Earlier this week, I was helping a woman with some basic calisthenics exercises in the park. She saw me doing some bar work and asked for help. She is eight years younger than me, and started exercising this year. She runs 4-5 times per week, including the park run, but she isn’t getting the results she wants, both in terms of how she looks and how she feels. Aside from the fact that she is running too much and needs to concentrate more on strength training to build muscle mass, the crazy thing is that she knows exactly why she is failing to meet her goal: her diet. She knows very well that you can’t out run a bad diet, but yet she still can’t stop herself eating loads of cake. (Her words.) Then she said that I must have good willpower. This really stuck with me as I don’t perceive
This might sound like a not-so-humble brag, so bear with me, but one of the compliments I often get when I reveal my age to someone who can see my physique (for instance, when I am in bikini at the spa), is that I ‘look incredible’. One the one hand, I absolutely love this flattery (mainly because I am otherwise starved for it) and am therefore quick to reveal my age. On the other hand, it infuriates me because of the difference between the conversation I want the question/answer to lead to vs. where it inevitably goes. Like any evangelist, I want to talk about my twin gods of diet and lifestyle, but instead the next question I inevitably get is: ‘do your parents look amazing too?’ What people want me to say is ‘yes’, so that they can write my physique off to ‘good genetics’ and theirs off to ‘bad’. That
Recently I switched gyms and it was a terrible mistake. I was really happy at my little budget gym, but the HQ payments team kept fucking up my payments which resulted in me being locked out three months in a row. Once was a mistake, twice was irritating, three times told me that they had no interest in fixing the issue, so I threw my toys out of the pram and moved to a different gym. The new gym was equidistant from my house, bigger, had more equipment, and was £4 pcm cheaper than my old gym; but still, within a week I knew I’d made a terrible mistake and wrote to my old gym manager to ask him to deal with the payments team on my behalf. Thankfully he did and I am back at my old gym and happy as larry again and getting clowned for being a dick.
When I was about 25, I was hit by a car when riding my bike which resulted in a dislocated right shoulder. Because I was 25, I popped that shit back in myself. I’m not mad at that part; dislocated shoulders hurt like fuckeries and popping it back in (mostly) stopped the pain. What I am mad about, is that I never sought treatment to help my shoulder recover. Never sought treatment, that is, until about ten years later when I started to suffer almost constant pain in my shoulder, anterior and posterior, which subsequently spread into my neck. Not only was I suffering almost constant pain, but I started to suffer a progressive weakening in that shoulder that eventually resulted in an inability to do pushups and means that I have been chasing “more than one pull up” for a decade. When particularly bad, I wasn’t able to pour a