My Strenuous Life: Read It All

Gents Confab

Week two of living the strenuous life is in the book. Here’s what I accomplished.

The weekly challenge

This weeks challenge was to read an entire book of at least 150 pages. In any other week this would have been a fairly easy challenge. However this week I did not have a lot of free time so getting an entire book completed was for sure going to be a challenge. The previous week I began to read “Shop Class as Soulcraft” by Matthew Crawford. I was a little under a fourth of the way through the book when the challenge came out so I decided to finish the book and also start and finish another book.

“Shop Class as Soulcraft” was a pretty decent book. It was all about how we are shaming people away from doing blue collar work and that should stop. The book started off really strong but to me, I lost interest about half way through. If you’ve ever seen the show Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe it was pretty much that but in written form… and not as fun. Personally I love doing things with my hands, that’s why I do leather working and ceramics. I’ve also never shied away from doing any manual labor. I’m all for training more skilled workers and not putting those down who decided to forgo college and head straight for the workforce or to a technical school. But again the book was a decent read and I would recommend it.

After I finished “Shop Class as Soulcraft” I went on to read “Lost To Time: Unforgettable Stories That History Forgot” by Martin W. Sandler. This book was right up my alley. All the chapters were different interesting stories that most people would have never heard about. I loved learning about different things from a secret subway in NYC before the actual subway was built to Cahokia the forgotten Rome of America. All of the stories were fascinating and if you like history you will love this book.

So challenge yourself. Can you read an entire book in a week?

Getting Stronger

This was kind of a difficult week for me physical activity wise. I workout during my lunch break and two days this past week I had things to do during lunch. Unfortunately because my work is currently on summer hours the gym was closed after work. So that means I had to do some walking aka one of my least favorite things ever. I still managed to do my hour per day but it was not as strenuous as I would have liked. You can see what I did below.

In the end

It was a pretty solid week. Work wise, it was jam packed and is only going to continue getting busier. I managed to get my weekly challenge done and I can honestly say that I am better than I was the week before.

Keep living strenuously!

– Jonathan

Workout schedule

Sunday: Stretch and Yoga for 1 hour

Monday: Push Day

Heavy:

• 5 sets of 5 reps: Bench press @ 130lbs
• 5 sets of 5 reps: Military press @ 80lbs

Superset 1:

• 3 sets of 10 reps: Low flys @ 50lbs
• 3 sets of 10 reps: lateral raises @ 20lbs

Superset 2:

• 3 sets of 10 reps: Middle flys @ 50lbs
• 3 sets of 10 reps: Facepulls @ 40lbs

Regular:

• 3 sets of 10 reps: High Flys @ 50lbs

Tuesday: Walk (lame)

Wednesday: Legs and Pull

Heavy

• 5×5: Squats @ 135lbs
• 5×5: Deadlifts @ 185lbs
• 5×5: Shrugs@ 185lbs

Thursday: More Lame Walking

Friday: Push and Pull

• 5×5: Bench @ 130lbs
• 5×5: Deadlifts @ 185lbs
• 5×5: Shrugs@ 185lbs

Saturday: Walk and swim