Hello boys and girls. I apologize for taking so long to post. The truth is that life has been pretty busy. Since writing you all last, I’ve been to an overnight quest for a job interview and been to Chicago for a national conference related to my work. Yeah, those are reasons, not excuses, but still, I do most of my writing for Angry Happy Truth at work, and truthfully things have kept my attention focused on work and not on my blog.
Today is sort of slow though, so I thought it would be a good time to write something. While I was in Chicago, I thought of a couple topics. I thought I could write a post about a conference survival guide, which would include a suggestion to wear comfortable shoes. I also thought it would be fun to list my top five favorite cities that I’ve ever visited. Hint: Chicago is my new number one (Sorry Boston!).
I will eventually get to those topics and my usually sarcastic self. Right now though, I want to write about something else. Be forewarned, as I write this, I’m slightly tearing up. Also, be forewarned, I’m sort of coming out as, well, potentially strange. That’s especially true if you happen to know me in real life. As a former colleague of mine often said, it is what it is.
On Sunday night, I attended a club near me because they were having a memorial for a lady named Ashley Kruiz. Ashley wasn’t an ordinary lady, in the most literal sense. She was a drag queen and had turned that aspect of herself into a successful career. Ashley had followings in both Lexington, Kentucky and in Atlanta, Georgia. It is not for me to go into what killed Ashley, but seeing the memorial, which consisted of performances, speeches, and stories from those in the audience who had known Ashley, it doesn’t matter. She was loved and her death brought together, for one night, several people and performers from clubs in the Lexington area that spend a lot of time infighting and bickering each other. That was what mattered.
The memorial, especially a few of the performances, affected me deeply. I learned a few things that night. Well, maybe not so much learned, but reminded and driven home. I feel that it is important to share those things here. So, without anymore foreplay, here they are, the three things that were driven home to me by Ashley Kruiz’s memorial.
- You are responsible for your own actions
Every action you take, from what you eat for breakfast to whether or not to ask out the cute girl at the bank, has consequences, even if that action is one of non-action. You can eat a breakfast of half a dozen donuts and that will make you feel different and have different effects than a breakfast of grapefruit and grapes. You can ask out the cute girl at the bank and let the dice fall where they may or you may leave the bank alone and dateless and lonely. Most of the time, you have freedom of action, but each and every action will have a consequence. The consequences will then force you to react and will lead to your future actions. The cycle of freedom of action and consequences will continue to repeat until you shake off your mortal coil (I tried hard to work that phrase into this post!).
Let the philosophers and religious scholars debate whether or not our lives are predestined. I personally reject the notion of destiny in the way that it is commonly thought of. The idea of personal responsibility of action was the first thing that was driven home to me at the memorial last Sunday. The condition that plagued Ashley was a result of her own actions, make no mistake. No amount of emotional outpouring could have changed that. She made decisions on how to live her life, just as we all do, and she had to face the consequences, also just as we do. It was just that some of her decisions had bigger consequences than our typical decisions about breakfasts and bank teller. Each and every decision has potential reactions and in her case, one of those consequences was a terminal medical condition. It is true that there are things that happen to us beyond our control, but how we react to those things, well, that goes right back to being our decision.
- You don’t know when you are going to be cut down
There are over 7 billion people on the planet right now. That’s a staggering figure if you think about it. Michigan Stadium is the largest arena in college football and holds about 110,000 people. For every person on the planet to see a University of Michigan football game, they’d have to sell out 63,637 games in a row. If you assume eight home games a year, that would take 7,955 years. That is, statistically speaking, a shit ton of people.
Here’s another even more chilling statistic though. Every one of those 7 billion people will die at some point in the future. Every one of those people is mortal. Yes, dear reader, even you. Holy crap! Even me! It’s a cold, hard fact, and we may take medical actions to stave off our time of departure, but in the end we can’t avoid it.
While we know that we will die, we can’t know (except in specific cases, most of which are horrifying to think about) when that time will come. Death will come when it wants to and there isn’t anything we can do about it. Each and every one of us could die at any moment. That fact is what makes life itself so precious to us. It is time and energy that we borrow from the universe and someday we have to give it back.
Ashley knew that she had her condition and I’m told that she lived with it for a while. What she didn’t know was the time and place where she would die, so it still surprised her friends when she slipped into a coma that she didn’t wake from. Knowing about her condition and its terminal nature though, she didn’t worry about that coming day. She continued to perform right through it all and close to the end.
- Taken together, Numbers 1 and 2 mean that Intention and Passion are the keys to happiness
“Live each day as it’s your last.” That phrase is cliché and pithy and incorrect. If I knew that this was my last day, I would take all my money out of the bank and drink myself into oblivion. It’s better to say, “Live each day so that if it is your last, you will have no regrets.” To me, that means to live passionately and with intent.
This is the big take away. Living with intention and passion. I’ve touched on the importance of these before, and I stand by them. I argue that intention and passion are just as important as love as emotions because to me, love follows from passion. Living intentionally and leading a passionate life means taking control and enjoying your life.
Ashley lived passionately. She was who she was and she embraced herself. In the process, she entertained thousands of people for many years. She was a beautiful woman and a great entertainer. She was Miss national in 1999 and Miss Renaissance in 2009. She was once Miss Gay Orlando and Florida Regional Entertainer of the Year in 2012. Here is a YouTube video tribute so that you can see her over the years http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcBM4ZfbZE0&sns=em. Although I never had the honor of meeting Ashley, I will remember her always.
If you have any other questions, comments, criticisms, things you’d like to see me comment on, or something you would like to discuss, you can contact me at angryhappytruth@gmail.com.
Sometimes I write something serious. Sometimes I try to educate through my writing. Occasionally, I use my blog to advocate for something, like the destruction of HB279 here in Kentucky, or as I like to call it, a State of Exile.
This isn’t anything so serious. No, Dear Reader, I’m writing today to document one of the single most persistent and annoying occurrences in my office.
Now, I could pick a lot of annoyances to write about, make no mistake. There’s the almost constant whistling that comes from the coworkers on either side of me. Or the loud conversations that take place regularly between certain weight challenged coworkers that are too lazy to get up and walk over to the cube right next door to theirs. Or my neanderthalistic boss who manages our office into a constant state of professional obsolescence. Actually, now that I’m thinking about it, I’m making it seem like a pretty shitty place to work, aren’t I?
Ha ha! Far be it from my to be such a Frowny Face! Sorry about that! Let me get on with the point of this edition of AHT.
We have a three warmer coffee maker. Now, understand that I think that “making coffee” is one of those things that professionals should learn because eventually, every professional will have to make coffee as one of those “other tasks as determined later” skills. They all work the same basic way. Put the glass pitcher thing (called a carafe if you ever need to know for your Trivial Pursuit game) onto the warmer. Put a coffee filter and the grounds into the thingy above the carafe, and pour water into the chamber and watch the magic happen. Since we have three warmers, every morning some magic elf comes in and repeats that ritual three times, botching it once every day and making one pot of decaf.
This morning I went and saw that the coffee was popular today. Our coffee’s popularity comes and goes, but usually the coffee making ritual has to be repeated a few times until about noon, after which time no one is willing to make more because the coffee making ritual gear has been cleaned and no one wants to get lectured by our HR lady about how they need to clean up after themselves and that she’s done taking care of children. Oh, back to it. So, one coffee pot had about half an inch of coffee sitting on the bottom. The other one had even less. Note that I don’t even consider the decaf pot in my calculation.
So, obviously since the coffee is going so fast, and it’s not quite 9:30 yet, someone needs to perform the coffee ritual, and the kindly elf that makes in the morning before I arrive is not where to be seen. So, I decided that I’ll make the coffee.
Here’s the annoyance. I pulled the plastic basket out to throw away the used filter and grounds and saw that it was empty! Someone had come, almost used up the coffee, and then knowingly threw away the used grounds and filter and REPLACED THE BASKET WITHOUT MAKING MORE COFFEE! Seriously, what the fuck? The faucet is right there, between the coffee maker and the trash can that the idiot coworker used to throw the shit away. This happens all the time.
What is the fucking point? What thought process could possibly going through someone’s head? Is it the case that they intend to make more coffee but they are secretly Batman and the Bat Signal has appeared in the sky right when at the critical point when the old grounds have been disposed of but before a new filter has been inserted? Is someone taking my use of the phrase “coffee ritual” too literally and considering the act of making coffee against their religion? Is someone just so arrogant and egotistical that they think nothing of taking the last of the coffee but beneath them to make more and they take evil and sadistic pleasure in knowing that they’re screwing the next wayward coworker who comes in for a cup of coffee?
Okay, that last rhetorical question actually makes sense, so maybe I’ve solved the crime. This seems to be the act of a Neanderthal, right boss?
If you have any other questions, comments, criticisms, things you’d like to see me comment on, or something you would like to discuss, you can contact me at angryhappytruth@gmail.com.
My last post was a “rerun” of something that I wrote in my past. While looking through some other folders, I came across this. Apparently, I wrote it on December 27, 2011, which means that it’s not a out of date as my last “rerun”! So, without further ado, here’s my essay, unedited and in its original form, “What Recovery?”.
What recovery? The unemployment rate in the United States hovers constantly above 9%. It would go up, but people are being forced out of unemployment. Jobs are created, but they are created in the service industry, and some people are leaving unemployment for those service jobs. People that once worked good paying jobs with benefits and now have to settle for wages just above minimum wage. People that graduated from college with nothing but hope and a mountain of debt.
Why debt? Because the colleges, which get state funding, keep raising their tuitions. Student are blackmailed into paying those increasing rates, which serve to further separate the haves and have-nots. Students from monied families don’t have to worry about those college bills. Those students from middle class families do, and the debt cycle of owing more than you make begins, a problem exacerbated by decreasing numbers of good jobs for increasing numbers of graduating college students.
Of course, you could join the military to pay those college bills. That is a great bribe. Service for school, and having seen it up close, it’s a pretty sweet offer. Go ahead, sell out, and guess what? After college, when you’re serving, you get a free vacation to Iraq and/or Afghanistan! Yay! Lucky you!
The United States spends billions of dollars every year in what is arguably an illegal occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Young soldiers are putting their lives at risk for that college money, just so that we can continue to play World Cop. Billions spent to artificially prop up foreign governments. That’s all right though, it isn’t like we have anything else to spend all that money on, right?
Oh, wait, yes we do. We have billions of dollars worth of infrastructure in the United States, most of which is beyond its planning life. Sewers are collapsing under our cities’ streets. Our roads and highway system are crumbling. Our bridges are deteriorating more and more each year. On average, for every dollar we spend on our infrastructure, we have two dollars of needs, meaning that the United States spends 50% of the money on the infrastructure that is needed.
It makes me angry to think about. Everything, EVERYTHING, in this country is geared toward getting every last dollar from the lower and middle class and into the upper echelons. Perpetual war sends dollars oversees while our infrastructure continues to decline. College graduates continue to complete for a declining pool of available jobs. Jobs that are available are lower paying and have fewer benefits than they used to, and don’t bother bitching about it, because states are taking away your rights to bargain.
We are under attack, people. We are trapped in an American Paradigm that has led us into slavery through insurmountable debt. Perhaps the time has come to consider other alternatives. Perhaps the time for Revolution is at hand.
Well, Dear Reader, that’s it. Not too long, short and to the point. I’m glad to see that in a little over a year, so much change has happened and that things aren’t this bad anymore.
Oh, wait . . . .
If you have any other questions, comments, criticisms, things you’d like to see me comment on, or something you would like to discuss, you can contact me at angryhappytruth@gmail.com.
This essay is an update of something I wrote early on in my career. I tended to be a little more, uh, melodramatic you might say, back then, but I’ve let most of the wording stand. If you don’t like it, well, that’s old me talking! If you do, then let me know. Anyway, here it is, updated for your pleasure.
I used to live in a beautiful house in Michigan. It sat on about a third of an acre about three quarters of a mile from downtown Howell in Livingston County, Michigan. My wife and I were very much like others around us. We were approaching middle age, owned three cars, two dogs, and two cats. I mowed our lawn, took out our trash, and used our gas grill just like most of our neighbors. I used to fit in pretty well within our little community. Despite all of this, there was one thing about me that used to make me different than most of my coworkers and neighbors. I walked to work.
That is actually stranger than it sounds. I do not mean that I used to walk from my car to the store through the giant Wal-Mart parking lot. I mean I used to walk to my office in downtown Howell. It wasn’t just to the office either. From my house, I used to walk to the downtown coffee shop, walk to the downtown restaurants and pubs, and walk to the various stores I visited. This was in a county in which 57% of those residents who work commute to locations outside of Livingston County.
A lot of people would argue this point with me, but Livingston County had become a suburb. People did not like that fact, but the federal government recently said so, having declared the existence of the Howell-Brighton-South Lyon Urbanized Area after the 2000 Census. There were still large farming areas within the county, but the fact is that Livingston County was the fastest growing county in Michigan, having had a 35.7% growth from 1990 to 2000.
While I was employed by the county planning department, I was in a unique position to check the proverbial pulse of the county. I could tell people what was happening with the land, how it would affect them, and what would probably happen in the future. Furthermore, I could, and still do, look at state and national data and tell the same kind of story. I could talk for days about zoning issues, master plans, agricultural preservation, ecological issues, and the lot. Generally, though, everyone already has the story. They may not have the specifics and the data that I do, but the short version is widely talked about. Here it is: Sprawl.
People’s definition of what sprawl is differs from place to place, but generally speaking, sprawl consists of forming individual pockets of homogeneous land uses that are separated and therefore only assessable by various means of transportation, probably automobile. That is the definition of sprawl that I have in mind when I write this.
Sprawl is rarely looked at academically. There have been lots of newspaper articles about it, lots of people deride it, but I really do not think that anyone has every really showed the true results of sprawl objectively. Comments about sprawl tend to be emotional and very subjective. From my point of view though, I believe that the sprawling pattern of land use has been the single most detrimental movement to occur in the United States, and not for ecological reasons.
A few years ago, a book was written titled “Bowling Alone” by Robert Putman. In this work, Putnam details the fall of so-called social capital, the means of measuring how sociable a community is, since the 1960’s. It convincingly shows the detachment that people feel from each other and the loss of the sense of togetherness that people now feel. Coincidently, these are the same years when sprawl began to take off and become the single most dominant land use pattern in the United States. It is my heartfelt belief that sprawling patterns that came into being after World War II have caused the fall in social capital that Putnam described. With the fall in social capital, our whole culture is changing into a more individualistic one where personal rights are more important than the common good.
It is not enough to make that claim though. Sprawling land use patterns may be the cause of the reduced social capital that American society is facing now, but what caused sprawl in the first place? Why did we so willingly make the transition from a city based society where everyone knew everyone else and people could exist happily without having to travel more than a few block for their basic needs to one in which we all have to get into our personal pods to travel for long amounts of time just to get a loaf of bread from a store filled with total strangers and worked by a bunch of surly teenagers? The answer to that question is where this essay starts.
In the Beginning
In 1984, there was a movie called ‘The Terminator’. The premise of this movie was that an assassin machine from the future had come back in time to kill the mother of the man, who had not yet been born, who would lead a successful revolt against a machine empire. The interesting thing is that the machines were created by man but they ended up controlling and enslaving man instead of serving him.
Dumb science fiction? Well, Arnold the Terminator has a few million reasons in the bank why it was more than just dumb science fiction. More to the point though, it has not turned out to be fiction at all, at least not in the United States. No, we are not under the control of intelligent machines that treat us as no more than insects to be smacked to death. Instead, we are at the control of an unintelligent machine that we use to kill ourselves. This machine is the automobile, and it is the root of all our sprawl-related problems. First, though, a word about the United States’ citizens and the Constitution.
The United States has always had the attitude that owning land made a person successful. In the early days of the nation, there was a certain amount of sense in this. It is estimated that no more than 5% of the nation’s population lived in a city, and the suburb had not yet been invented. That means that no less than 95% of the nation’s population was rural. This rural population existed by farming.
This rural lifestyle was often praised by Thomas Jefferson. It was his belief that what made the United States strong was the high number of individual farmers and the rural lifestyle that they led. He encouraged people to move westward and tame the land, farming it and making their living off of it. To help make this feasible, Jefferson developed the township and range system of land division that we use today, whereby each state would be mapped based on its own baseline and meridian and divided into 6 mile by 6 mile squares called townships.
Land was sold cheaply, and people moved westward and claimed it. Many stories are still told about the brave trail blazers and the wagon trains that moved people and goods outward at a steady pace.
When people did move out west though, they brought more than just their belongings. They brought their town concept. They developed more or less regularly spaced towns along the major routes so that, even if they were in the wilderness trying hard to turn their purchased lands into viable farms, they could have a source of necessities.
Land was bought then in large tracts, which was necessary to make farming viable. There was a nice equilibrium in place. The shop owners lived in the cities and sold their goods while the farmers lived in the country and raised their crops. This system worked just fine until the Industrial Revolution.
Admittedly, that’s where the original essay ended. I could keep writing this if you like, Dear Reader. If you would like me to keep writing about this topic and see where it goes, or if you have any other questions, comments, criticisms, things you’d like to see me comment on, or something you would like to discuss, you can contact me at angryhappytruth@gmail.com.
I have two other essays written. However, I decided that this is an emergency of sorts and that I needed to do my part to raise awareness.
There is something working its way through the Kentucky legislature right now called House Bill 279 (HB279). It’s dubbed the “Religious Freedom Act”, but it’s NOT!!!!!
If enacted, and all it needs now is the governor’s signature, it can be used by employers to fire someone on a basis of conflicting religious conviction. Believe in abortion? Get the fuck out! Are you a Christian? Great, you can stay on the team, but Carl, I think you’re an Atheist (or Muslim, or Hindu, or take your pick), so you can pack your shit and leave too. Mary, you’re a lesbian, so I don’t care that your last review was outstanding, you offend me, so follow Carl out, and take your birth control pills with you!
Don’t take my word for it though. This is a quote from rawstory.com ( the whole story is at http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/03/08/group-kentucky-religious-freedom-bill-would-allow-discrimination-over-birth-control/ ):
“If it does become law, Kentucky’s “Religious Freedom Act” could enable discrimination against more than just women seeking birth control. Civil right advocates worry that landlords and employers could also use the law to justify discriminating against LGBT people and minorities as well, all in the name of “religious freedom”.”
HB279 has gotten through both houses of the Kentucky General Assembly and now only needs Governor Steve Behshear’s (D) signature.
Here’s what you need to do. Assuming you’re in Kentucky, get the word out about this fucktard piece of legislation. First of all, read the Raw Story link above and educate yourself on HB279. After that, don’t bother calling a Representative or a Senator, because they’ve already proven themselves as mildly mentally handicapped and passed HB279. Instead, flood Gov. Behshear’s office with emails, phone calls, and anything else that’s legally permissible and try to convince him to veto the bill. Here’s the link to Gov. Beshear’s Contact page: (http://governor.ky.gov/Pages/contact.aspx ). You can email him, call his office, or send him a fax. Please try to stay civil when communicating with the Governor and keep from saying words like “fucktard.” One other tip. The verification code on the bottom of the page is case sensitive. Just so that I don’t come off as a hypocrite, I just emailed the Governor myself.
I have it on good authority that if HB279 passes, the ACLU will file suit immediately and challenge the law. That’s fine, and while I don’t always agree with the ACLU, this is a worthy cause. However, we shouldn’t have to rely on them to defeat bullshit laws like this for us. These are our rights, damn it, and a bunch of fucktards shouldn’t be able to take them away from us without a fight.
If you have any questions, comments, criticisms, things you’d like to see me comment on, or something you would like to discuss, you can contact me at angryhappytruth@gmail.com.
It’s been about a month since I’ve posted anything the AHT, and since I bragged about it over the weekend, I thought I’d better get to writing so I don’t look like a bigger idiot than normal.
So, what to write about? It isn’t like there has been a shortage of stupidity to comment on lately. Just because Obama was reelected doesn’t mean that that everyone came to their senses. The problem seems to be that when I see something stupid, my source is usually online, and frankly, writing about it is just reinventing the wheel. I mean, why bother writing up some snarky essay when something is already online?
This morning though, I had an idea. How about instead of writing an article on just one story I post several links with associated brief comments from me? It’s a new approach for me, so if you’re one of the people that reads this, let me know what you think.
Here’s the first article. The ranking member on the State of Washington’s House Transportation Committee, Mr. Ed Orcutt (R – Go figure) sent an email (where he screwed up the possessive form of “cyclist’s” by the way) to a constituent where he actually argued that because humans breathe out CO2, we are more polluting than automobiles (http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/03/03/washington-republican-riding-bicycles-causes-more-pollution-than-cars/ ). I think Mr. Orcutt took the Disney movie Cars too literally.
I’m somewhat disheartened at how little we (by which I mean both my circles of friends and the country in general) are talking about the sequester and the massive funding cuts that took affect on March 1. This isn’t something that happened by accident or snuck up on us. Both Democrats and Republicans INTENTIONALY BUILT THE SEQUESTER INTO THE SYSTEM IN 2011!!!! Maybe we aren’t talking about it, or raising arms up to fight it, because it’s just so big that it’s difficult to get your head around. Here’s a handy explanation (http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/03/the-sequester-explained ). Again, even though 100 Senators and 435 House members, as well as 1 President, knew damn well that these funding cuts, $109 billion per YEAR, were going to happen for almost two years, they came and went. Fuck you all, Washington.
I have only recently discovered Right Wing Watch (http://www.rightwingwatch.org/). Take a look at it. It’s sort of an online clearing house of mental deficiency and I could write a book of snarky comments just on what’s on their home page, but I’ll restrain myself here and only note that Pat Robertson thinks that demons can be brought into your home via new clothing (http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/robertson-worth-praying-over-clothes-rebuke-demons ). Now, seriously, Dear Reader, how can you expect me to comment any further? What can I possibly say about Pat Robertson to make him seem MORE crazy? Obvious crazy is obvious.
One piece of happy news though. The U.S. House of Representatives flipped their position and reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act, including provisions for the LGBT community, nonprotected immigrants, and Native Americans (http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/02/gop-violence-against-women-act-passes )! Of course, the majority of the bigots from the Republican party voted against it, but it wasn’t enough as some of their own members broke ranks and joined the Democrats. Credit where it’s due, it’s great that it passed, but should it have taken a year and a half? Probably not, but it’s there now. Of course, Obama still needs to sign it . . .
That’s good for now. Again, let me know what you think. Frankly, I wish there was more feedback from people. I wouldn’t mind getting into a dialogue over some of the stuff I put out. Also, early on, I wrote that there would be an associated podcast. Is there any interest in that? I’m thinking of something were the topic changes from week to week and I talk to different people from different communities. Let me know.
If you have any questions, comments, criticisms, things you’d like to see me comment on, or something you would like to discuss, you can contact me at angryhappytruth@gmail.com.
If you’re like me, you are an office bound middle management type who remembers that mythical time when you were in the “best shape of your life”. You’re pushing middle age and now the “shape” you most resemble isn’t so much the “best” as it is the “roundest”. You’ve tried to do different things in the past to return to your former glory. You’ve spent money, but not necessarily time, on diet books, gym memberships, and maybe even personal trainers. In the end though, your job, your family, and your middle management type lifestyle just sort of gets in the way, to the point that you tell yourself, “What the hell do I need to be in shape for anyway? All I do is push a mouse around a desk all day.”
The thing is, if you’re like me, you’re lying to yourself and you know it. Fair or not, people judge each other on appearances, and you assume that you’re being judged harshly.
I have been in and out of gyms for almost twenty years. I have read or listened to countless books and podcasts about working out, nutrition, health, and fun stuff like that. At the beginning of the year, I decided to put everything I’ve learned together and see if I can’t return to some measure of my past glory, that being about three years ago when I was training for my ill-fated experiment with the National Guard (that’s another story). I joined yet another gym and started to monitor my progress.
After a little over a month, I’m seeing real results for the first time since 2010. As a matter of public service, I decided to pass on to you, Dear Reader, what I’ve learned. Note here, if you are one of those people who is an actual athlete, I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to Mr. and Mrs. Middle Management here. If you want something more advanced or technical, go read a blog by someone who knows what they’re talking about. Besides, this isn’t so much advice on what exercises to do or what food to eat. It’s more advice about how to approach this new hobby of yours.
Before I begin though, I want to explain a couple terms. A “rep”, short for repetition, is one single execution of an exercise. A “set” is a number of reps that you do the exercise for before stopping for a break. To illustrate, on a bench press, you begin with your arms fully extended and holding a barbell above your chest. When you bring it down, touch your chest, and return your arms to their extended position, that’s one rep. If you do that ten times and then quit, you’ve done one set of ten reps.
Anyway, here we go. Good luck, and remember, I’m just sharing what I’ve learned myself. I’m not a professional trainer, so mileage may vary.
Find a plan and stick to it
There’s a tendency for new gym members to just wonder in and do whatever looks fun or easy. It’s great that you’re in the gym in the first place, because that shows initiative, but you really won’t see any progress if you don’t go in with a plan. If you don’t see progress in the gym, you likely won’t keep giving them money and going, and then you’re just back where you started.
That’s why it’s important to have a plan. It doesn’t matter what plan you choose and I’m not going to speak about specific merits about different workout plans, except to say that you should be in the gym three days a week, lifting weights for about half an hour, and then doing cardio for about half an hour. Oh yeah, if you can do that cardio one extra time a week, that would be great.
Being new, you probably don’t have any idea about how to put a workout plan together. Don’t run out and buy a new book for this or pay for an expensive trainer! If you’re reading this, you’re on the internet, so go to YouTube and watch some videos or find some personal trainers’ websites or blogs. Lots of personal trainers have videos or other forms of free advice up, and lots of those trainers have suggested beginner workout plans. Pick one and stick to it for at least a month. Just make sure that your plan includes half an hour of weight lifting and half an hour of cardio.
You should know what your goal is for your weight training at the beginning. If you are looking for muscle stamina and endurance, your lifting will be different than if you are looking for strength, which will be different yet again from body building. You likely won’t spend much time on YouTube or the internet before running into arguments over what the “best” workout is. Screw all that noise. Pick something and do it.
I’ve lifted weights for years looking for strength. Lifts of these kinds were usually heavy weights with five reps in five sets. Sometimes I’d mix it up and do not-quite-so-heavy weights with eight reps in three sets. If you spend any time researching this, you’ll recognize this as the “3×8 vs. 5×5” debate. Lately, because my goals have changed, I’ve decided to ignore all that and do four sets of ten reps (4×10) with low weights. Whatever you pick, just stay with it.
Do your own time
Having found a plan that works for you, and having stuck to it for a week or two, it’s only natural to look around and see what other people in the gym are doing. Wow, look at how much that guy is benching! Oooh, look at that clean and jerk! How cool it would be if you could do that too, huh? So you start to look at your own plan like it’s so much used toilet paper.
Don’t fall into that trap. The guy on the bench press who impresses you so much might be training for a competitive powerlifting event, something you aren’t likely doing. The guy on the clean and jerk (not as dirty as it sounds, go look it up) might be getting ready for his senior year of football, which, if you’ve read this far, you definitely aren’t doing. Those guys are in the gym for their reasons and you are there for yours, and their reasons aren’t the same as yours.
That’s what I mean when I say to do your own time. That was advice I first saw in The Shawshank Redemption and it got driven home during my failed National Guard experiment. Essentially, I mean that you’re walking your path, which is likely different from everyone else in that gym. Mind your own business for now. Later, if you start to feel like you’re getting the hang of this workout stuff, by all means ask for advice, but until then, trust me, Butterball, stay on your path.
While on the subject of advice, you’ll occasionally get that Friendly Dude who wants to give you a few tips from his storehouse of knowledge. If you’re a guy, Friendly Dude will most likely accost you in the locker room. If you’re a gal, Friendly Dude will approach you right on the floor, likely when you’re in the middle of a workout. Strangely, Friendly Dude will talk to gals longer than guys. In either case, smile, nod, and thank him for his advice. Then just get back to what you’re doing.
Once you’ve been to the gym a few times, you’ll start to figure out who knows what they’re doing and who’s just there for Amateur Hour at the Improv. It’s perfectly acceptable to approach someone and ask for advice, but if you’re offered unsolicited advice in the gym (and most of the rest of the arena of your life, come to think about it), just file the information in your memory banks and move on.
Worry about the sets, not the reps
When I changed my workout a few weeks ago, I went from five sets of five reps to four sets of ten reps on the bench press. I’d been bench pressing 185 pounds for five reps for some of my sets. However, I knew that I couldn’t do that for the new workout, so I lowered the weight to 135 pounds. Guess what? Even though I was working with fifty pounds less weight, I couldn’t do two complete sets. So, instead of finishing with two sets of fewer reps, I lowered the weight (and felt the ping to my ego while I did so) and finished the twenty more reps I wanted to at the lower weight.
Whatever your routine is, finish the sets with all the reps. Maintain the correct form for each exercise all the way through all the reps. If your weights are too heavy for you to finish the set, you’ll start to lose form and cheat to finish. This is when you see things like when guys arch their backs to lift the benchpress they’re straining against or something like that. Once you start doing that, you aren’t doing the exercise anymore. You’ve morphed it into something else. Besides, working out with a poor form is a great way to hurt yourself.
Admittedly, this can be a little hard to judge. I mean, you are supposed to be pushing yourself, right? I’m not talking about when that next-to-last rep is forcing you to push hard, I’m talking about when your body contorts to make that rep happen. If you start to lose form, stop, lower the weight your working with, and get back to it. Once you finish the set, honestly evaluate yourself and decide on whether to lower the weight further for your next set.
This applies to your cardio as well. If you decide that you’re going to jog on a treadmill for your cardio, don’t be afraid to back the speed of the treadmill down if you’re uncomfortable. Again, complete the thirty minutes. The time is the key, not the speed of the treadmill. Thirty minutes that push you a little bit are way better than fifteen minutes that push you over the edge.
The only caution I’d say here is that you shouldn’t lower the weights or slow yourself down so much that you aren’t challenged. When I lowered my bench press that time, I didn’t slap five pound weights on the barbell and lift 55 pounds. I took it down 10 pounds and tried again. A good way to think about your weight training is that, however many sets and reps you’re doing, the last rep should challenge you. Cardio is a little bit more subjective to judge, but because I’m running on a treadmill, I like to see how many simulated miles I run in thirty minutes. If that keeps going up, then I’m happy.
If you’re curious, my bench press, which is still at four sets of ten reps, has now reached the point where I’m finishing with 145 pounds. Trust me, you’ll make gains.
Have fun
If you aren’t training for a specific event, then there isn’t any specific exercise in the gym that you have to do. Yes, you are there to work out and push yourself, but if your chosen workout routine has you doing squats three days a week and you find you hate doing squats, switch it out with something else! Yes, squats are awesome, full body exercises, but you know what? They suck! They are so awesome because they are tough to perform with good form, especially when you start stacking on the weights. Furthermore, if you have a lower back issue, they can be somewhat painful to perform.
You should look forward to coming to the gym, and if your workout plan has you squatting three days a week and you hate them and make your back sore the next morning, you won’t look forward to coming to the gym. Instead, you’ll dread it, and that will just take away your initiative. Do that long enough and pretty soon you’ll just go find something else to do with your time.
I chose squats for my example because that happened to me. My workout plan alternates between two different routines, but at the beginning, both started off with squats. Bench presses, which I like doing, only got hit every other workout, meaning that some weeks, I was only benching once a week. But those damn squats were always there, staring me right in the face. After a couple weeks, I simply swapped out the bench press and the squats on my plan. Suddenly, I was squatting every other time and benching every workout. That was awesome for me, and even when I changed to my “high rep/low weight” workout, I kept the bench press and squats where they were.
This rule especially applies to cardio though. I jog on a treadmill. Fine for me, but you might think of that as cruel torture. Okay then, don’t jog on a treadmill! Choose something else. Maybe your gym has a pool and you can swim. Maybe you can ride a stationary bike. Maybe you can play racquetball or basketball or something like that. Or maybe you just walk a quick pace and start to sneak one or two minute jogs in when you are able. It doesn’t matter what you do for cardio, as long as you like it and it makes your heart beat a little faster.
Just don’t get carried away with this rule though. Yes, have fun, but remember that you’re in the gym to get healthier and fitter. The only way to do that is to push yourself physically. You are therefore going to have to learn to live with discomfort and sweat, at least until you hit the shower afterward. But within that context, enjoy what you’re doing. Don’t do something just because someone else says it’s good or because your workout plan says it’s time to do it in black and white. Do something because it’s effective and you, at least, don’t mind doing it, but hopefully think it’s fun.
Recent discussions that I’ve had with hospital executives and experiences with my horrible insurance company (I don’t want to name names, but their initials are MedBen) have driven home my belief that more and more, we need to take responsibility for our own health. That doesn’t mean that we should all be Spartan warriors, but it does mean that anything we can do to keep our money out of the hands of the corporate health care system is a good thing. Trust me when I say that hospitals speak well of all-you-can-eat buffets because they cultivate new customers! Truest me when I say that more and more, insurance companies will try to screw you! So, let’s stop relying on hospitals and insurance companies and start taking responsibility for our own health.
If you have any questions, comments, criticisms, things you’d like to see me comment on, or something you would like to discuss, you can contact me at angryhappytruth@gmail.com.
