On striving for a perfect week

2024-08-11

If I plan to do a certain set of actions perfectly within the week, what is earnt by my performing it? Is it an admission of incapability if I do not succeed with it?

Plan for next week

I mostly scheduled my time at some point this week (yesterday), such to allow me to adequately achieve all of my goals that I want this week. This will be:

Go to the gym on three days (Mon morn, Wed eve, Fri morn); do home exercises on the other two days (Tues eve, Thurs eve), as well as a swim Sat and Sun morn;
Practise guitar each day (arranged as: before work on the days I go into London; after on the days I am not; anytime on the weekend);
have time for the allotment (only this week, due to not being in London on Wed);
cook and eat good dinners;

It'll require a fair dedication to ensure I do not slip up, but it is certainly feasible. I'll report back I suppose how it goes.

I've actually forgotten about some work drinks, so the exercise on the Thurs will be difficult, but fine as it does not interrupt the three gym days...

Compromises

If I go to the gym and do exercise this much, it really impacts the amount of time I have available for the allotment. I am struggling even currently, but of course it won't get better if I don't give myself any time to improve it. Really I should look at say, eight hours in a given week to improve it.

Perhaps I can forego the gym altogether the week after, and focus solely on the allotment? This will net me a good bit of time: nineteen hours in total, I'd say. I can do it piecemeal, dealing with one bed at a time, until it is in a decent shape again.

The allotment is a bit of disaster this year, though, so I'm not overly concerned if it gets a little neglected. I can always take better care of it next year, where I will allocate a lot more time to it.

Exercise Routine

Mon, Wed, and Fri are going to be pull, push, and leg days respectively.

Essentially, these are pulled from strengthlog.com.

I will do, for the pull day:

Deadlift
Barbell Row
Lat Pulldown
Dumbbell Row
Face Pull (if I can find the rope handles...)
Barbell Curl
Preacher Curl (if I can figure out how to load less weight onto the preacher bar)
Rowing

For the push day:

Bench Press
Overhead Press
Incline Dumbbell Press
Dumbbell Lateral Raise
Dumbbell Chest Fly or the Fly machine
Barbell Lying Tricep Extension (maybe...)
Potentially some machines (e.g. chest press, shoulder press, ...)

For the legs day:

Squat (with barbell)
Romanian Deadlift
Bulgarian Split Squat (maybe... I'll be embarrassed to do this haha)
Seated Leg Curl (machine)
Leg Extension (machine)

I will also need to do core (abs) and obliques on the Tues and Thurs. For this I will most likely do (at home, not at the gym) ... Obliques:

Oblique Crunch
Lying Windshield Wipers
Side Plank

Abdominal:

Sit up
Plank
Leg Raise
Ab Whell Roll out (if I can find a wheel somewhere at home)
Crunch
Dead Bug

Basically, it's a general work out of these parts. Hopefully I can get it going regularly and begin to improve.

Weirdly, I don't feel that I'm progressing, but of course it happens slowly, and for the past while I have not really been going to the gym (instead preferring swimming). I guess it is as I am also not losing weight, either; I am consistently at a decently healthy weight though, which is good, I guess.

Giving up here a little earlier than I wish I could. Have a good one.

(Actually, a topic I could pad this a little with is whether it's acceptable to write less than the thousand words. I believe so, but only because I on other occasions write more than 1,000 words for this. As such, the average word count is still over 1,000, so I'm sort of in the clear.)

(Also, should I try to pursue brevity in these? Or is there no way to reach 1,000,000 words without a bit of verbosity? I agree I shouldn't needlessly pad it out, but also I think there is an extent to which I have a lot of words to play with here - I needn't be precious about them. And of course, I am writing for myself, not for anybody else.)