How to Not Stink

While chitchatting about this in the gym, I was thronged by interested people. So here’s the lowdown. If you stink, don’t feel badly. Workout clothes that are made of drifit and other wicking/polyester/groovy stuff tend to embrace B.O. and never let go. Even regular cotton clothes can smell after a while when in them, you are daily sweating like a horse/pig/ dog (Choose one as there is always a debate as to which one truly sweats the most.).

So you can wash your workout clothes in baking soda. Just throw some in the wash with the regular soap. Or you can try special laundry soap just for workout clothes, like Tide with Febreeze Sport or Win Sport detergent. My sister got hers at her local Trek store. And hang ‘em up to dry. A hot dryer just seals in the stench.

Now, what if you stink at clean and jerks? What if you don’t even know what a clean and jerk is, like I didn’t a few months ago? Well, I can’t help you with the former, but I can help you with the latter. We did clean and jerks yesterday and I kind of stunk.

Just throwin in a picture of our yoga class, which I love. I'll write about that later.

 The clean and jerk is an Olympic lift. You start with the bar on the floor, sort of jump, and lift it to your clavicles while turning your forearms up so that the bar rests in your fingers and palms, which are now facing the ceiling. Then you push the bar overhead by pushing with your legs and jumping into a squat underneath the bar. If that’s not clear, check out YouTube. Anyway, we tried to do our max weight for one repetition. I did 95 pounds but that was only 5 pounds more than I had done before. I thought I really stunk. But I guess that happens to people all the time. You can only lift a bit more than before, or you can’t even lift the same as what you’ve done before.

I was making such great strides as I progressed from nothing to having some upper body strength. Now I’m on the “somewhat strong plateau”. I’m not going to be progressing by leaps and bounds unless I get insane and start working out seven times a week, training for an Ironman, and living off nothing but muscle milk. Not going to happen. So I’m happy with a 5 pound improvement. I guess I didn’t really stink that bad.