Me in my happy place 🤗
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A few years ago, spending 4 months bouncing around between gyms would have frustrated me 😤 It’s almost impossible to progressively overload exercises when you’re constantly changing machines. Even if the “weight” is the same, there’s a myriad of different factors that will affect the load placed on the target muscles at different contractile lengths.
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These days I’m just a different type of geek 🤓 I’m obsessed with admiring machines that are designed well, and the challenge of using ones that aren’t 🧩 I embrace the puzzle of optimising a piece of equipment and how the more experience I build doing so, the better rehearsed I am to help answer questions from coaches because I’ve done the thinking in advance 🤔
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I’ve also learnt that you rarely come up with a great idea first time round. Provided you’re able to keep a mindset of what you currently think not being “the best” and there always being a slightly better solution, the more times you’ve been around the block, questioned your previous thoughts and adjusted the accordingly, the more refined your current thought processes will be 🧐
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I train to force strong contractions, and I’m pretty sure that if I push myself hard enough I’m not going to get much weaker just because I’m not being a slave to my logbook 📋 Don’t get me wrong - I’m all for tracking and continued improvement in the pursuit of measured progress, and it has its time and place.
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For me though, to sustain a passion for being in the gym for a lifetime, you have to follow what currently makes being in that environment as stimulating and fulfilling as possible 😃 In the past it’s been overcoming injuries, optimising for sports performance or just chasing numbers. Currently it’s growing my experience and challenging my critical thinking 🔣
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Kinda cool how fun a place even the most alien and poorly equipped gym can become, once you’re equipped with the knowledge to take getting “creative” in the gym away from coming up with what is essentially resisted choreography 🕺🏻 and towards playing with The Exercise Continuum & The Exercise Equation (two RTS trademarks) ™️
