Is it normal that my arm strength is holding me back on DB Presses though?

It’s normal for people to progress to a point where they’re not able to get into the starting position any other way than what I showed you. Whether that happens at 25kg or 45kg doesn’t much matter, at some point you’ll be unable to get those dumbbells in place except by standing up with them, putting them on your thighs while you sit down, and then rocking back so that they’re in the up position to start bench pressing.

Do I need other exercises to be able to ever lift those 25 kg DBs ?

Even if you were to spend the time and the effort getting there on 25 kg, you’d eventually run into the same problem at 30 kg. The strongest people in my gym are bench pressing dumbbells at 100 lb (roughly 45 kg), but they can’t lift them into place.

So that’s what I mean. For some of your exercises, what’s holding you back is something other than your programming.

For this:

now I am stuck at 22,5 kg since 2 months but not because my chest can’t handle the weight (I do chest press and increase weight there too) but I can’t lift the 25 kg dumbbells lol.

You can do this:

https://youtu.be/rVh8i5G-XC4

That’s how you bench press dumbbells that are heavy enough to where you wouldn’t be able to get to starting position from a laying position.

Alternatively, you could consider doing a barbell bench press.

But the program doesn’t much matter. I like to focus on just 6 lifts, and make progress on those:

• Squat
• Deadlift
• Bench press
• Overhead press
• Barbell row
• Pull ups

I’ve switched between different programs, but everything revolves around those 6 lifts, mainly the first 3. From there, I program around those based on whatever I happen to be prioritizing.

So look, if you keep changing the program you’re going to be wasting a lot of your time by misdirecting your focus on stuff that doesn’t matter that much.

It sounds like you’ve gone to the gym at least 5 days per week for 7 months. That should’ve been enough to be much, much stronger than when you started, maybe doubling or tripling your starting weight on the big lifts.

If you haven’t made progress on your lifts, your program isn’t the problem, and you have to look at why you haven’t been improving. Have you been lifting to failure? Every workout, you should be failing on at least one main lift, where you keep doing reps until you actually have to bail halfway, and you drop the weights safely (or set it down on a safety bar or your spotter comes to help you get the weight off). And then when you fail at the top of the rep range, add weight so that you’re back into the proper rep range for your program.

So the question is: 7 months ago, how much weight were you lifting on the flat DB bench? T bar rows? Barbell squat? Romanian deadlift? Have you doubled those numbers since then?

Are you moving up in weight? For any given exercise, are you lifting heavier weight while hitting the same reps and sets? If you’re making progress, you’re fine. If you’re stalling, you’ll need to start diagnosing the reasons why: sleep, nutrition, insufficient training, too much training, etc.

Until you actually start hitting plateaus, you’re overthinking things.

wouldn’t that paint a pretty distorted picture?

It can still paint an accurate picture, if understood within scope. You can’t outrun a bad diet with normal amounts of exercise. Even if it is true that you can outrun a bad diet with exercise that exceeds a particular threshold, it’s still a useful finding that under that threshold, the correlation drops to near zero.

Anecdotally, I know that my appetite adjusts naturally to my activity level, for the most part. The exception was during periods of my life when I was running more than 20 miles (32km) per week, where my calorie consumption hit a plateau even when my calorie expenditures exceeded that. I also tended to lose weight when backpacking in forests and mountains, but part of that was diet, too (of eating only what I packed in).

So if it turns out there is an amount of exercise that allows for a bad diet, it might very well be such a high activity level that it isn’t relevant to broad population-wide public health principles.

I always felt like PPL is trying to cram way too much into each day.

I think it can work, but I agree with you that OP has more exercises on any given day than I personally would be willing to commit to.

I’m also on a 3-day split centered around squat, bench, deadlift, so in a sense they could be considered PPL. But I only do like 3 accessories on each day, and I’m in and out of the gym in about an hour.

He played 7 seasons in the NBA, was kinda a journeyman playing backup center for a bunch of different teams.

But her height is actually useful. She’s a starter in a sport in which height is a useful physical trait, which helped her with university admissions with a scholarship. She’s apparently a professional who has been on the roster of some overseas teams, and plays for her national team (Canada).

Plus growing up in a family with tall people might make it easier to deal with. Her dad is former NBA player Mike Smrek and presumably has a social circle of very tall people and maybe even their very tall children.

So I don’t doubt that a lot of tall women actively dislike their own height. But this particular woman probably has reason to like being tall.

This effect is even more pronounced when examining satisfaction with actual partner height: women are most satisfied when their partner was 21 cm taller, whereas men are most satisfied when they were 8 cm taller than their partner.

I don’t have access to the full article, but it sounds like they didn’t examine the sliding scale of height preferences, by one’s own height.

The article says that taller people have a taller ideal height for their partners. And it also says that on average women’s preference is a partner 21cm taller than themselves, and men had a preference for 8cm shorter. But from the publicly available text, it doesn’t seem to report on whether that preferred delta between one’s own height and the ideal partner height changed with the absolute height of themselves.

So I’m curious: does the data support the conclusion that a 5’ (1.52m) woman would prefer a 5’8" (1.73m) partner, and that a 5’8" (1.73m) woman would also still prefer that 21cm/8 inch difference, looking for a 6’4" (1.94) partner? Or is there a sliding scale where already tall people aren’t exactly looking for excessively unusual outliers, and that the preference of tall women is something smaller than 21cm, such that the overall average might be that very short women prefer a big height difference but very tall women prefer a small height difference?

as long as they keep the core of the game intact (shooting Nazis in the fucking face).

From the article:

Exact plot details are being kept under wraps, but the (incredible) official logline of the series simply states, “The story of killing Nazis is evergreen.”

In Spanish, up until 1994, “ll” and “ch” were considered distinct letters from the component parts. But “rr” has never been considered distinct from “r,” even though it is pronounced differently, in large part because no words start with “rr” and any word that starts with “r” is pronounced with the rolling R sound.

I agree with the others who say to get in the mode of making new friends through hobbies and other activities. Not every friend you meet will be dateable (a woman you find attractive who is available and attracted to you too), but the act of being social and making new connections does a few things specific to dating:

• It helps you build your social skills for when you are talking directly to potential dates
• It gives you new leads on friends of friends who may be interested in dating
• It gives you a solid social circle, which makes you more attractive

Plus, like, the actual benefits of friendships with other people, and having people to pursue your hobbies with, will just be great to have even without dating.

Some concrete examples of how I’ve made friends (I’ve moved cities a lot so I had to do this like 7 or 8 times in my adult life):

• Pickup basketball at a gym where this happens on a regular basis (even if not formally scheduled). Not a lot of women, but a handful of women might participate. But I’ve made lifelong friends this way, and have met some friends of friends through this.
• Other social gym settings: scheduled classes with opportunities to work with or talk to others. I’ve made friends in CrossFit style gyms, and my wife has made friends through yoga and spin. Now I’m a regular at a serious lifting gym (and I drop into powerlifting gyms in other cities while I’m traveling), and there’s often enough rest between sets to just talk to people and get to know others.
• Being a regular somewhere, including places that don’t cost money, like parks and libraries. I’ve made a ton of friends at dog parks, and have dated a few women I’ve met at dog parks. When you see the same people a few times a week, that familiarity gives you an opportunity to build up a real connection over time.
• In a similar vein, recurring volunteer opportunities. In one city I lived in, I was a regular volunteer at a kitchen for feeding the homeless and elderly, and would strike up conversations with people while chopping vegetables or whatever. I got to know some, and ended up exchanging phone numbers at some point. I’m now on the board of a nonprofit and occasionally hang out with some of the other board members.
• Socializing with neighbors. I take regular walks so I see a lot of the same neighbors around. Sometimes we strike up conversations, and sometimes we invite each other to events we host in our homes.
• Work and career events. I did happy hours with coworkers, entered recreational sports leagues, participated in the occasional professional development type organization, and have made friends that way.

I’m still a social guy. I’m happily married, but I still make new friends through many of these avenues, plus through my kids and socializing with other parents at their activities. You do it enough and you learn what type of people you vibe with, and who you enjoy being around. With that baseline/foundation, it’s much easier to engage with potentially available women, too.

I disagree with you. I’d never want to go back to the old defaults in forums, of un-threaded conversations where every comment is equal (and generally sorted by timestamp). Some comments are just better than others, and a user interface should prioritize the better comments.

Comments that are interesting, funny, or informative can be read by more people when they’re shown earlier in the page.

Comments that are rude, factually incorrect, off topic, etc., can be de-emphasized in the user interface, even if they don’t technically break any rules. I’d rather it be a community driven decision than a mod-driven decision of the harsh consequences of comment removal or user ban.

The key is to find a community whose collective opinions you respect. Crowds may not be perfect, but they’re generally better than individual mods.

And a naive “newest first” sort algorithm just prioritizes frequent posters and incentivizes “bumping” threads, which also detracts from the overall quality of a forum.

Noah Hawley did a great job of turning Fargo the Coen Brothers movie into a universe that had lots of fleshed out ideas, while still retaining the Coen brothers’ style of alluding to a bigger world with unanswered questions and interesting characters with untold back stories.

I’m gonna give it a chance based entirely on his involvement.

Speaking as a working parent (married to another working parent), it’s worth pointing out that this dichotomy isn’t mutually exclusive:

raising children is far more self-fulfilling than working a job could ever be for most people.

I agree with this! But I also would note that of the 168 hours in a week, being away from them for 50 of them (especially if they’re at school anyway for 30 of them) doesn’t really detract from my ability to do both big picture parenting (teaching life skills, moral values, building memories, being a role model) or even the small stuff that adds up (cooking meals, helping with homework, listening to them, talking to them, taking them to and from extracurricular activities, pursuing hobbies together, etc.).

So it’s not an all or nothing thing. Most working parents can still raise children in an immensely fulfilling way, so the fulfilling part of a stay at home parent isn’t actually exclusive to the stay at home parents.

I loved cooking in a professional kitchen. The job itself was great. Some of the coworkers were all over the place, but I fucking loved the good ones.

And there’s something immensely satisfying about the teamwork behind turning a bunch of raw ingredients into multiple delicious meals, perfectly timed out with each dish hitting the table at the right moment. (The frustration of a kitchen that isn’t doing this is a separate story.)

But the industry itself has so much toxicity. Bad managers, bad owners. Substance abuse problems. And the real reason I left wasn’t actually the bad pay. It was the miserable hours. I was always a night owl but I couldn’t deal with the isolating separation from my family and non-industry friends from working nights, weekends, and holidays when everyone else was building memories and reinforcing bonds.

I think that’s true of many people.

But I suspect that the numbers are pretty evenly split between “would thrive in either role,” “would be miserable in either role,” “would much prefer being in the paid workforce,” and “would much prefer being a stay at home parent.”

My wife and I are squarely in the “would much prefer being in the paid workforce,” because we like our jobs, and because we want our children in an organized school environment (and paying for after care is fine for them and for us). Most of our social circle are in the same boat. But most of us are mid-career white collar professionals and have better than average flexibility over work hours and location (at perhaps the cost of a blurred boundary between work and home). So our jobs are easier to balance with parenting.

On the flip side, home situation matters a lot, too. How much you enjoy different types of household work (cooking, cleaning, home improvement/maintenance), different functions of a caretaker (feeding kids, scheduling out activities, being that first line as an educator or first aid or driver, etc.), how well your hobbies and interests fit into a lifestyle as a full time caretaker, etc.

One of my friends gave up his main career to take care of his kids, but now that they’re in school he went back to personal training at a gym. He lines up clients and is only available for sessions between school dropoff and pickup (10am to 2pm). It’s a good intermediate holding pattern for him, and he’ll likely go back to his main white collar career once his kids are old enough to be latchkey kids. That being said, I know he wasn’t super happy not working outside of the home, and this personal trainer thing has him in a much better spot than when his kids were too young for school.

The exclamation marks in “Surprise!” evoke the same energy as “Oops! All Berries,” like you’re biting into a “salad” and discovering it’s Oops! All Mayonnaise.

Pretty much nobody in my friend group (and we’re all parents) would prefer to be a stay at home parent. Personally, that’s a bad fit for me, my skill sets, and my preferences. I’d be miserable and bored, and feel that it would be a waste of the things I’m good at. My wife would feel the same way in that kind of caretaker role.

Like, I think if we won the lottery and didn’t have to work to maintain our lifestyles, we’d still send our kids to school and camps and things like that to get them out of the house and socializing with other people, while we’d probably still choose to work in some capacity, for some kind of public interest or passion project we’d do for reasons other than the money.

Staying at home with kids just doesn’t sound appealing as a day to day routine. I like my weekends with them, but I also like that we use the time to catch up, too.

Agreed. I love pizza with light bodied, high acid reds. And all sorts of other great Italian food and wine pairings.