Being cheated on was gut-wrenching. The worst part is I forgave her and she did it several more times. In hindsight, I was afraid I would not find a prettier woman than her. I was 20 years old and she was 18. Luckily though women do not stay pretty forever and now she's old/ugly like all people our age. (trying to be humorous as beauty is only skin deep and not as important as money)

Extend your warmup set or do two warmup sets (possibly with even lower weight).

Allow for a bit longer rest between the warmup set and the workout set.

Try both and see if either one or both makes a difference.

I fully agree with this! It seems that my body was converting my first working set into a warmup set so I should just embrace that rather than complain about it online. I will experiment around a little bit with it like you said and try lower weights but maybe my body needs a warmup set on my working weight? If so, I'll just do about half the reps of a normal working set and count it as a warmup set and see if that fixes my problem.

It sounds like your stabilizers are fatiguing faster than your big muscles

Great post and I appreciate your response. In the future though (for other exercises), what detail from my post gave you the biggest indication that my stabilizer muscles are fatiguing faster than the intended big muscles? Was it the higher rep count on set 2 than set 1 of my working sets? Or was it that I'm only on my 3rd week of practicing my dedicated tricep exercises?

What does your program say to do? This is completely exercise dependant as well as personal preference. 12 reps is completely arbitrary, as is 6 reps. Find what works for the lift and your body.

I typically refer to fitness youtubers with my top-3 being Flow High Performance, Jeff Nippard, and Mike Israetel. I forget the reason but they say some muscle groups benefit from volume in the 12-15 rep range, particularly lateral delts, triceps, and a couple others. All my heavy lifts (bench, squats, deadlifts, seated dumbbell shoulder press) I do sets of 3 reps simply because I find that rep range most enjoyable and because I've had remarkable success with that protocol despite (falsely) believing my whole life (prior to this year) that I was incapable of getting stronger or building muscle. But outside those 5-6 heavy lifts I do, I just defer to fitness youtubers since I'm still a beginner.

Who knows. It doesn’t matter. Push hard on each set, focus on form and controlling the weight, progressively overload according to your plan, and you will get big and strong. These little things will sort themselves out automatically over time

Fully agreed and well stated! 💪

None of my gym sessions ever go more than 30 total reps (with rare exception). Yesterday I did 5 total sets across 4 different exercises (Zercher Squats, Assisted Pullups, Assisted Dips, Seated Dumbbell Shoulder Press) and today I did 4 total sets across 3 different exercises (Seated Dumbbell Shouler Press, Romanian Deadlift, Close-Grip Cable Row).

Other than that, im out of ideas

My suggestion is to cut back your volume to 20 total reps per day and no more than 3 sets. If this "fixes" your energy problem then your problem was too much volume. The solution is to reduce your volume down to bare minimum then slowly add volume each week until you find your "sweet spot" where you still have enough energy to do more important tasks.

This constraint also forces you to be more mindful of your own "fatigue cost" of every exercise at the gym. For example, seated dumbbell shoulder presses cost me no fatigue as far as I can tell. High fatigue (speaking for myself only) are exercises which I find uncomfortable or psychologically difficult to do, even with little to no weight (such as hack squats, back squats, and skull crushers).

I have made unbelievable strength gains as a beginner in my 40's. Not much muscle gains but I don't care since that's nearly impossible to measure accurately and the increments are too easy to lie/cheat your way to size gains. Connor Murphy did a whole video about it around Covid or just before where he shows the importance of clothing, light, camera angle, pose, and 2-3 other variables which seem unimportant but massively affect how jacked you look.

Other than that, I've been experimenting with supplements lately and I've mostly copied Derek's (from More Plates More Dates) Gorilla mode pre-workout formula that he lists for free on his website the ingredients and amounts. Here is my "economy version" but Derek's formula is better:

Here is the paywall-free version: https://archive.ph/fBFRe

The only thing which finally helped my back was physical therapy. It was the list of 7 exercises she told me to do. I searched each on youtube and one of the videos included 2-3 extra beyond the one I was searching, and 1 of those extra exercises finally worked like a miracle! 😁 I still have the video bookmarked if you want me to search for it and link it.

Why do you need other people to decide that for you? It is both culinary skill and hobby. Life does not fit in categories described by single words.

Mainly FOMO (fear of missing out on a more "valid" hobby) but also to get others perspectives, including those I might disagree with because I'm often wrong in my initial judgment about stuff. I don't want to look back 20 years from now and realize I deluded myself into counting something as a hobby that isn't one, when the opportunity cost might be a better hobby that I've also been putting off getting started for the past 5-10 years (hydroponic gardening, wall/rock climbing, telescope star-watching, learning violin, etc.)

Ngl, and I don’t think you are a bot, but this feels like one of those astroturfed askreddit questions that come from bots.

I have terrible social skills in real life, I guess that bled into my online persona too. 🤦‍♂️

On the topic, whats important to you about a hobby versus a skill or technique?

I spent the first 30 years of my life in front of my computer. All my hobbies were computer or video game related. I also was immobile about 5 years ago (bedridden, over 400 pounds). It feels wasteful to not utilize my newfound mobility and do stuff outdoors. I can go back to all my old childhood hobbies when I'm old & senile.

Cable Tricep Kickbacks

Thank you! I will try them tomorrow 💪

A big insight I realized after posting today is how ubiquitous the 45lb plates are at gyms everywhere and that I carry them extremely frequently at my gym. I think that my brain is comparing everything to that standardized weight because even the 50's have a modicum of that fear/dread and it just so happens to be one size larger than the 45lb plates.

Tomorrow I will try to remind my brain that the 55lb dumbbells weigh significantly more than the 45lb plates and see if that "solves" the problem. For the past 2 years, I've plausibly been training my brain (incorrectly) that all the dumbbells weigh less than or equal to the 45lb plates. 🤦‍♂️

Great response, thank you. Here is my 26 month weight loss graph: https://i.imgur.com/QbOusoM.png

Basically I lost 100 pounds then regained 20 lbs during the last 5 months. I will try to research on how to reach 90% max glycogen levels but this looks promising:

• Aim for 5–10g of carbs per kg of bodyweight over the refeed window (36 hours prior to your 1-rep max attempt)

Hyper-awareness is a great way of describing it, thank you! This should help me search for it better if it's a common phenomenon.

Do you workout every day? And do you do just strength or also cardio?

I go the gym daily unless I have a prevailing reason not to. I miss probably 2-3 days per month but. I aim to do zone-2 cardio for 30 minutes 4-5 times per week but lately have been only doing 2-3 times per week due to the hot weather. During the cold months, I'd walk 2 miles daily. But now I don't enjoy it due to the hot weather, hence I go less.

20g carbs per day while doing sports is very low. It is possible your glycogen stores are depleting and making it harder for your muscles to keep working throughout your workout. So maybe also increase carbs on the days around your workout.

This is what ai said also, so I mildly carb loaded last night and this morning with a medium sized red potato of 150g raw weight (about 25g of carbs per potato) and I meticulously counted 8 gummy worms about 20 minutes before my workout (another 25g of carbs). After all, how much glycogen should I need if I'm doing a 1-rep max and it's my very first exercise upon arrival at the gym after 5 minutes of stretches and easy warmup? Maybe having maximum glycogen gives you more strength than suboptimal glycogen? During the 1-rep max, your muscles use ATP because the muscle fibers (actin & myosin) cannot use glycogen nor glucose. They require mitochondria elsewhere to phosphorylate ADP into ATP iirc.

(ai caveat: For a lift lasting ~1–5 seconds, the dominant energy system is the ATP-phosphocreatine system. Stored phosphocreatine rapidly donates a phosphate to ADP to regenerate ATP throughout the lift)

Maintaining strength with such a large deficit will always be super difficult, and remember that also weight moves weight, so don’t compare your pbs in weight as you shed pounds but in percentage bodyweight. The first weeks will be the toughest as your body adapts. Good luck!

Thanks!

That’s largely due to lack of mobility training. I would highly suggest making that one of your hobbies.

Already on it 💪

I thought you're just not supposed to talk to them if they reach out first (i.e. if you're a suspect) but it's fine to reach out to them as long as you're not a possible suspect to any unsolved crime in the last 90 days?

I'm in multiple low-carb communities and many people prefer erythritol over sucralose because they say it is better for your teeth. I'm in the sucralose camp and I've previously had a blood clot from my leg travel to my lungs, which 33% of people die the first time it happens to them. Team sucralose all the way! 💪

it’s not going to stick unless you have an application for it.

I am trying to get into "low dopamine hobbies" which is why I got into beekeeping last year and has been one of the best decisions of my life. Anything you do regularly becomes positively reinforced so as long as an activity isn't annoying or negative, you can do it more often until you enjoy it, even if it's not enjoyable at first. I also would like to practice speed at tying knots since that would give me a goal to look forward to. I'm a huge fan of watching speedrunning videos and always find doing something fast is entertaining, even if the underlying activity is nothing special in and of itself. I also love watching people play piano pieces extremely fast, and I myself have put in hundreds of hours of practice into playing 1-2 piano pieces about a decade ago. It gave me a goal to look forward to and I enjoyed the challenge, especially since I was terrible at piano before I began. 😁

I met another local gardener through an online board game but he was unable to offer advice on wilt disease prevention. Do you have any actionable advice on how to prevent fusarium wilt and/or verticulum wilt? I'm inexperienced with Lemmy so if you can't view this screenshot easily, I've transcribed it below:

I had a gardening question if you grow tomatoes

I have tried about 12 different tomato cultivars (medium to large sized, for sandwich slicing) and they all die halfway into their life cycle due to the 2 common wilt diseases in Florida’s hot humid weather

My best attempt was with better boy hybrid but I only got about 8-10 tomatoes and they were not big & healthy but undersized due to the struggling plant

I can do fine with cherry tomatoes (supersweet 100s and Everglades tomatoes) but I’ve never been a successful tomato gardener and have tried all the tips such as well draining soil, mixing in compost, watering at the base so the leaves don’t get wet, etc...

I have not bothered with hydroponic soil-free substrate but I bought 2 giant boxes of it a few years ago and still have it (coco coir and perlite) but it seems too much ongoing effort even if I got 50 tomatoes or more per plant

I also bought 200 rockwool cubes and might consider starting them in soil-free substrate and then transplant them when they are a foot tall, so they have a head-start at dealing with wilt funguses