Chaos and Pain: **To Lift, or Not to Lift. That is the Question.

23 April 2009

**To Lift, or Not to Lift. That is the Question.

Dunno if he feels like dogshit, but he certainly looks fucking retarded.

Ever walk into the gym feeling like a bag of hammered dogshit? Your lift becomes a Choose Your Own Adventure story, where you’re constantly debating whether to continue your workout or not. It kind of goes like this:

1) Should you lift? If yes, go to step 2. If not, go to step 6.

2) If you want to lift heavy, go to step 3. If you want to go light, go to step 4.

3) You’ve picked a heavy day! Work up to a heavy set and see how it feels. If it feels good, go to step 5. If not, go to step 1.

4) You’ve picked a light day! Warm up and dick around with some light weights. If you get ants in your pants and decide to go heavy, go to step 3. If not, continue to step 5.

5) If you’re enjoying what you’re doing and want to continue, keep it up until you’ve gotten in a decent workout and head home. If not, try to get some semblance of a workout in and bounce.

6) You’ve chosen not to work out. Go home, and think of yourself as a failure the entire way, even if you’re feeling like you got hit by a truck and worked out for a straight fortnight. Hahaha.

Those are pretty much the steps I go through in the gym. Typically, if I’m having a day in which I feel horrible, I hit the weights hard and heavy as fuck, because most old heads in the gym know that THOSE are the days on which you will hit random, brutal PRs. I have no idea why this is, but it just is.

Or you could just have the hottest bitch you can find spot you on a 585 raw bench.

Another way you can go is the, “holy fuck, I’ve been murdering myself in the gym lately and know I’ll hate myself if I head home, so I just fuck around with some light weights or do arms, and roll out.” I’ll also hit abs, calves and abs on these days, and be pretty psyched about them.

Finally, the last, and in my opinion, the worst, thing you can do is just say fuck it and go home. Typically, I won’t do this unless I have broken myself down to the point where I can do nothing without cramping or hurting badly in some way, and then justify my abandonment of the gym with that. If you’re just saying “fuck it, I don’t feel it”, you can string those days into a month off, or just abandon working out altogether. As such, if you’ve gotten to the gym, you might as well do something to justify your expenditure on gas.

Tis better to try and to fail than to look like a pussy for not doing a goddamned thing at all.