AndyJ's Body Enhancement Thread

Yeah. The doc will probably want me to drop back to Standard American Diet so the blood work looks normal to him. Plus the lab conveniently highlights "out of normal range" values for the tests.

I’m over a year into the current keto cycle, 382 days. A break wouldn’t hurt, but I’ll have to be careful. I don’t want to gain nine pounds in two weeks like last time.

In happier news:

BPEL: 7.0"
MEG: 6.0"
BPFSL: 8-1/8"
glans: 4.5"

I just got another call from the doctor’s office. They couldn’t schedule an appointment because their internet was down, and then they scheduled one but the internet went down again, and all their patient records are on a server Somewhere Else, so they had to cancel that one. Now they’re back up. They wanted to know if I could come in tomorrow afternoon, but I’m taking Mrs. Andy to the doctor a couple of towns over, so we scheduled for next Monday

Other than a couple of small areas, the only internet in my town is through Comcast. Over the years the latency has been getting steadily worse — I don’t think any online gamer would even be able to play — and the outages more frequent, not even counting the month of no-service earlier this year.

When I’m there Monday I’ll see if I can get hold of the office manager and have her ask their IT provider about a cellular hotspot as a backup. They might not bother; the two docs are in "working retirement" now, only seeing four or five patients a day, four days a week. Anything urgent already gets referred to ER.

No big deal on the wait. I’ve been chugging more water than I really wanted, and I’ve noticed my reclining blood pressure dropping as I’ve done so. Another indicator that the high red blood cell count is a side effect of mild dehydration, but I’d like to make sure there’s nothing else I should be worried about.

Starlink?

The standard Olympic weight plate is 17.75" in diameter. The only weights in my new set that size are too heavy for me to use at the moment. I wanted to practice some dead lifts, so I either needed to make some blocks to hold the bar up to the regulation height, or buy some Olympic plates.

Or… two weeks ago I found two sheets of 1/2" MDF in the back of my truck. They’ve probably been there a year, and I have no idea what I bought them for. Two weeks later I still couldn’t remember why I bought them, so I hauled one out and sawed it up. Then I made a circle cutter attachment for my table saw, and cut out six 17.75" discs. I’m going to glue two pairs together, and I’ll have two 1" and two 1/2" plates.

I need to haul them out to the metal shop where the big drill press is and cut the 2" center holes, but it’s raining at the moment.

Some scraps of MDF and some odd OSB laying around became some 12" and 10" discs. I’ll have to put them on the scale, but I’m guessing a pound or two apiece. I’d like 1-1/8" pound since I have a good selection of 2-1/2 pounders already. They’ll be handy if I ever want to do one of the routines where you increase the weight slightly every session.

I made them now since all that sawing made an unholy mess. The dust is all over everything, from my hair to the floor. And it doesn’t smell very good, either.

Doing overhead presses again today. Still having problems with the "bob head back out of the way" part. I keep bending my whole upper body back at the hips to keep the bar from taking my nose off. That leaves me with some mild lower back pain after the sets due to improper form.

I got my piece of plastic pipe and tried to practice the proper form. The pipe weighs less than a pound; with no load, the lift is pure form. Same problem.

I think what’s happening is that the dowager’s hump is keeping my from bobbing my head back properly.

The hump really should be dealt with first, *then* work on the overhead presses, but the information I’m getting says six months to a year of correction exercises before the hump is fully dealt with.

I don’t *think* I’m doing any major harm to my lower back given the light weight I’m using. I’m going to go back to the bare bar and drop the reps while I work on the dowager hump exercises. Those are boring and leave me sore for the rest of the day, so I’ve been shirking them.

In good news, I’m now able to keep correct form on the Romanian dead lift more than half the time. It’s amazing how uncoordinated an adult human can be; it’s a simple movement, easy to visualize, but half the time my spine bends forward instead of simply pivoting forward at the hips. I *know* what I’m doing wrong right as I’m doing it, but the firmware in my nervous system has many decades of doing it the other way, and doesn’t want to cooperate. I’m making progress, but it’s slow. No back pain problems due to the light weight, even though I’ve been adding a bit almost every session.

My form on curls is correct, or close enough. They’re almost enjoyable now. Not enjoyable at all with a straight bar instead of the curl bar, though.

Bench press form is also OK. No elbow pain at all. Some crunching in the right shoulder, it doesn’t show up with the machine, but the machine guides the movement, while you have to stabilize things yourself on the bench. No pain or soreness after the sets, so I slapped another 5 pounds on for next time.

[describing yesterday’s workout]

More overhead presses today, with the bare 35 pound bar. Managed reasonable form at least half the time. No problems with right elbow or shoulder.

Added another five pounds to the bench press. Successfully completed the sets, but about halfway through I started running into problems controlling the bar - it was a bit wobbly, and wanted to twist out of alignment. I think the main "lifting" muscles are fine, it’s the "supporting" muscles that are weak. I could go down the rabbit trail of trying to find out which ones those are, and working them, but I think I’ll just stay at this weight for a while and see if things improve.

I did Romanian deadlifts yesterday; today I did barbell rows. Those are normally done with a low-racked bar and the bar hanging from the arms at the start of the lift. I’ve been following Mark Rippetoe’s instructions for a lot of things; he insists the "proper" way is to pull the bar from the floor. I’ve been doing it the usual way. I haven’t finished my spacer plates yet, so I used a small step-stool and some wooden shims under the middle of the bar to raise it to 9 inches, then worked from there. I did okay, but I still have to work on form.

A few days’ break and a compression sleeve over the right elbow worked; a couple of twinges on the overhead lift, but nothing to worry about. I’m starting to get some crunchy noises from the right shoulder on the bench as weight goes up. That was really bad last year, but low load/high reps on the exercise machine fixed it. Well, enough that it’s not showing back up until now. I don’t know if I should back off the bench and go back to the cable machine, or just keep working the bench.

Finally saw the doc yesterday, went over the red blood cell count thing and the endo cutting my TRT back. He mostly agrees with her. We went over the spreadsheet - he’s starting to appreciate having all the labs right there in rows and columns - and he said that other than the C-RP and CREAT, which are hosed by keto, everything looks exceptionally good for someone my age. Given that, and lack of symptoms for any of the more serious possible causes for high RBC, he felt it was very unlikely my insurance would cover any specialized diagnostics or testing.

I had printed six weeks’ worth of blood pressure logs, and showed him how BP had gone way up when I was laying down while sitting was still creeping down, and how reclining BP started going down after I started chugging water. He acknowleged that dehydration could be the cause of the BP and RBC values. He said he would go over the information later when he had more time and give me a call.

For the last few weeks I’ve had occasional bout of "discomfort" at night. Nothing specific. But when I’d stand up, I’d go into bouts of burping. I could probably burp a whole heavy metal track.

Around 0300, awake from another attack, I did some web searching, noticed a comment that Cialis can cause gas problems, searched on that, and at the top was a 2005 thread from… right here on Thunder’s. Headache/stuffy nose is the most common side effect, and I get those in a tolerably mild form. Burping is a less-common side effect, and I get a bad case of that.

I’m taking 10mg tabs twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays. Of course, I just took one yesterday. I’ll cut Thursday’s tab in half and see how that works. It has been nice having better EQ and a fuller flaccid, but my EQ isn’t so bad I’m willing to put up with the night burps like that.

Every rep with bad form is a chance for injury. You can strengthen your other muscles with accessory exercises.

Any particular advice, or just a general observation?

Deadlifts are very difficult to get perfect form with. I know a load of weigh lifters who avoid them for this reason and some that do them and put up with the occasional sore back. I think it’s best to avoid them unless you put serious effort into getting the perfect form. There are other exercises that hit the areas that deadlifts do.

How many sets and reps do you do per exercise?

Just search youtube for squat accessory or deadlift accessory or whatever. You’ll end up on discussions about knees wobbling in squats and so on.

I’ve mentioned it before but I found Get Serious by Brett Osborn a good book. It’s not super in depth because it’s not a complete book on strength training but it’s done from a fairly technical perspective. I still use the bones of his routines. I think you’d appreciate the style. I added his form videos a couple of page back memento - AndyJ’s Body Enhancement Thread. He reminded me of the rucksack walk which is really useful. Basically walking with added weight in a rucksack. But maybe you could do a farmer carry or something.

The ATHLEAN-X youtube channel is great for accessories and modifying exercises to fit the actual mechanics of the body. Becoming a Supple Leopard by Kelly Starrett is a very good book that’s kind of the equivalent of a book on C++ polymorphic inheritance for the body.

I agree with scienceguy, deadlifts are a dangerous beginner exercise. You’ll understand so much more about form later and what pushing to your limits should feel like. If you go on, work primarily on form and keep the weight low until you understand the difference between good form and bad form.

The general thing is do everything with good form. If you can’t, you don’t have the muscles required and you should stop and work on the limiting muscles. To put that into other language, you have to earn the weight (or you’ll regret it).

I’m not doing any standard dead lifts. "Romanian dead lifts" are basically a variant of barbell rows; you start with the bar racked low, and it only goes down to a bit below the knee.

I don’t even have any plans for regular dead lifts; I don’t think my knees can manage that.