I'm in love...

I have an admission to make everyone... I'm in love! Yep, it's official. I get excited thinking about it. I can't get it off my mind. Whether I'm looking forward to it or thinking back on it, I just can't get it off my mind...

Of course, I'm talking about the Arnold Press.

When I wear t-shirts, I've really noticed the shape that my shoulders make as they fill out the short sleeves. There's a perceptible lump there now. I can clearly remember when my shoulder cap was an amorphous idea, hidden under layers of fat. Then one day, a small curve began to appear out of the fat - it looked like the side of an egg, slowly pushing its way up and through the garbage. Eventually that egg became fuller, and the fat has slowly fallen away from it. The shoulder cap rounds out in the front, and there's a fairly clear separation of the shoulder from the upper back trap muscles, and from the triceps muscles below.

Shoulders are some of my favorite muscles to target.

I'll knock out some upright rows. I'll do isolation moves with raises to target the front, lateral and rear deltoid muscles. I'll do presses to hit those babies. But now... it's the Arnold press.

Not only do I feel them in my front and lateral delt heads of my shoulder, but also in the forearms. I'm doing three sets of 15 reps each with 30 pounds at the moment. I feel like I'm ready to do a bit more weight as well, but that's not why I love them. I love them because they allow me a spot of vanity.

When I'm pressing the dumbbells up towards the sky, I can see the longer line of my extended biceps, though I've been seeing that line for awhile. The exciting line I'm getting now is the line that's carving the separation between my rear delt and my triceps. The line comes out of my armpit and runs below the biceps line. It's small at the moment, but it's something that I can see, something that I can focus on. And it's getting ever so slightly longer and deeper each week.

But it was today that I saw something I'd yet to see. Something that I've been hoping for since lifting weights. Something that marks the next phase in my body's reconstruction.

I saw a vein.

For several years, I'd only seen one vein on my body, and it took and trip to the bathroom or some downloaded adult material to see it much - and even then, with my belly in the way, I'd have to work a bit to notice it. But no longer! When my hands stopped looking like marshmallows and instead deflated a bit, there was a little bit of vein happening on the backs of them. But veins on hands is boring... And then, today, just behind my wrist there looking like a topographic map, a small creek of a vein, cutting a slightly raised path two inches long down the top of my forearm!

As I sit here and type it's gone now. This vein apparently requires some hard, blood-pumping action to make itself known, but that's fine. I've got the tools I need to bring that vein out. I've got the Arnold Press.

I'm excited to watch that vein run longer up and down my arms, much like the muscles of my forearms began small and have now carved several lines of muscle that are visible even when I'm not flexing. Then? Then I'll be even more excited when that vein stays parked on my arm, even when I'm just sitting at my desk, typing up TPS reports and going about my business.

Small, steady progress peeps. That's what it's about.

255.6 (looks like I fucked myself this weekend, just as I'd feared. Didn't see a vein when I was doing it either. Ooops.)