Sue

If this file is going to be load bearing for a team, at some point stop doing it with formulas. A scheduled script that writes a flat snapshot into one tab is boring, but it does not silently change under people while they are reading it.

On the 6pm problem specifically, because it is a real constraint and not a confidence failing. Go at an off-peak hour for the first month if your schedule allows, even once a week, because an empty free weight area is a completely different room. Write your session on your phone before you leave the house so you never stand around deciding. And nobody is watching you. The people who look like they know what they are doing are entirely occupied with their own set and their own reflection.

No disagreement here at all. Progressive means starting somewhere and going up, and a lot of people read lift heavy as start heavy.

Started at 51 for the same reason. My week for the first six months, and this was set with a physio who knew the scan results, which is the part I would not skip:

Two full body sessions a week, about 45 minutes. Squat pattern, hinge pattern, a press, a row, and a carry. Sets of eight to ten for the first eight weeks, then gradually heavier for sets of five to six.

The progression is the whole point. It is not lifting weights, it is lifting weights that keep getting heavier, and I did not understand that distinction for the first two months. Your doctor and a physio should set the boundaries for your situation because scan results differ, but nobody could tell me what a week looked like either, so that is mine.

Before you compare anything, ring the town and ask two questions. One, is there a mandatory connection ordinance, because plenty of places give you a window of a few years and then you connect whether you like it or not. Two, is there a betterment or frontage assessment on your tax bill regardless of connection, because in our town everyone on the route paid the assessment and the people who declined the hookup paid it and got nothing. That single phone call changes the whole calculation.

The at 70 line is the real argument. A working septic is only cheap while it works, and the failure lands as one big bill on whatever day it feels like.

Going to disagree with the "legs are impossible" line slightly. They're not impossible, they're just tedious. Nordic curls off a sofa, single-leg RDLs holding anything heavy, step-ups onto a high box, and a sandbag you fill yourself for about £20 covers most of it.

What you actually gave up is convenience of loading, not the possibility of it. I trained legs at home for two years and got to a decent place, but I had to be far more deliberate than "add plate, do five."

Buy headphones before monitors and it is not close for your situation. Monitors in an untreated 3m room lie to you at exactly the frequencies you most need to hear, and you will spend months chasing a low end that is a room mode rather than a mix decision. A decent pair of closed backs for tracking and a decent pair of open backs for mixing, plus checking on whatever normal speakers you own, will get you further than any monitor you can afford at this budget in this room. Monitors are the reward for treating the room, not the first step towards it.

Lunges specifically are the culprit, if I had to guess. Anything with a big lengthening component under load gives far more soreness than the same effort in a squat, and if you did those for the first time with any volume at all, four days is unsurprising.

Worth telling her the general principle too: in English, two words looking alike is weak evidence and often no evidence at all. Ear on your head and ear of corn are unrelated. It's a fun thing for a curious eight year old to have in her pocket.

One private session was worth more than a year of group classes for exactly your situation, and it cost me about the same as three drop-ins.

The teacher watched five poses, changed two things - where my ribs were in every backbend, and my hand position in downward dog - and the second one fixed wrist pain I'd assumed was permanent. Group classes are lovely and a teacher with twenty people cannot see you the way one with only you can.

If you do one thing, do that, and tell them upfront you've been self-taught for eight months and want to be checked rather than taught something new.

Baseline before he digs is the bit I would have skipped. Booking the lab this week.

Exactly the same in music. I can explain what makes a passage difficult in beautiful detail and still not play it, and no amount of further explaining moves my hands. Different system entirely.

I bench once a week. Reading that back, it looks like the actual answer.

Ordered a set. It genuinely hadn't occurred to me that I could bring my own plates.

Also: stop measuring with a tape monthly. Real change is roughly a centimetre a year for most people not on their first six months, and daily variation in pump and hydration is bigger than that.

Photos in the same light every eight weeks tell you more, and they don't tempt you to re-measure on a Tuesday because the first number looked bad.

Add that a lot of what survives isn't digitised, and a lot of what's digitised has poor text recognition, so it exists and still can't be found by searching.

I did the version you're contemplating and I'd tell you not to. Space heater plus humidifier in a 2.5 by 3 metre room, three or four times a week over one winter.

What I got: maybe 32C on a good day, condensation running down the window every session, and black mould in the corner behind the door by February that took a landlord conversation and a repaint to resolve. The electricity was the smaller cost and it wasn't nothing, a 2kW heater running two hours a session, several times a week, is a visible line on the bill.

If you're renting, this is a deposit-risking hobby.

It's the worst possible room. Cold external wall plus deliberate humidity is a mould recipe. If you try anything at all, do it in the warmest internal room and open everything for twenty minutes afterwards.

Practical disagreement with making 24 kg work indefinitely. If you were already comfortable with a barbell, a basic bar and a couple of hundred kilos of second hand plates often costs less than another set of adjustable dumbbells, and used plates turn up constantly. You need about two square metres and a floor you do not mind. If you are in a first floor flat, ignore me entirely, but if you are on a ground floor or have a garage, buying load is cheaper than engineering around not having it.

Agreed on the proportion. My disaster was a single juicing session that was probably eighty percent citrus in one go, which is nothing like a weekly handful.

Also don't mixed grip on a rep you're not sure you'll finish. That's the specific scenario where the bicep injuries happen.

Mild disagreement with everyone saying combine. Seventy-five minutes for both is thin, and what actually happens is the second half gets rushed and eventually skipped.

I'd do gym twice a week as pure lower body plus one press, and keep the rings on the days between. Same weekly volume, nothing competing for the tail end of a session, and no evening where you're deciding what to drop while tired.

Warm-up worth trying: two minutes in a 90/90 position each side and ten slow bodyweight squats to full depth before you touch the bar. Mine does the pinch thing when I go from sitting at a desk straight into loaded squats, and almost never when I've spent five minutes getting the hip moving first.