Work It Paleo

Hottie Doing a Push Up

Ok, so now I am a little pissed at myself for getting a gym membership on a whim. The only thing that is proving useful is Assisted Dip/Pull-up machine. As it is, I can’t move my own weight around well enough to do either of those exercises without assistance.

But why am I feeling a ting of regret for purchasing the gym membership? Well, after doing some research on bodyweight workouts, I have found that there is A LOT of variety. More than I ever really thought of.

Also, I feel more comfortable doing those exercises than working with traditional weights. Although I don’t think traditional weights are wrong or useless , I would much prefer doing a bodyweight workout. Hell, I have an ample supply of weight!

I think I realized this on Sunday afternoon. I was going to head over to the gym when I decided that I would rather just workout at home. I did weightless squats (concentrating on form), push-ups, sit ups, negative pull-ups (using an Iron Gym), and some static lunges. I felt great afterwards! I also realized that the squats I am doing at the gym are not right at all. I am not going down anywhere close to parallel at the gym. At best, I am doing a little more than a 3/4 squat. This tells me I need to improve my range of motion before I work on how much weight I can move around.

On the money side of things, I spent around $600 getting started with the gym. This includes signup fees, monthly fee, personal trainer, gym clothes, and workout towels (they don’t provide any). Of that, I could have just spent $100 on clothes and towels and been good. I get great training advice by reading various blogs, forums, and websites (yes, I plan on linking this stuff on a separate post). I have found that a home gym setup for doing a bodyweight exercise routine would be cheap (haven’t added it up yet, but it seems to be an inexpensive thing to setup, may also do a separate post on this). So, now here I am kicking myself for jumping into a gym (again!) so quickly. I will probably hang on to the membership through the fall. Hopefully by then I can have something good going on at home. And even at that, I will probably leave my brothers membership alone and just have him pay for his thing once I am out of there.

Now on to the Diablo II part. I found myself bored this evening after taking my second to last exam for the quarter. I have been wanting to play a video game for so long, but I just haven’t really found the time. So last night, after I made dinner I installed Diablo II and the expansion pack and played that for about 2 hours.

I had never had a chance to use the Druid before, so that is what I went with. Let me tell you, tearing through people as a werewolf is freakin’ awesome! I can’t wait until I can get the Werebear form!

For an old game, its really really fun! The graphics are nothing great by today’s standards, but the gameplay is solid and it just brings back a lot of good memories. And it helped me fight the urge to fire up WoW again. Although, I have no desire to do any group play at this point, it is easy to get wrapped up in that game for a few hours at a time, even if you are just running around by yourself. Not to mention the fact that installation and initial setup would take hours if you include getting my old addons installed. Then there is matter of getting my gamepad out and installing and programming it, which is a bit time consuming.

Had I fired up WoW, I would have had no fun last evening and been out $15 dollars. With tuition due in a few weeks and the need to purchase books and food, I really don’t feel its good use of my money.

So Diablo II it was! And let me tell you, classic games are soo much fun!