Sprinting to a Finish Line that is Miles Away

When working out I've always had one problem. I have a tendency to push myself too hard. I have the constant feeling that I am not pushing myself hard enough because my body fails at certain things and it is when the body is tired and at the point where you feel the lactic acid burn that the real work is done. Because of my anger at those failings I push myself whenever I get the chance. My weakness in working out has always been core stability. It is because of this that I attack that weakness with plank jacks and mountain climbers. I find them difficult and need to push myself to get through it, and once I get into the mindset of pushing myself I don't stop.

That first paragraph is a lot of rambling to get to the point of this post and that is that the week before last I pushed myself to three workouts a day. It was a very hard week. I ended each day more tired than I'd been in a long time, but I made it through. The next week wasn't that difficult and I decided to continue doing three workouts a day, but I would make the second workout more intense. This could have been a mistake or the other mistake could have been to ignore what had been until this week a minor pain.

Getting Into the Fourth Best Shape of my Life

Let's start this story with an old advertising slogan. One that was popular when I was a youth and used to describe a product I enjoyed then and still do, and that slogan is, "Bigger is better." Where I heard it most was to describe professional wrestlers like Earthquake and Typhoon. It didn't matter that they were fat, they were bigger and that was better. My real idols at the time were Macho Man and Brett Hart. I enjoyed putting my four year old nephew in the Sharpshooter and running around the house in my underwear doing elbow drops off the back of the couch.

At that time I am going to say I was eight years old, and I wanted to be big. I made my mother buy me some dumbbells and I started lifting them as best I knew how. The next time I went to the doctor I asked him how best I should lift the weights. I figured if anyone was going to know about how to get big and strong it was the doctor, but instead of telling me to just work on running and body weight exercises while my body grew he told me to not lift weights until I was sixteen. With weightlifting suddenly taken off the table there was only one path left to me getting big, and that was cramming lots of food down my throat. This could have been done in a healthy manner as well but no one told me that one either.