Locked in, lunch meat, too many balls
Due to a lack of time I am trying to jam in blog entries where I can and in some cases, combine some of my Dufisthenics content in here as well.
On Monday I finally got the combination I have been hoping for at Planet Fitness for chest day, a free Smith machine and the ab slant board being available. The combination of the two would allow me to simulate a real decline bench press, the only real bench pressing I can do right now because of left shoulder pain. I have been trying to do decline with a regular bench but it sucks as the downward slope requires you to try to grip awkwardly with your feet and legs to keep yourself from sliding. With the decline ab bench I could lock my legs in place.
The combination of the two worked out well when combined with my being at a peak of my cyclical strength level. I pushed up a fake 265 for one rep (240lbs actually) and did rep totals at lower weights far exceeding any recent PF efforts. It really sucks that it is so hard at times to get access to the equipment you want to use. It’s so frustrating to see people that have absolutely no clue what they are doing tying up a smith machine for 20 minutes doing movements that are dangerous or have minimal value due to horrible form/ROM.
To say that decline bench pressing is ok for my shoulder is sort of misleading, it just hurts less. If I were to describe the sensation in my shoulder I would use this example. Take a piece of lunch meat and lay it on a plate. Now take a handful of small gravel and sprinkle it on the lunch meat. Finally, take one more piece of lunch meat and place it on top. Now run your hand back and forth over the lunch meat. That is how it feels.
As I mentioned, my workload for the last few months and likely to the end of the year is pretty massive. I am steering the ship of a ton of projects simultaneously, each one important in it’s own way, by far the most I have had to do/be responsible for, ever. I’m not complaining, I’m up to the challenge but it will sure be nice when I can go back to my normal, mostly static environment where things just sort of work because I put in the effort to make it that way.
The changes we are making are definitely trying to future proof the office where we are moving a lot of functions and services to the cloud where ultra-availability and redundancy is the norm. People often ask if I worry about job security as a result of cloud outsourcing. Of course I don’t as there is still plenty of technical expertise needed in migration, implementation, and maintenance of these IT solutions. By the time I actually worry about job security I will hopefully already have one foot on the retirement bus.