A non shitpost blogpost
One of my goals for 2026 is to develop my human harness. Basically mental strength and discipline. These are the byproducts of the right processes:
Working out has many benefits:
Here's my progress report as of 20 October 2026. I have been working out for about a year now. The past 3 months have been most consistent. I started off gyming once a week, around July last year, after my younger brother told me about the health benefits. Then I started going ~3 times a week, because I wanted to see more results. However, my gyming rate began to fluctuate because I have strong rationalization tendencies. As such I decided to just go every day, to remove the choice of going to the gym or not.
If I went on Mon Wed Fri, or Mon-Fri, I would come up with excuses like:
"Why not go on Saturday, I'm feeling a little tired and busy today".
Further I also go every morning, first thing before I start my day.
This makes it such that I can't make excuses as the day progresses, like:
"It's been such a long day, I can just work out tomorrow".
"I don't feel well, maybe I can take a break today".
Going every day forms a stable base for me to layer other things on top.
Early on I started hitting limits in my gyming progress, starting with incline bench. I was very focused on having a perfect form, with high reps, and stagnated at a low weight for a long time: 18-22kg (3 months). I said fuck it, and decided to just push aggressively higher, with lower reps, bad form, just pure ego lifting. That got me to 26 kg. In the past 3 months I went from 26 to 36kg (1rm), 34kg (working set). After having some shoulder joint pains, I also incorporated extensive warmups. My warmup routine is something like:
Even though this may not be "optimal", I find this slow progression and warmup allows me to feel if my body is ready to go hard on chest day, and ensure I'm injury free. This is because I can gradually ease into the technique (it's been 3-4 days since the last split) and also get a feel if anything is off that could cause injury.
Another thing I noticed was that I stagnated at 34kg for a while, not able to get to working set range. There were several things that helped with this. First was a change of diet, making sure I had carbs in my body (banana, bread, etc...) before I started my workout. Second was incorporating longer rest cycles between sets. Before that I was on 90s rest between sets. I saw dips between chest day splits, and decided to up my rest timings to 3 minutes. After that I could hit my rep range more consistently, and have been making progress every chest day session. Third was bracing and anchoring my feet to the ground to drive. This creates a lot more stability allowing me to isolate and stabilize my pushing form.
I do hope to hit 40kg on the incline bench by the end of the year. And will work hard towards that. I'm also focusing on squats and weighted compounds like pull-ups and dips. Hopefully I could have a good report at the end of the year.
For squats as well, I hit a plateau for some time. I was trying to do deep, paused squats, coupled with short breaks of 90s. After increasing the breaks between sets to 3 minutes, and only doing deep, not paused squats, I'm able to have a working set of 35kg per side, or around 90kg nett. Still pretty mediocre, but it's worth it to make sure I have a proper form. I should be able to progress steadily now, and hit a good weight by the end of the year.
I wrote an app as well to help me with weightlifting, and another simple one for habit tracking.
Application: https://shred-weld.vercel.app/
Both of these applications are free to use, and you can write to me on X, over email or in the issue tracker: https://github.com/kwannoel/mfs-issues, if you have feedback! Happy to meet other lifters, or those who want to get into weightlifting but don't know where to start.