Gah, another workout injury.

Pretty annoying, but not the end of the world. From what I understand, it's going to happen now and again and you learn from it and try not to repeat it in the future.

I'm pretty into lifting. I'm not exactly looking to be a bodybuilder, but as you know it's my primary anxiety medication. It's not perfect in that regard, but it keeps me mostly functional without the side effects of the medications I've tried that have mostly shifting my dysfunction around.

Overall, it's made me more confident in my appearance and generally a happier person. Check out my guns:

I was a pretty energetic kid, and I realized that things like pushups helped regulate my anxiety a bit in my early 20s. I did a lot of pushups, situps, and pullups through my 20s, but it didn't keep me stable the way lifting does.

I started lifting back around 2015 while at OSU. A friend of mine in undergrad named Anna (but not the Anna I've mentioned here) suggested it and took me to the RPAC a few times. Oh, that's the main gym on campus, it's amazing. Every kind of machine you could imagine, plus a running track that's super easy on your knees on the top floor with a fantastic view.

The days I spent going down to do lifts with her were some of the happiest I ever had on campus, which was usually a stress-fest that interchanged between sexual frustration with the lady who never figured out if we were dating and what ultimately felt like self harm in my studying. The days I spent with Anna at the gym were a welcome reprieve from the normal routine of my life before.

I hadn't done a lot of lifting after she and I ended up parting ways. By the middle of 2018 I was trying to stay away from alcohol that I'd become too dependent on for stress relief from my post-college life, and I kept my miniatures at my folks' house in Ashtabula far from Columbus. I needed another outlet.

My housemate at the time was a tremendously messy person who left the shared spaces of the house uninhabitable. I am being charitable in my description.

But they did have a couple kettle bell weights they'd fished out of a dumpster and so I did a couple workouts with them. I very quickly acclimated to them so I took what little cash I had and got a few vinyl weights at the Walmart that went all the way up to 20lbs.

At first I struggled with them. But I kept going, and after a couple months working at the IT call center I was able to afford some iron weights and really got to cracking. I was doing bench presses on my floor and I was determined to become strong.

Being physically strong is still something I am getting used to. I've snapped a couple bolts on my car 'cause I used to have to put everything I had into tightening them.

So the first time I injured myself would have been late summer of 2018. I'd just started dating Caitlin and I was still doing bench presses on my floor. I was doing roughly 40lb dumbbells by this point.

Since I lacked a bench or even any racks, I was lifting the dumbbells off the floor from the supine position, and that put a tremendous amount of strain on my forearms. I ended up dropping one of the weights on my chest one day, and I had to keep away from them for a while.

I remember being a little disappointed in that, but I figured I'd let it heal and I'd be more careful. It actually took me several years before I got all the equipment necessary to do them safely.

The thing I was really hellbent on doing the heaviest I could was bicep curls. It's traditionally the thing that really makes people think you're strong to be able to do, and I attempted to rush up to doing 50lb dumbbells a few times over the years and would end up straining my forearms again and again.

It wasn't until the last couple of years that I started directly training my forearms. I don't have naturally strong forearms, it's been difficult for me to increase the weight on them. Regardless, I stopped injuring my forearms after I started strengthening them.

But of course then my wrists started aching while doing them, and I realized I needed to do something called inverted wrist curls in order to strengthen those enough to do the non-inverted wrist curls in order to do the bicep curls without injury.

Funny how it's all connected. Annoying that this isn't all written in one place.

So I don't really use a gym. I much prefer to work out by myself and I have a pretty good setup in my basement. My time in gyms has been good, nobody's ever hassled me, but since my workouts tend to be short but frequent throughout the day, it's not practical for me to go in and out at different times. I'm just not good at dedicating a whole hour or so just to exercise.

But one of the downsides to this is not having a lot of guidance. I've had to figure things out through reading and I often miss the basics since there isn't really a universally accepted general workout.

I read Strength and How to Obtain It by Eugen Sandow (1901) back in 2009 or so. I was inspired by his opening words, but again, couldn't get my hands on any weights. I was less enthused by his racist anecdotes toward the back of the book.

So ultimately, a lot of my fitness journey (I shudder at how white I sound here) has been figuring it out as I go along.

So these days I do a lot. In the mornings, I do either side deltoid raises, situps, or inverted wrist curls with the smaller dumbbells, 25lbs or less and a 45lb plate for the situps. At the office I do some tricep dips and frog squats, or oblique side bends, all with a 30lb plate I keep in the office. After work I do the heavy workouts, bench presses, curls and overhead presses, hip and calf raises, mostly with the really heavy weights, somewhere between 80-100lbs. Then in the evening it's the smaller weights again with front deltoid raises, regular wrist curls, and more situps with the 45lb plate. I do a 3 mile run twice a week, though I've started adding one mile into other days just to wake myself up.

Well last fall I had a small shoulder injury on my right shoulder. I think I strained myself doing deltoid raises, going too heavy. I stayed off of it for about a month and it was fine, I've since kept it to lighter weights with more consistency and focus on good form and it's done the trick.

Well I've had some issues with my left arm since I got out of the hospital. I can feel an ache where they kept the IV in for a few days, but this past week I managed to exasperate my shoulder with the bench presses. I think it might be a rotator cuff injury. That's had me kinda worried, but ultimately I've decided to just relax and stay off of it for a while.

I've had to restart plenty of times as you can see, so anything I lose I can get back. But it is still annoying at best.

Workouts have become an important part of my life, as you can probably tell. It's something that I can always gain some satisfaction from, in challenging myself and overcoming some perceived barrier. It's surreal to me to go from being a very physically weak person to someone who is one of the stronger folks I know.

I was flexing at a goth night recently a friend of mine was taken aback, as she forgot that I'm "kind of jacked." I don't really exude jacked guy energy, nor do I particularly want to, though I have been told by Caitlin that I definitely have a macho side that comes out now and again.

Still, I'll take it easy. Give myself patience, like I've been trying to this year. Rely on the pull exercises and my running for a while and avoid pushing.

Well, here's to hoping for a quick recovery.