A Week of Small Steps

After a few weeks of indolence, I managed get a few things done this week. It's not what I would call "accomplished," because for me, accomplished means achievement. Small steps would be the best way to describe what I did this week.

The most overwhelming and hardest task of the week was working out. When I stopped working out about three months ago, I topped out squats at 135 lbs. This week, I finally surpassed that doing 140, but there was a problem: my back was rounding when my butt was in line with my knees. The weight wasn't too much to handle, but I'm a bit of a form freak. A lot of trainers advise to "never go below 90" with squats, but I subscribe to the other school and spend a lot of time focusing on flexibility and mobility.

The problem was coming from my overly tight hamstrings. I finished my sets, but without going through the full range of motion. On this plan, the weekends are set aside for rest and recovery, so I'm doing just that. I'm going to throw in some extra hamstring stretches along with the normal stretches I do. Hopefully, on Monday, I will be back to full (or more) flexibility. My goals is bodyweight (170) in two weeks.

On the school front, I managed to re-enroll at JC. I'm "going back for my associates" as one of my friends said. It feels a bit weird to be back there after earning a degree, but I need to strengthen my math skills and build them to move on to a doctoral program.

The third small step is this blog. I haven't written in a while, but along with math, it is another skill I need to hone. For me, the best way to improve my writing, is to read. So I've been reading Tom Wolfe's Hooking Up, which is stimulating both in the stories it presents and the vocabulary used. I find in writing this, that my biggest problem writing is balancing the informality of the blog with formal style I accustomed to for papers and professional work.

In the next weeks I hope to post with some accomplishments that these small steps are building.