3 months of hitting the gym
In my previous post, I said that I live a very sedentary lifestyle and wanted to change that. So this is roughly 3 months of hitting the gym. Truth is this isn't my first three months in the gym, but honestly before I was kind of just fucking around instead of sticking to a routine.
I'm too busy to do more than three days a week at the gym so I decided to do a full body routine 3 times a week. The intention is to be able to hit all of the major muscle groups at least twice a week. I just searched up "3 day full body routine" and used whatever showed up in the search results as my routine. I was basically switching between Workout A and Workout B every time I went to the gym:
Workout A:
Bench press
Squats
Rows
Workout B:
Deadlift
Overhead press
Lat pulldown
It is a very bare bones routine. There are literally just 3 exercises and no accessory lifts. That's kind of the point of a beginner routine. The website I stole it from swears that it works though. The structure is so I have a push, pull, and leg exercise on each day. The 2 push exercises covered a vertical and horizontal push and the pull exercises covered a vertical and horizontal pull. I did 3 sets of 8-12 reps for each exercise. I'm very injury prone so I wanted to do a higher rep range with lower weight for my safety so please don't come for me because I'm not doing 10 sets of 1 rep to failure.
Honestly, I wasn't as consistent as I'd like to be. Sometimes I did it twice a week or even once a week. Other activities just got in the way. I also got injured from something unrelated so at one point I didn't even do it.
I was eating a bit more as well, so I gained 3 lbs (from 112 to 115 lbs). I made a small amount of progress in my lifts which I'm happy about. I think that my body overall looks better, but it's such a small difference that no one other than me would notice. I definitely feel better, although I still feel pretty weak.
However, I ended up stopping this routine because I started getting demotivated because the left side of my back started hurting after doing lat pulldowns. I think I re-triggered some old injury but I'm not exactly sure what caused it. I suspect that I'm not depressing my scapula properly but honestly the weight might've just been too much for me. It eventually healed, but then I increased the weight on my lat pulldowns because I thought it had healed enough, but that ended up triggering it once more. It is really hard to motivate myself to exercise when some part of my body is hurting (which happens more than I'd like).