Sports
nov 6, 2024 - started strength training
I lack strength. I might have the technical skill to do certain movements, but don't have the muscles for it.
One ability that I lack the most is being able to do a pull-up. Necessary everywhere, obviously crucial for rock climbing, urbex would be much easier if I could climb into windows without asking friends for assistance. So, it's been my goal since the summer of 2023, but I would train for it only sporadically with the resistance bands at my climbing gym, if I remembered to do it, and the progress was very slow. Did banded and negative pull-ups this summer too, but without a lot of consistency.
I recently started going to a regular gym and building a good strength training routine, and my main goal is to learn to do unassisted pull-ups. This is currently the most important and energy-consuming part of my workouts. I'm doing them on the assisted pull-up machine, it's a machine that subtracts from your bodyweight. I can now do a pull-up with minus 10 kg from my weight, so I'm not that far away from my goal!
Pull-ups are one of the hardest exercises, and especially for women! Generally, girls are less encouraged to be active than boys, it's more common for men to learn pull-ups early in life, and it's much easier to learn them when you're a child and don't weigh a lot.
And I have an impression that women aren't shown why sports are fun, and as adults they often view physical activity as a chore. I feel like women often choose some really fucking boring exercise and fail to maintain the routine because it's not fun and they aren't looking forward to it, and sometimes after failing like that a couple of times, they start to outright think that it's just not for them and they aren't a sporty person.
And even the women who exercise a lot usually have poor upper body strength! Women mainly focus on legs and glutes, because they are afraid training upper body will make them appear more masculine, and don't train the arm and back muscles enough.
nov 4, 2024 - rock climbing
I used to have a hyperfixation on rock climbing, but somehow never got to talking about it on my website. Well, I only had the blog section for long text posts, and the only thing I had to say about rock climbing was something like "I go to the climbing gym three times a week and it's so fun I wish I could go there every day."
One day I overworked my wrist during the session, but in a couple of days my climbing gym was having a trip to the real rocks. I was so excited, it would be my first time! How could I cancel it and deprive myself of going to a beautiful remote location and climbing a real cliff because of some small pain in the wrist?
I climbed on the cliffs all day and you can probably already guess what happened later, I injured the ligaments. That's when my passion for climbing fizzled out — I had to start wearing a restrictive band for my wrist and began to grow increasingly frustrated because it impacted my performance. The band restricted my range of movement, and even when I didn't have to wear it anymore, I was too scared to put any pressure on my injured wrist and couldn't climb as well anymore. Climbing stopped being fun and eventually I left.
I started climbing again after some time, but not in the gym — I climbed trees and into the abandoned buildings. It started like that: one day me and my classmate went urban exploring, and I was reading "Baron in the trees" by Italo Calvino at the time, it's a book about a boy who refused to ever get down from the trees and kept his promise. It inspired me to try climbing a tree too. My classmate was skeptical at first, but got envious of me sitting on top of the tree and joined. Climbing trees turned out to be insanely fun and we started having tree climbing workouts after our classes, picking interesting trees for each other that would better suit our climbing styles.