Power Step class at Sats Jakobsberg started ten minutes late again today. This due to the instructor for the class before pulling 15 minutes of overtime. For the third week in a row. Jackass. I was so irritated by it that I had a hard time enjoying the Power Step class that followed. And I ended up in a really bad spot as well, so I hurt my hand on the ventilation-shaft-thingies they have in the ceiling due to this sub-optimal position. Again.

With the resent flood of new members at the gym (fulfilling their new years vows), it is absolutely packed in Body Pump and Spinning class. Incidentally the evening Body Pump classes at Sats Jakobsberg are placed directly after another class which makes it even harder to find a good spot when people rush into the room at the same time to grab the best spots. So I tend to prefer the classes where I can set up my equipment a few minutes before the class starts.

However, despite this annoyance I was able to build up enough focus to increase my weights for the back-track after struggling with the same weights for about a month. I don’t know what they were thinking when they designed the class and decided you should have the same weights on the first three exercises. If I put on enough weights to make the squats challenging I can barely manage the chest press, but the over-head lifts during the back-track are absolutely lethal with those weights. If I would use the same weights for that exercise I would hurt myself. Badly. Especially considering the low ceiling at Sats Jakobsberg. Hopefully the next release will rectify this.

Going down from five to four cardio sessions per week has already had a noticeable effect on my endurance. I feel more fatigued at the end of a Core Pulse session than I used to. Paradoxically the feeling is the same as that of over-training. I suspect it has to do with the fact that lately I have opted to drop Body Pump for an extra Power Step and Core Pulse class, and thus actually increasing the total amount of pure aerobic exercise.

I have been incubating this image in my head ever since I returned from my trip to Asia. I was inspired by the religious Hindu art I saw in Singapore and Malaysia to draw a deity in the same style. Now, I should mention that while it is not unusual for me to “get inspired” by various things, this is one of those things that just sort of stuck in my head for the longest time. The problem I had was that while it was a very strong feeling of inspiration I felt, the image in my head was not forming into anything tangible. But then about a week ago I started sketching on a picture of Ganesha and at first I was not very happy with it as I felt I was reinventing the wheel so to speak by drawing an image of a deity that has been depicted thousands of times in the past in every conceivable style and pose. And that is when I realized that what I wanted to create was not a traditional Hindu deity, but one of my own imagination. And once I had come to that realization, the image of a Hindu/Buddhist deity with the head of a elk was not very far away.

I wanted to tie the image to my own Finnish roots so the elk seemed like a perfect fit seeing that a special kind of elk, The Elk of “Hiisi” (Finnish: Hiiden Hirvi), is featured in the tales of the national epic Kalevala. Hiiden Hirvi was a powerful elk created by the forest deities known as “Hiisi” from the life essence of the forest. “Hiisi” literally means “a sacred place of worship” but is also the name of the spirits that live in these places. In the story the hero has to capture this elk alive to prove himself worthy to marry the daughter of Louhi (Mistress of Pohjola).

I used my sketch of Ganesha as a base and kept the dancing pose but added a couple extra arms (Hiiden Hirvi is said to have six legs, I figure six arms is just as good) and invented my own Mudras for the hands. I replaced Ganesha’s famous broken tusk with a broken piece of horn and replaced Ganeshas favourite fruit with a Karelian pasty which I think is the perfect Finnish-Asian-cross-over-food (rye bread with rice filling). Once I had these key features everything else just fell into place naturally.

Karelian pasty! :D Om nom nom nom!

You might be thinking that it doesn’t look much like an elk/moose though (besides the horns). This is due to that special ingredient that I like to add to my art which I call “The WHAT THE F*CK Component”. This is also the reason why I can’t draw a normal bellybutton or cover up man-boobs (what can I say? I love drawing nipples). I mean why is he crying and smiling at the same time? I have no idea. I just flow with the ideas I get in my head. In general, what my imagination comes up with is very dependent on what music I am listening to when I paint. When it comes to the weirdness here, the album Silent Shout by The Knife comes to mind (Spotify playlist). I like listening to this when I paint late at night, and just immense myself in the dark black echoes from the deep forests of the North.

The spinning room was exceptionally hot today so I was sweating like a pig after just a couple minutes of cycling. At least I got a thorough warm-up for the “main event”.

Guessing what weights to put on was a bit of hit-and-miss. If only I could remember what weights I used at my previous gym. At least I could see how much weaker I’ve gotten. :P To make matters even more complicated the weight plates they use at Sats Jakobsberg are not metric-based. They do have the metric weight displayed alongside, but the increments are not a logical 2.5 or 5 kg as I am used to. This annoys me quite a bit.

Some smart-ass had left an extra pin on the back side of the weight rack for the cable pulley so that I ended up lifting almost twice as much as I had intended. At first I didn’t realize what was wrong and I did manage two curls before I had to yield. No wonder the guy before looked like he was about to pop a vein. He just didn’t realize to look behind the weight rack like I was fortunate enough to do.

It was kinda crowded, so I had to do my exercises in a sub-optimal order since the machines were sometimes occupied. But I still managed to be in and out in just under 30 minutes.

To my surprise they didn’t have a machine for the Lever Seated Row. So I switched that exercise into a Cable Straight Back Seated Row which puts some additional tension on the stomach, hamstrings and glutes. Other than that I was able to do my exercises as I had planned it. Even the shoulder exercises went smoothly, I didn’t feel any pain or discomfort this time.

While I’m not a complete newbie to strength training I have not done it with any serious motivation, commitment or focus before so I figured that the best way to make strength training more fun was to create a similar type of journal as I did when I started running. This log will be used to keep track of strength gains and to build a sort of personalized catalog of exercises.

As always when I commit to a project I have started out with doing some quite extensive research and come to several conclusions:

Research suggest that no matter what I do, as a beginner, I should be able to increase my strength rapidly at first. So I should not have to worry about setting up a really fancy program as it simply won’t matter what exercises I do. Then it also makes sense to opt for the safest and simplest exercises I can think of. This is not only prudent but leaves room for future experimentation. This is important since it is considered beneficial to change exercise schedule roughly every 2 months. If you start out trying the fanciest most efficient exercises you have nothing left once you hit that infamous plateau. So keeping it to regular curls before switching to hammer curls would seem logical.

Research also suggest that the old saying of “less is more” also holds for the number of sets one should do. After the first set, you start getting diminished returns on every set that follows. I will obviously need more sets initially to find my starting weights, but I will eventually limit my exercise to a maximum of two sets of 8-12 repetitions per muscle.

When it comes to the choice between free weights and machines, I opt for starting out with machines since the motions are more isolated and thus safer. However since there are benefits to using free weights, I will move more towards that in the future.

At first when I started searching for good exercises to start out with I was quite overwhelmed by the huge amount of alternative exercises that you can potentially do for each muscle group. But one has to realize that it would be impractical to do all of those exercises all at once so one has to make a choice to narrow it down. So I figured, why not make this choice as limited as possible, choosing exactly one exercise per muscle. While this may mean that I might not be targeting all of my supporting muscles, I doubt anyone ever manages to target all muscles every week anyway. Also, it will certainly save me some time.

Another overwhelming factor is the amount of muscles that you need to work out. Even when you lump them together into “muscle groups” you end up with having to do eight or nine different exercises to target all of them. So to start out with I will do only chest, back, shoulders and arms, and then I can add the lower body workout to the routine once I start feeling a bit more comfortable with what I have.

With all of that said, I remind myself that “rules are meant to be broken” and set out to brake a few of the once I just set up. For instance, I will do two shoulder exercises instead of one and I do this simply because it feels like “the right thing to do” in my case considering my overly flexible shoulder joints. When I had picked my five exercises for my chest, back, shoulders, biceps and triceps, it felt sorta asymmetrical, so I added one more shoulder exercise to bring the number of exercises up to an even six, and so that there would be a symmetry between pushing and pulling type exercises.

Below you see the six exercises I have chosen to start out with.

1. Lever Chest Press	2. Straight Back Seated Row
3. Lever Shoulder Press	4. Lever Lateral Raise
5. Cable Pushdown	6. Cable Curl

Pictures taken from the exercise database at ExRx.net.

A complete workout would then sum up to a total of 12 sets, which I should be able to execute in as little as 20-25 minutes. With a 30 minute spinning session or alternatively a 15 minute warm-up on a treadmill and a post workout stretch this should feel about as efficient as any group training session. Once I add the leg-part to this it will obviously grow a bit, but probably not by a whole lot.

Finally, I should talk a little about goals. What exactly do I want to achieve? Well, first of all, I don’t want to build myself into a hulking monstrosity, neither do I believe that I have the genes for it. However, I’d be lying if I said I am not doing this based on a little bit of vanity. But then we have of course the health benefits. While I generally don’t do any kind of heavy lifting in my daily life to put that maximum strength to any practical use, the kind of strength you build at the gym is said to “last longer” compared to the endurance based strength you build in for instance Body Pump class. Increasing your muscle mass increases your metabolism as well, which I need to do in order to loose that last bit of fat that I have on my belly.

It will be interesting to see whether or not increasing maximum strength can help me increase the amount of weights I can take in Body Pump class. My hypotheses is that any cross over gains will be marginal at best.

One of the recommendations I was given during the PT consultation was that I should get some extra protein into my system directly after my workouts. It doesn’t come as news to me that the body needs protein to build muscle and that the body has an extra hunger for protein directly after a workout. However my real post workout meal usually comes one to two hours after my workouts, which is maybe a bit too late. Seeing that I am having trouble gaining weight, I figured I’d try out this protein powder stuff.

I ordered 5 kg of Whey-80 from Gymgrossisten and I received it in the mail today. It’s funny how when you specifically order 5 kg of something, and once you receive the parcel and you go to pick it up, you think to yourself: “Wow this weighs a ton, this must be like… five kilograms!” followed by my inner voice replying: “Well, duh! What did you expect?”. Happens to me every time.

It tastes horrible, but who cares what it tastes like. Anyway, I better get used to it, I’m stuck with this now for the next 4-5 months at the very least. :P

She also recommended Creatine, but I noticed somewhere on the product pages a warning that Creatine should be avoided when drinking coffee, so that’s an instant no-buy for me.

No turning back now, I’m a true cycling nerd now. I got myself a pair of cycling shoes today and a pair of SPD style cleats.

It’s a pair of Mountain bike shoes so they should serve me well both for spinning and in the odd event I might rent a bike in the summer or something.

I’ve always felt that the “cages” you use when you strap yourself to the spinning cycles while wearing regular running shoes were quite uncomfortable. That’s the main reason I wanted to try it out with real cycling shoes. Seeing that Saturday has become synonymous with “Cycling-at-Sats-Jakobsberg-day” for me during the autumn I figured the investment would be worth it.

Cycling is really the only form of group training where I can push my heart rate close to my maximum, whereas in for instance Core Pulse and Power Step class I sometimes feel that I am barely hitting my “second wind” during the most intense parts of the session. Also, spinning class is the only class that has moments I absolutely hate. Like tempo intervals. God I hate those. No matter how many times I’ve executed those intervals, they always feel tougher than the last time. But that’s the thing, once the body gets used to some form of exercise the exercise looses it’s effectiveness. Cycling just feels impossible for me to adapt to which means it is always a good workout.

Can’t wait to try them out. :)

Photos from my three days in the extremely hot and humid city-state Singapore.

Slow exposure of boats carrying some amazing light displays parading down the river.

Ganesha, a very common sight in the Indian parts of the town.

The Opera house.

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Pictures from Kuala Lumpur, capital of Malaysia.

Downtown Kuala Lumpur has some amazing skyscrapers.

Me standing in front of the Petronas Twin Towers. Wearing a matching t-shirt.

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Pulau Tioman, Malaysia.

Celebrating the “Fire Festival”.

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Khota Bharu, cherating and Mersing, Malaysia.

Fruit juice - in a bag.

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