LOTS of Lifting!

It's funny: I haven't been to our Y in nearly a year (51 weeks now), but I'm lifting more than ever before. I've been to my "new" university's gym a few times as I first noted in this post from last month. And I've been doing a lot at home with my 2 sets of dumbbells and a make-shift pull-up bar in the basement.

I wondered HOW much more I'd been lifting than usual, so I thought I'd look into it.

I know in the past, I'd do 3-4 sets/muscle group and call that good. Five sets was a great day. Now, 4 sets is an absolute "oh shoot I don't have any time to workout" workout. Five to 6 is standard, and 8 is good. A year ago (or long), 8 sets would have been unheard of for me.

Last week, I looked through my previous 2 weeks of upper body workouts. The week of the 15th, I did 20 total sets, and the week of the 22nd, I did 22 total sets. That's a total of 42 sets over less than 2 weeks.

For what it's worth, a "20 set week" is a very nice week, and that second week of 22 sets was a PR. So that's my biggest 2 week stretch of lifting ever: 42 sets/muscle group. (And then I did 21 sets this past week, so that now means 43 sets is my 2 week PR.)

I looked back 2 years in my training log to compare. (I didn't want to just look back 1 year because that's when I was injured [and in the boot and knee scooter], and I had started lifting a bit more to compensate.) I looked at my upper body strength work in February of 2019. I had to look well into March as well. Because it took less than 2 weeks THIS year to do 42 sets for my upper body, but it took nearly 8 weeks in 2019 to do 41-43 sets for my upper body!

(And overall time was similar. I did 6 hours and 1 minute of upper body in the 2 weeks that I did 42 sets, and I did 6 hours and 27 minutes of upper body in the nearly 8 weeks that I did 41-43 sets 2 years ago.)

That also explains why I'm taking way more gym selfies than ever before. I'm feeling good, people. Proud, but not in the "deadly sin" way. I've taken ONE gym selfie at my old gym, and I don't know that I ever did at our gym before that, so that's maybe 1 gym selfie from 2003 through 2019. I snapped maybe 2 last winter at the university gym (as I'd been working out harder since about November of 2019), and now here are some "fresh" ones because I'm feeling pumped:

From early Feb.


From late Feb. (Yep, got a new phone.)

Here's to lifting heavy things! :)