My Resistance To Weight Lifting

Photo Credit: drpretty via Compfight cc

Well, now that yesterday's unpleasantness is behind (Ha! "Behind" - see what I did there?) us, we can move on to more important things...

(Crickets chirping.)

Funny, it's the screw-ups that make the best copy, isn't it? There is just not a whole lot of gripping drama to "My stomach seems to have recovered and my blood pressure is a little low." Error makes for better reading than compliance.

So, given that I will probably not be indulging in any humorous diet screw-ups today, I am free to turn my attention to something I should've started last week: resistance exercise.

I had sorta been waiting until I could make it up to the gym at our local community center, but I can see that waiting is not doing me any favors. 70 pounds of weight loss has led to a whole lot of sag. So, rather than waiting until I get out of the house and up to the gym on a regular basis, I am forced to turn my attention back to my fall-back tools for "weight lifting": resistance bands.

I will be the first to tell you, I am not a fan of resistance bands. I feel like they don't provide enough resistance, forcing really high reps to get any kind of significant benefit out of them. I am also not clever/flexible enough to figure out how to use them to target specific muscles, so I end up doing sort of general exercises (like standing rows) instead of muscle-specific ones (like, say, cable pulldowns). Once upon a time, I was a gym rat, and the downshift kinda drives me crazy.

However, doing 50% of something is always preferable to doing 100% of nothing. At least that is what my mother used to say when I would fail to turn in homework assignments back in school. So, I have put together a little resistance band workout that I will try to use 2 or 3 times a week:

• Chest Presses (To target that hideous mass of loose skin on my pecs)
• Standing Rows (To try to get some work on my largely ignored back)
• Shrugs (See if I can develop shoulders again)
• Overhead triceps extensions (The most awkward of all, as it involves putting a heel on one end of the band then reaching up with the other end.)
• Bicep curls (Standing with legs spread holding down the center of the band, grabbing the ends in each hand and curling - another weird one.)
• Forearm curls (Same as before, just engaging only forearms)
• Crunches ('Cause, abdomen fat/skin)

No legs resistance work here - the 3 - 4 times a week on our single speed bikes is about all the leg work I want or can handle.

Hopefully, this will have some positive result, though I am not holding my breath. I honestly feel like I might as well be doing isometrics instead - the bands provide similar resistance, and isometric exercise doesn't involve trying to jury-rig ways to keep the bands in place. Keeping my fingers crossed.

If anyone out there is successfully using resistance bands, let me know - I am just positive I am doing this all wrong.

Just Waiting Until I Smack Myself With These Oversized Rubber Bands,

- Hawkwind