One Mo'nutha Day

It is Monday.
The start of another week.
As has been my habit for the last year or so, I will start my weight workout in a few minutes.
Today is a session for arms and legs. (chest and back, tomorrow)

I am following a plan suggested by a contrarian trainer who contradicts the common training pattern of working each area of the body just once per week.
He suggests wording each area twice per week.
Since I am no longer running, I have the time and energy to try this plan.
This will be my fifth week on this plan and, so far, it seems to be working.
I feel stronger and a bit "bigger" (I do not see any physical differences).
The bigger feeling could be my normal delusions of grandeur after starting a new program.

According to this guru, I am to follow this plan for eight weeks then take two weeks off.
I am not going to take two weeks off at the end of the month.
I might take a week off.
Maybe.
It depends on how I am feeling (and if am still making progress).

I will prolly change to a three-per-week plan for a few weeks (4?) and evaluate whether I want to go back to the four-per-week, two-way split of this plan, or try something else.
I may go back to the four-way split (arms, legs, chest, back) I was doing before I started this program.

Almost all methods work (meaning they build or maintain strength and muscle mass and burn calories), it is just that some plans work faster than others or work better with your system.
Typically, you cannot stay on one program too long before your progress plateaus and the program becomes ineffective.
At that point you must change your program in some way - take a week or two off, or change the exercises you are doing, change the order of exercises, change the kind of exercises, change the frequency of your workouts, change SOMETHING, to get your body to respond again.

It is hard for me to believe but I have been working out with weights for 14 years.
I stopped for only a few months in 2003-4 when I was shipped off to Oklahoma to work 12-hour shifts for three months.
I ran - for 9 1/2 years - taking about a year off in 2007-8.

Those two activities are very taxing to my system in different ways.
Of the two, I love (LOVE!) running psychologically.
I am/was addicted to the endorphin high it produced.
But it was hard on my overall system.
As I grew older, it began to eat away at my muscle mass (not a good thing for a skinny old man).
That is the main reason I quit this last May.

My body loves weight lifting.
It responds by adding muscle and it likes the strength that it builds.
No real endorphin high is produced by my workouts, but I feel "good" afterward (a mild high?).
At at this time in life, weight lifting is what I must do.
As I said in my previous post when I announced by retirement from running, weight lifting is easier to control time and effort-wise to match my physical constraints as I age.
I hate to even mention age, but it is a fact of life that increasingly intrudes into my ongoing delusion that I am still twenty-something. (I feel like it most of the time...)

So, it is time to walk across the hall, into the room that has been set aside as my gym in my little house.
My torture chamber. :)
And do the moves I have assigned myself for this workout for this day.
Mentally, I don't want to.
But, once I start, I will feel better about doing it and feel better about the whole thing when I am done in an hour or so.

Here we go......
.