👀 Muscles for everyone

#203 | We should all be gymbros

Hello!

Since last November, I've been slowly and steadily turning myself into a rather gentle gymbro. Yup, I'm that guy now. I show my tiny yet defined biceps to anyone who'll look at them. An astounding number of my social conversations are now about pull-ups, and most surprising of all, I actually...enjoy? Working out??

I've done some form of sport or the other for most of my school life, and yet it's only now, in my 30s, that I'm actually ENJOYING it and obsessively trying to figure out how to do it better.

This brings me now to my specific situation - my workouts are...chaotic. I hear people talk about leg day (never skip leg day, folks) and weights day and whatever, but for me, every day is everything day. I'm just modifying a lot of my old warmup sequences from karate and long-distance running and hoping that does the job. And sometimes, I just stop mid-stretch, staring blankly into the distance, wondering what on earth it is that I want to do next.

I suppose this is where MuscleWiki comes in. It's a bit of a clunky name, but this website will pretty much help you create a targeted workout plan from scratch. Here's how it works:

The website homepage is just a body with all its major muscles mapped out. All you have to do is select the kind of exercise you want to do - or with what tools and then click on the muscle group you want to focus on. You don't have to know what they're called; who really knows the difference between traps and delts and lats anyway, eh?

Just pick your muscle on the website, and MuscleWiki will pull up a set of beginner and intermediate exercises that you can do, with written steps and helpful gifs of each motion. It sounds mind-numbingly simple, but it's a boon for someone like me who's trying to strengthen very specific muscle sets.

A confession - I got distracted while trying to figure out how to end this JOT and looked at glute and thigh exercises for ten whole minutes. 

So I guess that's what I'm going to do now: leg raises. 

Cheers,
Pai

Shalaka Pai is an independent filmmaker, animator and illustrator and the creative half of Pai & Bee. She works with visual storytelling across various mediums, exploring themes of neurodivergence, queerness, and lived experience in her work. 

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