Skinny to Strong

In my previous post I wrote about my body weight, muscle weight and fat % goals. Today I will write about my weight training goals, in particular about my compound exercise goals. If I have to choose the 5 best exercises I would choose the following exercises and in that order Squats Deadlifts Bench Press Pull ups Overhead Press It is very easy to understand why I like them. These are the exercises where I can lift heavy. Heavy like lifting close to or more than your body weight. Lifting so much weight simply means one thing, those exercise require more number of muscles and also mostly bigger muscles. One cannot bicep curl one's body weight. The muscle is way too small and no other big muscles are involved. Also the distance these weights are moved is big. Work done is weight times the displacement. So you do more work moving the weights to a longer distance. Engaging more muscles means more hormone response, more repair and more muscles! Now back to my goals. On October ...

I hate squats but I love them. Every time I go to gym to do squats, a feeling of resentment and fear takes over me. I resist those feelings and put on a weight with which I can do warm ups (usually about 60% to 70% of my work weight). Once I rip through them I gain some confidence. But as soon as I do my first work set I know why I hated squats in the first place. It is not because every part of my body hurts. But because of the dizzy feeling of the aftermath. By the 6th or 7th rep I am breathing heavily, panting almost and the very strong urge to stop doing any more reps creeps in. I force my self to do a couple more if I can. Move slowly to rack the barbell and once the weight is off my back I feel my head reel as if I am going to faint. I just have to hold on to the squat rack and stay there without moving lest I blackout. But after the 3 work sets that I normally do, I feel great. Almost proud to have achieved my goal for the day. Squats are considered to be the best exercise i...