybuilding for a while to gain muscle mass and then applying a powerlifting program to get the most out of that muscle mass.
When people are first starting out though, this distinction isn’t that important as basically both styles of training will lead to both muscle growth and strength gains early on. But there comes a point when it starts to make sense to think about whether and what to prioritize.
Nutrition
A training program should be supported by appropriate nutrition. Your body will need a couple of things in order to get bigger and/or stronger, or to lose fat if that’s your goal.
I’m not going to go into micro-nutrients like vitamins and minerals here since I don’t know enough about those so I’ll focus on the three macro-nutrients or “macros”: carbs, fat, and protein.
Carbs and fats provide your body with energy so it can do all the things it does. How much energy they give you is measured in kilocalories (kcal), or just “calories” (Cal) in the US because they must do everything different there.
Protein provides the building materials for your body. Proteins are large molecules made up of smaller blocks called aminoacids. Your body breaks them down into these blocks and then uses those to assemble new protein molecules for all sort of different jobs. Of the 22 total aminoacids that are found in organisms on Earth, 9 are “essential” to humans, meaning our bodies can’t produce them so they absolutely must be supplied through nutrition. The rest can either be directly consumed or synthesized.
Building muscle requires both extra energy and extra protein in addition to what your body uses throughout a regular day, and then that additional muscle also needs energy to be maintained just like every other part of your body. And of course doing exercise itself requires energy, although weightlifting workouts don’t burn nearly as much as cardio does during the same time.
A common figure for how much protein is required is about 1.5g of protein per kg of body weight per day. Depending on your diet and body weight, this might not be an easy target to hit but even at lower amounts, muscle growth still happens, just maybe not as much as possible. Plant protein tends to be a little less efficiently absorbed by the body so for a plant-based diet it should be adjusted up a bit depending on how much animal protein is present. I’ve seen recommendations for up to 2g of protein per kg body weight per day for a vegan diet.
If losing body fat is a goal, then there’s really no way around putting the body in a consistent calorie deficit. It’s possible to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time, but then the overall body weight will also be affected by the added muscle mass, and muscles are heavy. Body fat has a major influence on how visible muscles are, so if muscular aesthetics are a goal, this might be more important. But also overly focusing on body fat can lead to pretty unhealthy eating habits so approach this with the proper caution.
There’s really not that much to it. Consume enough protein per day, and adjust your calories according to your goals regarding body fat and whether you want to lose, maintain or gain overall body weight.
A very popular supplement is creatine, mostly taken as a powder mixed into drinks or meals, or as a pill. Powder tends to be the most widely available and cheapest form. It acts by giving a little boost to your cells’ ATP supply and delivers a little extra energy on the very short-term.
Praxis
Enough theory. This is where I get to talk about what I actually did, what worked, and what didn’t.
As already mentioned in the beginning, I started with a bodybuilding-oriented workout program that was compatible with minimal equipment and doing everything at home.
This was great initially and I made really good progress. However I quickly ran into limitations of that approach. The weights I needed to progress on my movements became too high to safely handle at home, for example barbell chest presses on the floor without the safety rails and rack of a proper bench press setup and no spotter where, if I drop a heavy enough barbell during a chest press, it may land on my throat and just kill me. I also wanted to do some exercises that simply aren’t possible in an apartment. I can’t do deadlifts in my bedroom, my neighbors would rightfully be very pissed if I dropped 100+kg on the floor multiple times a week and it would probably destroy the floor itself too.
Since then, my workout routine has undergone major changes. I switched to a popular powerlifting program called “5/3/1” and I found a gym that works really well for me.
When I started out I didn’t really have any focus other than those two goals I had set: running 5k, and one pull-up. At some point I needed to figure out what I want to do beyond that since one of those two goals, the 5k, was reached very quickly and the other will probably soon follow.
It helped me to imagine myself a year or two from now and what I would be doing then. While I do enjoy some running, I’m definitely not a marathon runner. I’m impressed by people who are able to do cool calisthenics stuff like pistol squats and hand-stand push-ups, but I don’t see myself doing that. But lifting double my body weight off the floor without much trouble? That sounds amazing. So that’s how I came to powerlifting.
Gear
For the two workouts per week that I still do at home I really don’t need much. I have a yoga mat, a few loadable dumbbells and weight plates, as well as a short 6kg barbell that I use for biceps curls and overhead presses. It uses the same plates as the dumbbells so I didn’t need to get a separate set of those.
About dumbbells:
Dumbbells are an amazing workout tool. They’re extremely versatile and can support you long into your progression. They are good for total beginners and stay useful at every level.
I would avoid those with a fixed-weight. When you actually make progress on your exercises, you quickly outgrow them and then need a heavier set. You end up with a large set of dumbbells that take up space and of which you only use a few at a time. Fixed-weight dumbbells are great for commercial gym because they very convenient and a big gym has the budget and space for them, but at home they are a waste of money and space. For home use you probably want a set with variable weight. There’s two options: loadable and adjustable dumbbells.
Loadable dumbbells are the “old-school” kind where you have a metal bar with a knurled grip section in the middle and weight plates that you slide onto both ends and secure them with wither a screw or a clip. These are by far the cheapest option, they work well, and you can easily buy more plates including second-hand ones. Just check the diameter of the holes so they will fit your bars. The downside is that they can be a bit of a hassle to set up when you do movements that require many different weights per workout, but you get used to it pretty quickly.
Adjustable dumbbells are the fancier option. They have a mechanical system where you adjust the desired weight at the grip and then they clip on the necessary plates for that weight from a stack of plates housed in a kind of frame. They are much quicker to adjust between movements but also quite expensive, and their plates can’t be reused anywhere else like on a small barbell. I wouldn’t recommend such a big investment at the beginning. If you end up doing a lot of dumbbell exercise at home and you’re annoyed by how long it takes to switch weights on loadable dumbbells, you can still upgrade to adjustables later.
However I realized quickly that I would outgrow the setup I had at home so I reconsidered the idea of a gym membership. After doing some largely disappointing research, I found out that one of the major universities in Berlin has a gym that’s available to students of most other universities in the city too and at a very low price compared to commercial gyms. This opened up a whole new world of options. Now I have access to standard size barbells and racks for powerlifting, as well as cable machines which are another hugely versatile tool. Cables offer a few advantages over dumbbells because they have constant resistance throughout the whole range of motion of a movement while dumbbells often have a point in the movement where they offer very low resistance. This happens for example at the bottom of a biceps curl as the dumbbell is first moved forward before it moves up, but gravity only pulls it down so you don’t get the full resistance of the weight until it has already completed a substantial portion of the movement path. A lot of dumbbell movements have this kind of limitation in some way. It can be addressed by leaning your whole body in a certain direction so the pull of gravity pulls at a different relative angle, maybe by using an incline bench or performing different variations of the movement, but cables simply don’t have this issue.
For clothes I usually wear a simple gym outfit for my workouts, just a pair of shorts, a sports bra and tank top. I might add some knee sleeves and lifting straps soon though. There’s no need to overinvest in this stuff early. You’ll figure out what is comfortable and convenient for you over time.
For running I have very basic running shoes and socks, a pair of long jogging pants for cold days as well as a running jacket for really cold days.
One thing I can very much recommend is a running belt. It has a bunch of pockets for small items and water bottles so I can pack the same stuff in the same places regardless of what clothes I’m wearing that day. It just keeps stuff easy to reach and organized.
For recording my workouts and health data I use an Apple Watch Series 9. I think some kind of fitness tracker can be really useful but it probably doesn’t matter much which one. I already had the watch so I went with that and it’s been working well. Especially for interval runs where I switch between fast and slow segments it helps a lot because I can program the intervals ahead of time and the watch tells me when I’m done with a segment and what comes next.
5/3/1
Jim Wendler’s “5/3/1” powerlifting program is a really popular one. It’s based on a four-week cycle with the first three weeks gradually increasing loads while the fourth is a “de-loading” week with significantly lower ones for active recovery. The training weights for each of the main lifts are calculated from the “one rep max”, meaning the maximum weight you can lift for one single rep in that movement. This value can either be tested directly or estimated using a one-rep-max calculator. At the end of each cycle the base values are adjusted (hopefully upwards) and the training weights are calculated
The name comes from the pattern of rep counts during the first three weeks of each cycle. As loads go up, the required rep counts go down from 5 to 3 to 1.
I’m using a variant of this program that is adjusted for beginners in that each main lift is performed for six sets across two workouts per week. The standard version of the program only has three sets total per main lift but since recovery for beginners is usually faster, there’s extra volume added to speed things up a bit since the standard 5/3/1 program has a pretty slow progression.
The main lifts for me are: bench press, overhead press, deadlift and squat.
In general this program is designed for slow and steady progress while keeping the training weights safe by always using lower weights than the possible maximum.
Accessory movements
For my accessory movements I try to identify the muscles that need extra attention. For example currently my triceps are limiting my performance on the bench press so I add in additional sets of triceps extensions, either using dumbbells or a cable machine, throughout the week to stimulate more growth there. For lower back in order to support heavier deadlifts, I do weighted reverse sit-ups.
I’m also still working on that goal of being able to do a clean pull-up. For that I use a pull-down machine and an assisted pull-up machine to slowly work up the required strength.
Apart from that I added some biceps curls, lateral raises, leg curls, rows and planks to round out my training and target muscle groups that aren’t that involved in the main powerlifting movements.
Accessory lifts can and do change a lot too, depending on what I feel needs additional training volume at the time. They are not set in stone.
Cardio
I started out with three runs of 5km each per week. After a while it became clear that this was too much and interfered with my recovery from weightlifting. I have since reduced it to two 5k runs per week and I’m still slowly improving my time so there’s still progress even with reduced frequency.
For low-intensity cardio I just rely on my everyday cycling around town and when I’m at the gym I always do a short cardio session for warmup, either on a bike or elliptical machine.
One thing about cardio that is counter-intuitive is that is often doesn’t really help with losing body fat. While it does burn a lot of calories, the body might just reduce energy usage at other times to compensate, for example by reducing subconscious movement activity throughout the day. I have definitely seen this happen in myself and it means that I should see cardio really just as a tool to improve cardio-vascular fitness, but not as much as a fat loss tool.
Food
Food was a pretty substantial change for me. Before I started all this I was eating more or less whatever. I didn’t really pay attention to what I was eating and much of it was probably not good for me. I had a lot of sweets and food that was high in carbs and fat.
Switching to a high-protein diet as a vegetarian posed some challenges. It’s not easy to hit my recommended 130g of protein per day and since much of that is plant protein I should actually adjust that number upwards to something more like 160g. I use protein shakes and bars to make hitting my protein target easier and I try to include some protein in most of my meals and snacks. Things like beans and lentils have become a staple of my diet as well as eggs, tempeh, and various plant-based meat replacements.
I was never good at tracking calories exactly. To me it’s frustrating and only leads to me not doing it at all. Instead I created a simple system where I classify foods into rough categories:
- snacks: up to 200kcal
- small meals: up to 500kcal
- major meals: up to 800kcal
During a regular day I will have either 2 major meals and 1 small one, or one major and 2-3 small ones. I’ll also allow for 1-2 snacks throughout the day. Some meals will be a bit lighter and some a bit heavier but on average this works to put me in a useful caloric deficit along with my exercise as I’m still aiming to lose some body fat while building muscle.
I have cut down significantly on sweets and calorie-dense snacks like crisps since those really spike up the amount of calories without offering much else and they aren’t particularly filling either. However I have not totally eliminated them and I think that’s important. I don’t want to enforce some draconian diet regime on myself that just end up making me unhappy. That would lead to giving up very quickly. Instead things like sweets have become exceptional treats which also has restored my enjoyment of them again.
Since I know that I’m prone to struggles with disordered eating, especially in times of stress, I try to not obsess over my calorie intake and to not punish myself if I “fail” my goals. I have mostly adjusted what I eat and not how much in order to not slide into harmful eating habits.
I started out at 89kg of total body weight, and I’m now at 85kg while having added substantial muscle mass. I’m trying to hit 80kg before switching to a maintenance level of daily calories.
I try to never go into a workout hungry or overly full. I try to schedule things so that my body has some time to actually digest food before I actually need the energy, so it can be converted into usable forms like blood sugar and glycogen.
As for supplements, I currently use only creatine and a basic multi-vitamin every day. Nothing fancy.
Recovery
I think in the beginning I underestimated how important recovery is. I only had one full rest day in my program at the time and that’s definitely not enough at the intensity of training I’m doing. I was often tired and had low energy for other activities as a result.
This was one reason why I started the 5/3/1 program since it has a strong focus on not over-doing things and the relatively rigid schedule prevents me from adding on too much training volume.
It can be difficult to notice the signs of incomplete recovery as they build up slowly. I can only recommend to pay close attention to your body and any unwelcome changes, as well as to err on the side of caution especially when working with heavy loads that require a lot of recovery time.
Early on I noticed some disomfort in my right knee while running and I made the mistake of ignoring it. On the next run the discomfort became pain and it took me several weeks to fully recover from it while the injury impacted all of my training. I was able to continue my program but I had to be very careful with the knee during that time. This could have gone much worse and I’m much more cautious now. I pay more attention to the signals my body gives me and I will cancel a run or a workout, if something feels too far off. I’d rather occasionally accept an incomplete run or workout than risk injuries that might prevent training for weeks.
Sleep also plays a major role in recovery. I noticed that after a night with too little sleep, my strength during workouts is lower and I fatigue more quickly. Recovery from heavy lifts also takes longer, if I don’t get enough sleep.
Conclusion
This all sounds like a lot of work, and it is. My workouts require a substantial amount of time every week and they’re a fundamental part of my everyday life now. But it’s absolutely been worth it. I have never felt this good in my own body, ever.
It’s difficult to describe how it feels to become significantly stronger. It’s more as if the world around myself has changed and everything else is now less heavy. It changed how I move through the world. I feel more confident and I’m less anxious. It has even had positive effects on seemingly unrelated aspects of my life. I have for example gotten much better at keeping my kitchen in order, which has always been in indicator of my overall mental health.
Also, it really suits me. I look incredible, if I may say so.
I don’t want to say everyone should try this, because whether it’s the right thing for anyone or even possible depends on so many things. But if you can, maybe see how it feels. It might be really fucking good.
