@ralphdibny maybe I'm just extremely lazy but there's something about packing and shipping sold items that's so very taxing. So you have my respect. I have mountains of stuff I could sell (games, car parts, collectibles, etc.) but the thought of all the steps to getting the money for them puts me off.
I have a Bowflex Xceed. It was around $700 wherever I got it. Which is a lot until you start pricing gym memberships, especially for an entire family. And that's not even taking into account Covid. Anyway it's just about the right size for where I need it and basically does the job whilst not being too hard on my shoulders. Can't imagine anyone building mass with one of these though.
"One of the unloveliest and least enlightening aspects of contemporary discourse is the tendency to presume that whatever one disagrees with must be very simple—not only simple, but also simply wrong." - Elizabeth Bruenig
@zupertramp cheers, nah i find it very taxing. It's a combination of cleaning, finding the right packaging before it's sold and being hunched over on the floor to do all that and to take photos which kills my back. I'm sure some dedicated eBay sellers have ergonomic chairs and desks to do all that in but I just have a bedroom floor.
Not only that but it's for very little reward but maybe I just take it a bit too seriously especially with my cleaning of the items. You never want to let something go for less money than you've seen similar items sell for but it's rare that you are the lucky one who sells something for more than it's worth. So it can be pretty demoralising in that sense. I'm hoping to sell a big box of original Pokémon cards I've got down from the loft which includes some of those cards you see in news stories that sell for like a grand or 2. But knowing my luck, they will just sit there on a buy it now for a year and I'll end up getting peanuts for them.
I only really started doing it properly last lockdown so I could clear out some of my crap (one of those long chores to do that takes place over years) and make a bit of money while my work twiddles their thumbs about whether to furlough us or not.
I've never been muscly (apart from naturally because of work and even then it's hidden under fat haha) so I can't really comment on how you build mass so to speak. Lots of fitness people swear by dynamic resistance, i.e. no external weights whereas others use a lot of weights so it's hard to know who's right really. A lot of them are selling their brand too, with their tapes, equipment, diets etc so they would plug whatever the core ethos of that is.
Not sure what 210lbs of resistance feels like, which is what I read the bowflex xceed limit is. Aparrently you can upgrade it to 310 and 410 though
I think yogas a slow way to gain fitness but probably good for maintaining it once you are there. Im mainly doing it because it's low impact and I can do it on my bedroom floor (gets a lot of use, that floor!). I think it's supposed to be good for your back too so that's what attracted me to it in the first place.
@ralphdibny Good job on getting some yoga in even though you didn't feel like it. I usually find that if I've been doing something like that and my back is feeling not so great that if I do something to tax it e.g. stretching or strengthening then it feels a ton better. We aren't really built for daily life are we!!
You've probably never heard of the forest but it's called Cannock Chase. It's a reasonable size even though it's the smallest AONB in the country. The 16km I did includes my run over there and back as well but you could easily spend more time in the forest going round the various trails, and there's a good selection. There's plenty of the usual walking / cycling trails that have been created by the council / forestry commission and animals but there's also a mountain bike centre and some graded routes for more experienced riders. The red routes are great and if you are feeling foolhardy then there are a few black sections that you can take on which usually involve big rocks or these raised wooden walkways. I haven't been over to the bike tracks so far this year but even during lockdown it's been really busy over there and unfortunately because of the rain they are constantly receiving maintenance.
@render cheers, yeah I kind of thought about pushing the session to today and the rest of the week a day late but I just thought I'd get it out of the way in the end. I don't like to mess with the schedule unless I really need to because of work or something like that. It's starts off by rescheduling to the next day, then the day after then all of a sudden I'm not doing the schedule at all lol so sometimes it's just a bit better to do the tape on the proper day even if it's a bit half hearted.
I still went to sleep late last night but I feel like a had a decent sleep. Had a really nice dream too about meeting up with friends from school that I haven't seen in like 13 years. I just wish I could wake up in my own body as a 12 year old sometimes. The world didn't seem so crazy back then and I'd give anything to be a teenager again in the early noughties.
But yeah, enough reminiscing! I hadnt heard of Cannock chase and i looked it up on Google maps. It's definitely bigger than my forest! It looks to be almost 10k across (as the crow flies) at its widest part whereas mine is more like 1.5k. The only paths marked in mine are bridleways, it sounds really good to have different paths of varying difficulty marked out like that. Those animal paths make me laugh, especially if you follow one that's not obviously an animal path until it leads you somewhere that is far too small for a human to get through and off you trot back to where you took the wrong turn 😅.
I'm normally quite adventurous in exploring in this country if I'm wearing the right clothes for it. I'll normally take less obvious paths on a whim just to see what's down there. It's got me into trouble twice in other countries though.
Once in Finland, I was walking in a forest and sort of climbed/walked carefully down some rocks. It was ok getting down but when I looked back up at it, it was a small cliff and there was no way back up! The area I was in was kind of an oval shape surrounded by cliff that met a lake on one side, and on the other side, between the cliff and the lake were some rocks with a property on the other side. I wasn't to keen on going through a stranger's property in another country, especially a country where you can buy guns off the shelf in their equivalent of sports direct. It was the only option though so we headed towards it and climbed these rocks to get over, there were deep cracks between the rocks (maybe like 6foot deep) and I kept thinking of the film 127 hours as I scaled them. Anyway, we got through and run across this property on to the main road while loads of caged dogs barked at us. It was pretty scary.
The other time, in Portugal, we were walking along the coast and it was quite rocky and we found this smallish beach alcove. There were rocks on either side and it was getting quite dark by this point but there was also a rickety looking wooden structure of steps and paths that led out. Anyway I got a bit freaked out because I can get scared of heights and unstable/open air structures and it was a bit too dark to scale rocks so we stayed in this alcove until it got really dark. The funniest thing about this though was that at one point, some very experienced runner just run down the rocks and run back up the rocks on the other side 😅. Eventually I calmed down and we carefully went up this wooden structure. I was about to put my hand on the rail but for some reason I stopped short and decided not to. I turned the light on my phone and looked at the rail and it was completely infested with these huge hairy catterpillars! Not only that, but this whole structure was completely covered in them. So I kept the light on and we walked up this really quite long wooden structure stepping on and over caterpillars all the way back to the main road again without putting our hands down on the rails 😅.
@ralphdibny The animal tracks are great like you say. I've lost count of how many times I've had to turn around because the track has suddenly disappeared or goes over the edge of something I wouldn't take on. Some of the animal tracks over the Chase can be good fun as well, especially if they slalom through trees. The forest is definitely somewhere I've started to appreciate a lot more since lockdown, especially as it's local to me rather than having to travel to it.
Sounds like you've had some great adventures on your travels. Don't think I've got into any awkward situations like that in other countries but several times in the UK I've managed to end up on some private land somewhere whilst out running and had the landowner show me the way off the property.
I've read the 127 hours book but never seem the film and I can totally get where you are coming from there. Not sure I'd have the stones to do what he did though, especially considering I'd probably have forgotten to take a knife and ended up having to use a spork 😬
@render they are probably the hairiest situations I've been in on walks, apart from the aforementioned shoe losing saga I've been living since I was a teenager! I guess I just didn't really expect much drama but ended up with some anyway. I've read the girl who loved tom Gordon by Stephen king and it's about a girl who gets lost in the woods, so from reading that I know I shouldn't go walking around in forests in America if I ever go. But I never had enough foresight to apply that to other countries I've visited haha.
It can be hard to know if something is private land or not to be honest. Lots of private land has public rights of way across it as well and it's not often well advertised. There's a YouTube guy called Tom Scott who did a video about a nationwide effort to uncover all of the historic public right of ways as the government have put a deadline on applications to appease landowners. It was quite an interesting video but most of his videos normally are.
Nah I definitely couldn't self amputate. Way too much to consider, like the point of no return for help coming, tournequays and blood loss as well as cauterisation. All of which I have zero experience in so it's really not a situation id like to be in! That being said, I did see a bionic arm company doing a Venom Snake themed arm from metal gear solid 5. Still though, I'd probably prefer to have my current arm.
@render@ralphdibny Slightly off topic and a little late, but I’ve always been fascinated by survival stories. They 127 Hours account is a classic, of course. There’s a true story documentary series I’ve watch on TV that recounts some of these and it’s surprising how many people go out for a run or a hike and get lost in the wilderness and have to crawl to civilization on broken legs or eat insects to survive. You just never know until you’re in that situation what your survival instincts will make you do. It’s a gripping study in human psychology.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
@Th3solution crawling with broken limbs, eating or drinking disgusting things... those sound plausible for me personally but the whole cutting off some major appendage, oof, i don't know. Can't even fathom it. But, like you say, who knows until you're in the situation.
@ralphdibny demoralising sums up online selling pretty well i think. I used to be able to do it. Now I just can't muster the motivation. I'd rather be broke lol.
Just going on past experience, regarding building muscle, I've found results with heavy weights, low reps. That and eating like 6-7 times a day but my experience is admittedly anecdotal. And it's not like I've ever been that big and I've never been as committed to any alternative form of strength training to give a truly informed comparison. So I'd favor free weights but there are certainly caveats.
Biggest problems with the bowflex though are the way the weight isn't constant throughout the entire movement (because you're basically bending a thick stick it obviously has more resistance the more you bend it so that takes some getting used to) and it being an all-in-one device it suffers from the same thing all these devices suffer from, be it a printer or exercise machine. Which is to say it doesn't do any one thing that well. So the range of motion on some exercises have been sacrificed in order to be crammed into the overall functionality. If that makes sense.
But I've no plans to upgrade. 210 pounds isn't very accurate imo but whatever it actually translates to, it's enough for me. I'm just looking for a basic level of physical fitness these days. And trying to instill some good habits with my kids.
"One of the unloveliest and least enlightening aspects of contemporary discourse is the tendency to presume that whatever one disagrees with must be very simple—not only simple, but also simply wrong." - Elizabeth Bruenig
@Th3solution Yeah I like those kind of documentaries, things like Touching the Void and there’s a series called I Shouldn’t Be Alive which might be the one you are talking about? There’s something amazing about the fact that those people shouldn’t have survived but they did.
I’ve read a few books like that as well. One that was quite interesting was The White Spider which is a recounting of the first attempts of the north face of the eiger. It’s amazing what happened in the rush to be the first and the chances that people were willing to take.
@render Yeah, there are a couple shows I’ve seen and that’s one of them.
And I’ll have to look at The White Spider. Sounds right up my alley. Sounds similar to Into Thin Air which is about the group that got hit by the blizzard on Everest several years ago. They made a movie of it too, but the book was great.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
@Th3solution Ha, I've literally just started reading Into Thin Air.
I read his book Into the Wild (the story of Christopher McCandless which was also made into a film) and recently finished re-reading the autobiography of Ranulph Fiennes which has mentions of Krakauer towards the end and reminded me to get Thin Air.
I can highly recommend Fiennes' autobiography though. Off the back of reading it first time round I also got his biography of Captain Scott which is also a fantastic read. And from that I bought The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard (great name) who was a junior member of Scott's expedition. He didn't go on the ill-fated trip to the Pole but the titular Journey is one that he and two others made to collect Emperor Penguin eggs which very nearly killed them.
@Thrillho Awesome! I’ll add those to the list as well. I really enjoyed Into the Wild also.
It’s a little off topic from the nature vs human type of genre, but it has elements of that as well as other amazing personal survival parts, but another favorite book of mine would also be Unbroken. (Also with a less than adequate movie adaptation) Not only does it have his tale of survival at sea without food and water but also Zampareni’s survival of the prison camp. ....And back on topic, he was an Olympic runner and actually competed in the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin before he joined the Army and then had the whole tale of survival mentioned. So apropos to this thread — being in excellent physical condition will serve one well if lost in the wilderness, adrift at sea, captured by enemies, or attacked by wild animals. 😄
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
@zupertramp fair enough! Not too long a post there, considering some of the essays I have written in this thread 😅. I'm only doing 3 exercise tapes a week so I seem to be padding out my posts with past experiences. Not necessarily for that reason, it has been enjoyable to share stories.
I don't know if they are still a thing but I remember having all these random bits of exercise equipment from shopping channels (UK ones like bid up TV and QVC). We had a walking machine and a rowing machine, so random. They weren't expensive but ended up being trashed after periods of non use. I think I was so obsessed with Bid Up TV as a young teenager that my Soul Calibur 2 save file was called DuncanPow after one of the presenters on it 😂
@Th3solution I've only seen the film of 127 hours. I only went to see it because it's a Danny Boyle film who has made some of the best films. He's quite prolific though, so not every film of his is a hit but most are still worth a watch.
I feel like this sort of thing couldn't happen in England. I could be wrong but everywhere I have been in this country, I've never felt too far away from civilization, or at least a house. Civilization might seem far away when you are looking at miles of farmland to the horizon but the farms are still in use and there are villages about in most places. Could be different in Scotland though as I believe there are more extreme terrains up in the north of Scotland.
I have seen another (Tom Scott) video about this dodgy River/stream/brook in the UK though. The banks are close together but they are rocky and mossy. The distance isn't far so you could jump it but if you slipped and fell into the river then you would be sucked down into the water and killed by drowning or by being bashed into rocks. I can't remember what the reason was exactly but it was something to do with the flow of the water making it impossible for objects to stay at or near the surface.
@Th3solution@Thrillho Great shouts on some books to read. I’ve got The Worst Journey In The World and I’ve never got around to finishing it. Will have to revisit that at some point.
I’ve been to a live talk with Ranulph Fiennes and really enjoyed his stories. It sounds like he’s been on some amazing adventures and on that day he was recounting his climbing up the Eiger to ready himself for Everest. I actually did a team overnight running event in the Peak District that he was also in called the High Peak Marathon. I can’t remember where we came relative to his team but I do remember it being a really tough event. He wrote about it in one of his books apparently and mentioned it was down to -20 degrees that night. I do remember it being really cold. Bet it didn’t feel that bad to him.
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