As far as home exercising went, yesterday did not go as planned. My wife showed up unexpectedly very early in the afternoon primarily to do some cooking.
She tends to spend her weekends somewhere in Vancouver, and so it was that she had not been home since leaving here for work in the latter morning of Friday.
She had taken the morning off work yesterday, citing soreness of her back. However, she was to leave here shortly after mid-afternoon to attend the later portion of her workday at her friend's Thai restaurant.
I had suggested that she probably should have rested up before leaving here, but she countered that she felt the duty of preparing a proper cooked meal for those of us here in the household ─ i.e., her two young adult sons, my younger brother, and I.
I rather suspect that her greater concern or guilt was over her boys.
Anyway, had she not come home when she did, I probably would have attempted a plank (the exercise). Just a few days prior, I had succeeded in attaining just over 12 minutes with planking on two successive days.
Nevertheless, I might not have planked even if my wife had not come home, for I was feeling discouraged by a YouTube video I had watched earlier that day: The TRUTH About Planks (IT’S UGLY!).
After all of the suffering I have gone through for the past six or so weeks, just to have this very muscular chap come along and declare that they are ineffective for the benefits that are being claimed by planking proponents! ─ of course it was discouraging.
Well, I have since considered matters for myself, and early this a.m. ere it was yet dawn I performed another 12-minute plank ─ actually, a bit better than 10 seconds more.
I don't know if all of the young man's contentions are correct. What I do know is that when I began planking maybe 1½ months ago, 12 minutes were far beyond me. Heck, I felt much accomplishment when I finally first managed to reach five minutes.
So how can progressing to a 12-minute plank not be a sure indication that some structural elements of my physique are not considerably more enhanced than they were?
He also seemed to imply that a static plank was not doing anything to build muscle strength ─ in this instance, he was referring to the "glutes." That discussion is just after the two-minute mark of the video, I believe.
He compared the plank's ineffectiveness in that regard to the uselessness of just flexing one's bicep and expecting it to be getting trained.
I found the argument to be very shaky. Planking is a form of isometrics, I would say. Isometrics can be extremely effective muscle and strength developers, but few people have the patience to apply themselves with isometrics because the exercise is so damned boring.
There is no sense of achievement. There is nothing to point to in terms of any bragging rights, even in one's own mind. After all, there are no repetitions being increased as would be the case in something like chin-ups or push-ups; nor is there the other proof of increased strength that is very visual as when added weight is incrementally or gradually added over time to barbells and dumbbells that a weight-trainer would be working with.
I have never been able to stick to isometrics ─ it's just too boring, as I already said.
However, if I found myself shut up ─ much as in solitary confinement ─ and had no means of exercising beyond what I could devise with my own body, then I am sure I could easily incorporate isometrics into whatever routines I would resort to.
One good takeaway that I got from that video was the suggestion of trying the demonstrator's version of reverse planks ─ I have yet to try one, but I certainly do intend to.
Maybe even tomorrow.
A different planking video I rather liked was this one: NEVER DO PLANKS LIKE THIS | 10 Most Common Mistakes.
It had not previously occurred to me that shifting one's body about when endurance planking was actually cheating, for it helped release the buildup of tensions ─ and that tension is the entire design for why we are planking, isn't it?
So I am going to concentrate and try to minimize my shifting until can pretty much rigidly plank for 12 minutes.
Or that's what I presently think that I am going to try to do.
One other exercise video ─ and I loved it! ─ displayed a guy performing perhaps the most beautiful strict chin-ups I have ever seen being done.
I always tried to be as strict with them as I could when I performed chin-ups over the years. Maybe I was never racking up the ridiculously huge numbers some guys claim, but most of those guys are almost just see-sawing themselves up and down ─ their elbows are practically never un-crooked.
The young fellow in this video is fabulously strict with the exercise ─ and he is almost tireless, too: 20 Pull Ups in a Row | Workout For Beginners.
Have you ever seen anyone doing such controlled, slow, and absolutely full-range chin-ups as that? ─ and so many at a time!
Boy, I wish I could have had access to a video like that back when I was in my 20s.
The desire is still there...but I'm now just over two weeks from having my 70th birthday, and I don't even have a chin-up bar to train with.
Nothing but discouragement....
I am going to finish this post with a commemorative collage that Google Photos apparently created yesterday from three photos that I had taken exactly six years earlier ─ i.e., September 23, 2013:
So what are we looking at, exactly?
Well, it is an orb-weaver spider and its web ─ but I had never before seen such a spider's web anchor lines extend so very far.
The main web where the spider was waiting had to be about 13 feet above the ground. And one stay line was anchored upon my house, while another was anchored on a neighbour's house ─ perhaps 15 feet from mine.
The work and commitment that the spider put into its array ─ as well as the webbing resources ─ were outstanding.
The entire set-up was sufficiently elevated that no one was going to accidentally walk into any part of the web and destroy it. Alas, however, I doubt that it existed more than a week.
I suspect that a bird ─ probably a crow ─ at some point blindly flew through some part of the web and thus collapsed it. And the spider never reconstructed at the same site ─ if the speculated bird did not in fact snatch the spider from its web.
Here are the three original photos, although there were some others:
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