Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

Put a sleeve on it

My knees are barking the day after a heavy barbell squat session. Perhaps it’s time to give up the facade and get some knee sleeves. I already use elbow sleeves when I bench press to prevent tennis elbow from flaring up. It’s time to wrap the other major joint of the other major limbs.

The hesitancy comes from this macho ego image of dismissing any sort of assistance. That using straps and sleeves will prevent me from developing my body to its full potential. Why shouldn’t my hands be capable of holding onto a multi-plate barbell for multiple deadlift reps without the bar slipping out? I want grip strength of the gods!

Of course that’s not how it works. I have to keep in mind what muscles an exercising is targeting. I cannot let hand grip be the limiting factor for an exercise - deadlift - that’s suppose to work the lower back, hamstrings, and glutes. No matter how awesome your grip strength is, it can never surpass the three aforementioned muscles. It will no doubt be the first point of failure, which is what lifting straps alleviate. I use them all the time.

As we head into the colder months it’s important to maintain warmth at the joints when weightlifting. That’s what sleeves do. Since I’ve started lifting I’ve been able to thankfully squat without any pain, but that seems to be changing as the weight increases on the barbell. The knees have soreness, and the upper back as well (you try putting 255 pounds on your back).

Alright then. Black Friday is coming in a month, time to take advantage and get a pair of knee sleeves. The good neoprene ones are not cheap!

At the limit

It seems I am stuck at around 167 pounds. Conventional wisdom is that if you want to grow muscle and get stronger, you have to eat more. I’ve been eating more for this entire year, and yet I’ve been hovering at the 167 pounds mark for the past months. Still adding weight on the barbell, though, thankfully.

I guess that’s the problem with bulking: what got you to a certain weight level, won’t take you any further. My body has reached an equilibrium with my current food intake amount. To increase weight further, I must eat even more. And honestly, I am tapped out.

Because I don’t want to become the guy who is obsessed about eating. I have to remember this whole weightlifting thing is about health and longevity. It should not dominate my life. The goal isn’t to maximize muscle mass or step on a bodybuilding competition stage. To eat any more than I already am will become a chore. And it won’t be comfortable, too (all that digestion). Hard pass.

Getting fat - dirty bulk - is easy: I’d simply eat all the ice cream I could ever want, every single day. That’s not my goal, obviously. Clean bulking is incredibly difficult. To get enough calories by eating the right foods is not only time consuming (fiber and protein is not as caloric dense as a piece of cheesecake), but also expensive (cookies are cheap). There’s a limit, and I’ve personally reached mine.

At least until they figure out muscle protein synthesis in a pill. What Ozempic is to fat loss.

The never-ending fight

I experienced two firm reminders of our mortality today.

First was a return of a coworker from a month long absence. Turns out he’s got colon cancer. Good news for him, the doctors caught it early and the tumor was successfully removed. Bad news for him, he’s got six months of chemotherapy awaiting him. It’s going to be rough for sure. Imagine losing your appetite completely when what you really need the most is to eat.

The coworker is only in his early 50s. It’s a reminder for me as I near the 40 mark to keep consistent with yearly checkups. And of course, continue on with the healthy eating and weightlifting.

The second was assisting an elder faculty member changing the password to her Mac laptop. I’m sure we all have bad days, but bad enough to where you can’t find keys on the keyboard? Bad enough where you can’t even write down a password on a piece of paper? The lack of normal cognitive function was alarming to see, primarily in concern for the faculty member’s well-being. Those phishing scam callers are rubbing their hands in anticipation.

Self-awareness is difficult when it comes to recognizing your own decline. There will come a day when the amount of weight I put on the barbell will begin going backwards. I hope at that time I will be reasonable enough to not force the issue. In the meantime, the fight against entropy is never-ending - until it does.

Healthy can be cheap

The greatest-of-all-time (GOAT) in terms of comfort food for me has got to be fried eggs. Pair it with some rice and roaster seaweed, and you’ve got the perfect poverty peasant meal. I am lucky to have income above the poverty line, and that combination still remains a constant meal choice for me. Love it.

Whoever said it is expensive to eat healthy is a lie. Rice, beans, and lentils are exceedingly cheap per pound. And it’s got your main three macros covered: carbohydrates, protein, and fiber. Beg at a street corner for a few hours, and you might be able to add an egg or two to that mix.

What does get expensive is variety. No one wants to eat rice, beans, and lentils for three meals a day, every single day, three sixty five days a year. A variety of healthy foods can get pricey. Especially if you’re like me and prefer the nicer kinds of fish (raw salmon is the GOAT), and the most prime USDA cuts of beef. Sweet potatoes are definitely pricer than lentils.

If I were indeed poorest of poor, I’d have no issues eating the same cheap thing for all the meals. Blaming poor health outcomes on the high cost of groceries completely forsakes the agency of a person. Even peasants have choices they can make. Of course it’s tough to eat without variety. I hate it too! But that’s the sacrifice one has to make for the sake of health.

The discipline to eat monotonously also comes in handy whenever I need to enact some austerity into my spending. That’s why eggs, rice, and seaweed will never go out of style for me.

How to avoid the sun

Word on the street is we’re on a tsunami alert!? There’s been a huge earthquake off the western coast of Russia (big wide country, let’s remember), and we’ve got a potential for destructive waves. 8.8 magnitude is quite a massive one, isn’t it? Those of us living on the coastal side of San Francisco are right in the crosshairs.

Thankfully there’s an entire width of the Pacific Ocean to dissipate that energy before it reaches us. Reads like there’s only a potential for waves in the single digits of feet in height for us. That’s nothing to evacuate over. Those are rookies numbers in this racket.

As an avid daily user of sunscreen (for the face), sometimes I wonder jokingly how on earth did people survive before sunscreen was invented back in the 1930s. Obviously, those who are outside a lot developed darker skin. The tanning effect is the body’s natural defense against the harmful UV rays. The most natural of sunscreen, if you will.

Surely people before the 1930s understood to avoid long term sun exposure, or to cover up as much as possible if the long term isn’t avoidable. Long sleeves, hats, face coverings: clothing items we all should still wear in our modern times when we have to be outside during the day. Sunblock or no sunblock.

Ever since I added the UV index reading to my Apple Watch, I’ve been surprised at how high it can get even on a cool and cloudy afternoon (San Francisco in the summer). I guess the bad UV stuff is still doing damage, even if it’s not necessarily strong enough - compared to a blazing cloud-less day - to sunburn the skin.

Lather up, people. Be happy we live on this side of the sunscreen invention. The technology is so good these days that it can feel just like putting on regular lotion: super lightweight, and non-greasy.

Do you even cardio, bro?

A few days ago I did some cardio on the exercise bike for the first time this year.

Let’s just say I really should incorporate cardio back into my exercise rotation. I’ve been so focused on chasing higher strength numbers that I promised myself to get back to cardio after hitting predetermined weight milestones. (Three plates on the back squat for reps, for example.) Priorities, you know.

Obviously, having solid cardio health can be helpful to adding weight on the barbell. Especially for the squat. Heavy squats for 10 plus reps is incredibly taxing - at least for me, an average man of nature. By the time rep eight comes around, I’m having to take extra time between reps, not because my legs are tired, but to catch my breath.

But long cardio session are so boring, no matter if we now have unlimited Internet videos to keep us entertained. Given the choice between cardio and leg day, the latter will always win out for me.

In this current dopamine hamster wheel world of ours, where fast rewards gets rewarded, weightlifting can be very additive indeed. Especially when you first start out. Every new week you’re adding more weight to the bar, or doing more reps than the last. The first time I moved my own bodyweight in pounds on an exercise was like the floodgates opening to a gush of new possibilities. You want to keep going and going until the next milestone, then the next.

What I am trying to avoid is turning weightlifting into my entire personality. It’s tough, because the rabbit hole - as with any other hobby - is deep. I have to remind myself that this is all towards keeping a fit body for as long as possible. Once you get past a certain weight number, anything more is for the ego. At some point I will simply maintain, rather than chase.

Two more months of dry

It is official: I have two more months of Accutane treatment remaining. A blinding light at the end a very dry tunnel. I cannot wait to stop applying lip balm every two hours, and regain the ability to comfortably go outside when it’s sunny. Trading seven long months of monk life for acne-free skin for (hopefully) the rest of life is a fantastic deal.

It was two months ago - month three of Accutane when I largely stopped getting new acne. After that momentous occasion, it’s just a matter of getting enough overall dosage. They use my body weight to calculate, and that’s how we determined there’s 60 more days of medication to go. My understanding is insufficient dosage can lead to relapsing.

I actually don’t mind the lengthy medication period. I am essentially getting pure cocaine-grade retinol, which is fantastic for skin rejuvenation. Those over-the-counter retinol creams might as well be snake oil when compared to isotretinoin. If the side-effects weren’t so severe (and they really warn you against getting/causing pregnant), and the fact you need a prescription, I’d probably take low dose Accutane for the rest of life.

But, normal life must go on. Soon as I am off the drug, I shall add running back to my exercise regiment (I run outside, obviously). My cardio endurance has definitely deteriorated during this Accutane period. I’d run out of breath doing heavy squats before my leg muscles give out. That’s not ideal: you always want the muscle being worked on to be the limiting factor.

Here’s to a swift next two months.