More man stuff

Three weeks into January and five days into my thirty eighth year I find the weights have started mocking my ambitions. The mania in which I’ve attacked them seems to have caught up with me. My eyes were definitely bigger than my stomach.
The curling’s fine even though I’ve increased the resistance by ten kilos. My biceps obey my will stoically, wheezing as they bring the bar up to my chest yet they are un-stuttering in their task.
The same goes for the shoulder press. I can really feel it. I huff them up to either side of my head and feel the weight pushing downward. They battle me as gravity strains to re-capture them. Yet they go up and down smoothly. Steadily even as if I could add some more discs before I really started to strain or maybe injure myself.
Ten more on the arms, ten more on the shoulders and although I’m feeling it I’m comfortable. It’s my favourite that mocks me. The daddy of them all, the big one.
The bench-press.
I love the bench-press it is the defining lift. It is your big lift. You’ll leg press more but that doesn’t matter this lift is the limit of your upper body strength.
Back in the day I was pressing around seventy k at a push. I was much more comfortable with sixty five. I could lift sixty five all day long. At the drop of a hat I could slide under the bar and push it up a dozen times.
Then I scared myself going for seventy two kilos. I’d lifted sixty six. That was fine, easy in-fact. Then seventy kilos. Up it went, lovely, I was pumped, fired up relishing it. Confidently, over confidently, I loaded the bar up to seventy two kilogram’s. This was my big lift, my absolute limit at the time.
The first six reps went up smoothly. The seventh I felt. The eighth was hard. I paused, arms locked. Down then up, I grunted loudly, very loudly for the ninth but up it went. I held it there, breathing hard, ready for the final lift. Confident that I would do it I urged myself on. Told myself it was attainable.
I shouted at the weight, grunted and up it went but before I could lock it out my whole upper body failed. It went up, stalled, and then it came down. There was nothing I could do to stop it. All I could do was slow it, in slow motion it dropped down on me, dropped down on to my throat. Eleven stone of iron descending on my neck, threatening to choke me.
Being pinned under a bar is a strange feeling. It’s one of those situations that you have to get out of. You haven’t got a choice. I couldn’t rest there balancing the bar on my neck and await the return of my girlfriend to help me. I would have suffocated way before then.
Somehow I would have to get out of this predicament myself. I’d managed to turn my head to the side and locked my right arm to keep the bar from crushing me. I was helped by the left hand side of the bar hitting the floor which took the majority of its weight but I was still pinned, I was still trapped.
I managed to get both hands under the weights just to the right of my ear and somehow flipped the whole thing off of me sending it crashing to the floor. I lay there for a few minutes collecting my thoughts and pondering my escape and quite frankly shitting myself.
Dumbbells are better, dumbbells you can drop. Dumbbells are also harder. You can’t compensate your weaker side the way you can with the bar. It’s do or die. Until recently I was pushing sixty k in dumbbells, thirty in each hand but it was getting far too comfortable, to easy.
They were maxed out so here I am once again under the bar. I’m pleased to say I’m benching seventy four with no difficulty what so ever. Seventy four is my new sixty five. So far my record is seventy eight. I’ve done it once and there I have stalled. I can do seventy six consistently but now I fear seventy eight. I don’t want twelve stone coming down on me. This is very annoying because I want to be doing eighty because eighty is essentially my body weight. I fluctuate between eighty and eighty two and I want to be lifting it. No matter that I’m shoulder pressing my mother (she’s a small lady) I want to be bench pressing me.
The Girlf interprets this as another manifestation of my twat-ishness, the ego male that she loathes. She bemoans my chest. It has gotten hard and uncomfortable to lie on but that doesn’t stop her stroking it and licking her lips. She finds the weight lifting boring but enjoys the results.
I think the sensible course of action is to stick on seventy four for a few weeks before knocking the weight up. I wanted to be doing eighty by February but I think that is unattainable at-least consistently. I have no doubt that if I took three days off and jumped under the bar nice and fresh I would be able to lift eighty ten times but I wouldn’t be able to do it the following day.
I have hit a wall but this is fine. I’ve gone from sixty in dumbbells to seventy eight on the bar in less than a month. An eighteen k hike is nothing to be sneezed at and I am pleasantly smug. That’s an increase of three stone in real money. The warm sense of twat-ishness is lush.