Hi, everyone. I came to this board on Steve's recommendation, (thanks, Steve). I've been hanging out at SparkPeople, and while I love their food tracker and some other aspects of that site, their message boards leave something to be desired. You can post a question and it'll take hours for a response, if you get one at all.

Anyway, a little about me... I'm 38. 5'7" and 160 right now. My goal is to get down to 140, but a lean and toned 140. I've been as low as 125 before and I looked like shit. (can we say shit here?) I was lifting heavily up until about 2 years ago, when FIL got sick and all that was put on hold for a while. Now I'm back and more motivated than ever. I want to turn 40 looking HOT and being healthy. I have a cruise booked for September and the only time I want to take off my bikini is to put on my sexy little cocktail dress for dinner.

My first step is to get a really good lifting routine down. It's been so long I can't even remember what I used to do. I'll search the boards for that. I look forward to talking with everyone and learning a lot here.

Hey, so glad you ventured over here!

I think you'll find a much more effective atmosphere here in terms of the message board.

Do you have a gym membership?

Sometimes it takes a while to get a response here too, but overall the responses you do get are much better.

This site emphasizes calorie deficits/increases in exercise in a manner that is not 'one size fits all'.

And for those who like to get technical, there are solid answers on some of the more esoteric principles too.

Michael

Thanks, guys. Yeah, I do have a gym membership. I live in a VERY small town, but we have a pretty state-of-the art gym. It was actually completely redone not too long ago... the only thing I don't like is they took away the free weight bar contraption I used for doing squats and replaced it with the machine where the bar doesn't come off (sorry, that is SUCH a bad description, but I don't know what either of those is called). And people look at me funny when I use the bench press bar for squats. Imagine that lol

Wow, so you no longer have a squat rack or power cage.... they replaced these with a smith machine.

Lovely.

I feel sorry for you!

Thank you! Yeah, they took away the squat rack. I have a lot of people tell me the smith machine is better, that it helps with your form. But I did amazing things to my legs a couple of years ago with the squat rack and I was really disappointed that it was gone. I'll make the smith machine work, though. No worries. :-)

I'm actually really against squats on the smith machine. Well it is good for hanging my jacket on while I do barbell squats, lol.

You can get hurt using anything in the gym, but the smith increases those chances IMO. Too much stuff going on like fixed bar path and whatnot.

It is by NO MEANS better than free weight barbell squats.

My simple progression when I do weights is:
Chest/Triceps (pushing)
Back/Biceps (pulling)
Legs

Within the upper-body workouts, I make sure to do the "big" exercises first, so doing chest before tri, and back before bi. I break it up this way so that I am not sore on both sides of my arms in a given day. I have a VERY hard time when it hurts to move your arm at all, very demoralizing for me, so this is what works for me. Also gives each muscle group 3 days rest...