Week One Holds
Day 5 of the protocol: nineteen sets, 14,390 kg, and the first week of the protocol doing what it was supposed to do.
Day 4 — back, traps, chest
Three rows, one shrug, two chest movements. Walked there, walked back.
Dumbbells count per pair: 40 kg per hand is logged as 80 kg. That makes this the second-heaviest session of the block behind Day 1 (15,268 kg), and in twelve fewer sets than Day 3: about 757 kg per set, the heaviest average so far. The barbell row at 80 kg × 10 and the 40 kg shrugs are the two lines that will be hard to beat next week.
The thing that actually changed this week
The worst sleep-killer I have found is training at night.
A hard session leaves the body switched on for hours, and what I take before and after it adds to that. Put the whole stack in the evening and I arrive at bedtime with the engine still running. The muscles are finished. The rest of the system never got the message. That is an observation, not a mechanism.
So the session moves. Tonight's still ran late — the last one that will. From the next session it lives between 13:00 and 15:00. The programme does not change; only the clock does.
One bonus I had not priced in: SmartFit is far emptier at that hour. Less waiting for a machine, a session that runs the way it was written, and a walk home in daylight — starting with the next one.
Two caveats. "Train earlier" is not one variable — the session moves and everything attached to it moves too, so if sleep improves I will not be able to name the piece that did the work. And one week proves nothing. The bad nights after evening sessions were clear enough to act on; the afternoon window now has twelve weeks to earn its place.
Today's numbers
Bodyweight 102.4 kg. Blood pressure 113/77, pulse 70 — taken late morning, after breakfast and coffee, so not a resting baseline, and still normal on both numbers.
The facial puffiness that was obvious earlier in the week was gone today. I am not assigning it a cause; it is logged with its date and we will see whether it stays gone. Week one of the protocol is going well. That is the whole assessment. Day 5 of 91.
Thank you, Adriana
A package arrived from TRT Colombia: the ultra-fine syringes. Adriana coordinated it, as she has with everything else — the unglamorous half of any protocol, and it went exactly as it should.
Sincere thanks to her and to the team at TRT Colombia. They are excellent at this.
Meanwhile, on the football pitch
While I was lifting, Sofi and the kids were destroying a football pitch.
The kids also finished Unit 5 of their school year today, and Unit 6 opened. Everybody in this house closed something today.
MONSTER 2.0 — The Shadow — the block this session belongs to.
Day Four. One Side Effect. — the puffiness that showed up earlier this week.
MONSTER 2.0 — The Needle — where the syringes come in.
Addicted to the Gym — why the session never gets skipped.
