Squats Are Evil

Seriously.

Wanting some more competitive scores on Fitocracy (points are skewed very heavily towards weight training vs cardio), Jason picked up a couple of weight sets at the store. Mine is a 3, 5, 8lb set and we got to work Saturday morning. If you’d like to see the details of my first strength workout, you can click here. I basically did up to 10 reps each of squats (10, 6, 6), bicep curls, tricep extensions, shoulder presses, one-arm rows in each of the three weights.

It felt good and I was confident in what I accomplished, so I told him we should do another workout. But not just another workout, we should do MOAR! We shouldn’t just step up the weight, but add two more sets of each to step back down. That workout is detailed here. I rocked it for a newb!

Until I woke up the next morning.

You see, the most recent experience I had had with squats was freshman P.E. in high school. I remembered nothing about pain. Of course, I also hadn’t done 72 weighted squats in one day in my life ever before that either. I died. My legs wouldn’t work. The most frustrating and disconcerting thing was that not only did it hurt to walk, but my legs kept trying to go out from underneath me. My thigh muscles were revolting to such a degree that they just refused to help my knees go the right direction. I hated feeling like I had traded one successful day for what would end up being four days of hardly being able to function.

I drank water, I stretched, I rested my legs and worked my arms, I whimpered and hobbled a lot.

I knew I was retaining water while I healed, so I was starting to get worried about this week’s weigh-in,  especially since I knew it had also impacted the amount of cardio I had just gotten used to doing. I just put my head down, focused on healing and getting in the activity I could do (dumbbells work on arms/shoulders).

Turns out I didn’t need to worry.

• Jenny -1.8 (-54.8 total)
• Jason -1.2 (-78 total)

I have exactly 10 more pounds to lose before I’m back to where I was before everything went haywire in our lives two years ago. It’s my goal to lose it by the end of the year. If I work hard, don’t get too caught up in the holidays and make sure I can focus, I feel like I can meet that goal.

I am happy to say that although I still think squats are evil, I haven’t sworn them off entirely. I’ve started working some body weight squats into my evening strength training (6 last night!) and my muscles have healed enough that I was able to complete my usual morning walk at pretty close to my normal pace. This is very good news, as I am starting to train to participate in a local Holiday 5K Fun Run/Walk (as a walker) to benefit Habitat for Humanity in three weeks. This means starting to get up earlier to increase my walk by 50% since I don’t have time to increase distance where my alarm is currently set to go off. But you know what? I can do this.

What goals do you have for the holiday season?