Not Just a Man's World

This time last year Not Just a Man’s World was born on the internet.  The planning to set up the blog had taken the whole of August 2009 and I finally had a few posts ready to go live at the end of the month.

I’ve learned a huge amount over the course of the year.  Thanks to the research I’ve done I’ve gained improvements in both my general health and gym progress.  Choosing to write about my own progress with my powerlifting goals has also taught me a lot about myself since I can’t ignore it when things are going wrong.  It’s really made me accountable for what I’m doing and made me face a bucketful of fears and mental trials along the way.

With the blog’s first anniversary I thought I would use the opportunity to look back over the year and identify some of the key things that have happened on (or because of) Not Just a Man’s World.

• I started out with a minimalistic two posts a week but quickly increased this to six posts a week.  Recently, though, I’ve had to drop back down to five posts a week to deal with extra time pressures at work – I hope nobody minds too much!  As a result of all this writing, this is my 280^th post!  That’s a huge number of hours spent writing and researching which I wouldn’t swap for anything.
• Particular research highs which stick in my mind and which seem to have armed me with facts that get used most frequently with the non-fitness and non-diet people I meet include articles on cholesterol, sleep and cortisol.  The things that really matter to everyone.
• Researching for posts has given me all sorts of extra benefits from putting my learning into practice.  Learning about incontinence has helped me identify the key to solving my own problems.  Discovering the great Bret Contreras and his Hip Thrusts finally gave me some traction with my goal to gain decent glute muscles and as an additional benefit my success led Chris to start the same exercises so that I’m now living with someone who has a distinctly Gary Tayloresque glute set.  After another 12 months of heavy lifting and experience I’ve also finally understood why I shouldn’t use my leg length as an excuse for poor squatting - whatever I read on the internet.
• My gym work has gone from strength to strength.  Disclosing it to the world wide web has forced me to really find ways to resolve my problems and caused me to go from a squat depth of this:
  

  17.5 inch squat depth before Romanian deadlifts

  to this:

  

  13 inches after a lot of effort and hard work

  and build up the strength to comfortably squat 80kg, safely above the British Drug Free Powerlifting Association national qualifying weight for my weight class.
  

• I seem to have mastered the art of rapid fat stripping (although I’m sure there’s still room for improvement in the program).  Along the way I also learned that my mental limit for stripping fat this hard is twice a year and a maximum of four weeks in one go.
• I’ve increased my own weight from a range of 49-52kg (the weight range I was in from my mid teens until two years ago) to a range of 55-57kg.  Since I appear to be carrying less fat this must mean I’ve gained a good deal of muscle.  A weight gain goal I’ve been trying to grasp for many years.
• You all seem to be fans of the banana bread and carrot and orange cake recipes, which are still the most visited pages on the site, closely followed by Weight Training Women, Recent Glute News, Intermittent Fasting and (to counteract the fasting I suppose) the chocolate mousse recipe.  Not wanting to read too much into all this other than to notice that everyone seems to like their puddings!
• My culinary skills have improved significantly during the year, thanks to the experimentation I’ve had to do to publish 50 recipes over the last year.  Chris must be thankful that he’s not had any more “accidents” since the chocolate scrambled eggs incident in November 2009, though I must thank him for being an unwilling, and sometimes unknowing, participant in many recipe experiments, including the raw eggs muscle gain trial - the only trial where Chris felt the need to complain publicly.
• The end of a year of blogging has culminated in buying my first pair of Vibram Fivefingers, something I started writing about on the blog back in January but was discussing with Chris long before that.  So far all is going well with the Vibrams and I can’t believe I didn’t get them sooner.

I’ve been researching for a post about Dairy for several months now (every time I think I’ve nailed it another pile of research or opinions comes out) so that is definitely coming in the next couple of months, but if there is something else you want to read about and you think I would benefit from doing the research and writing it up for everyone then do let me know.  I’m always interested in new ideas of things to learn about.

It’s been a busy year and I’m looking forward to an even bigger year of researching, learning, developing and sharing going into 2011. 

Watch this space.

No related posts.