As the title suggests it has been 6 weeks since I started with my first strength training routine and started eating protein after my workouts. I have completed six sessions of no more than 30 minutes each (including warm-up). That means I have spent less than 3 hours in the gym on the upper floor of Sats Jakobsberg. During this time I have managed to increase the total amount of weights for my six exercises by 48%! While a good chunk of this can be attributed to an initial adjustment of my nervous system to this new form of exercise, I think it is safe to conclude that my first strength training routine has been successful.

As I mentioned earlier on my blog, it seems to be a good strategy to change training routine every 6 to 8 weeks, so starting next week I will start up a new one. The prudent course of action would be to go a longer time with my first routine seeing that I haven’t really hit any kind of plateau yet, but seeing that the new group training classes are released next week I figured the timing was quite nice. I guess I am also itching to design a new routine as well. Half the fun in strength training comes from the planning phase I think. Kinda like engineering.

So what have I learned during this short “experiment”? First of all I have gotten accustomed to the exercise equipment and the “ways of working”. But more importantly I have learned about how to motivate myself to keep up with what is essentially one of the most boring forms of exercise ever conceived. The planning phase, which I mentioned above, is truly at the root of this. The plan gives me a framework towards which I can benchmark and keep track of my progress and it makes my workout more efficient and structured. Seeing that it usually takes months, if not years of work for a person to see any kind of visible results from any form of fitness training, many people will quit their training routine before they even have a chance to reap a single reward for their hard work. But being able to visualize (for instance in a spreadsheet application) the gains in weights lifted gives me a tangible result already after the second session. While I can’t say I have noticed any visible change in muscle mass on my body, I know thanks to the fact that I have disciplined myself to do the same exercises for six weeks in a row that I have gotten stronger. 48% stronger, to be precise.