I feel badly even featuring this tea, because The Captain is part of Friday Afternoon Tea’s rotating fandom blends, and alas—it has rotated out of availability until next summer.

 

You know me and blends: I’m often not a fan. But my last blend from Friday was pretty amazing, and the ingredients in this blend—black tea, pu erh, cacao nib, and fig—sounded about right.

 

Here’s the thing about blends: a lot of time, I feel like blends fight the tea. The goal of the added things is to mask the flavor of tea. But tea is delicious. You don’t need to mask the flavor of tea unless the tea is bad. Blends that enhance the flavor, though? That can work.

 

Pu erh tends to be a dark, rich tea as it is—even without additives, it sometimes strikes me as chocolatey or figgy. So a tea blend of black and dark teas, with dark, rich ingredients? That could work. That could definitely work. I had high hopes for this blend, and I was not disappointed.

 

It was one of those blends where the additions were kind of like salt in a recipe: just enough to enhance the flavors that were there in some kind of culinary magic that made them More rather than Less.

 

I definitely like this and I’m very sorry, but it won’t be on sale again until next June, but if you like the idea of tea blends that Don’t Fight the Tea, check out Friday Afternoon Tea and also I just placed another order so hopefully the next time I feature a tea from them it will be available for purchase now.

So way back in 2016 or so, I realized that I really needed to be doing regular resistance training, because resistance training helps maintain muscle mass (of increasing importance for women as we age), and prevents osteoporosis, and decreases blood pressure.

 

I’m going to mention something briefly weight related in the next two paragraphs—if that’s not for you, please skip the part between the green dashed lines.

Side note: This was not my first time trying resistance training. I’d done it earlier, in a stage when I was trying to lose weight (which is a topic for a whole other discussion, yargh), and the thing I discovered at that point is that for me, personally, treating any form of exercise as a weight-loss tool is actually very counterproductive, because if I get frustrated by weight loss and I’m only exercising to lose weight, I stop exercising.

 

My reality is that I am much, much happier, feel much better on a day to day basis, sleep better, and have better health numbers on everything except the scale if I exercise regularly. So I don’t exercise to lose weight. I exercise because it makes me feel better.

So when I turned forty, I decided to get serious about resistance training. I got a book (I’ll tell you about it at the end) that had a weight training progression, started using an app (I use Strong) and got really, really good at going three times a week.

 

It was very exciting. I got to the point where I could feel actual muscle definition. Using an app made it easy to see how my strength improved, and it was really cool to watch my progression as the weeks went on. I did this regularly for about seven months before I hit a snag.

 

Here’s the snag: the book I got had three or four separate weights work outs, and you were supposed to progress from one to the next after a certain amount of time. I stayed on the first one for much longer than they said because I started out as a baby beginner and needed to make sure I mastered the form, and also because moving on is hard.

 

Then I tried to make myself move to the next step up. This was too much of a change in routine, so I stopped doing weights entirely. 

 

(Please understand that if you want this to make sense, I’ve got nothing. Those are the words that describe what happened. I say them here because I am resolving to not be ashamed of being a goofy-brained individual and I figure the more I say the goofy things my brain does, the more other goofy-brained people will say “oh, yeah, my brain does that too,” and the more we talk about it, the less it seems goofy, and the more we accept that our brains are all goofy and none of us are rational.)

 

After years of feeling scarred and beleaguered because I had such a great routine going and then just stopped for no rational reason, I have decided that I should just not do that, and should instead think that I had a great routine going and so clearly I can start it up again.

 

For the last few weeks, I have started resistance training because I liked it and gosh darn it, it’s good for me. This time, though, I’m trying to learn from my mistakes by not changing the entire workout plan completely from one week to the next. I will transition slowly as I gain fitness to harder exercises!

 

I’m also giving myself a goal, because I do well with goals. What is my goal? As per my last Doing a Thing newsletter, I am not going to tell you. But: I am trying to do a thing. It will probably take me years. Wish me luck!

I did promise to mention the weight training book, and…deep sigh. I have a caveat list that is a whole newsletter long.

 

I actually tried a bunch of different books. The one that I hated the least is called The New Rules of Lifting for Women. I have put it here at the end because “hated it the least” is doing a lot of lifting because too many gym people are judgy weirdos.

 

The lifting philosophy in the book (work large muscle groups, work toward low rep/high weight) works very, very well for me. Almost everything else I have seen for women emphasizes high rep/low gym weight workouts, and that is not for me.

 

(The main reason for this is because it’s boring af for me to do like three reps of fifteen to twenty. By contrast, there’s actually a huge endorphin rush when you get down to 4-6 reps of high weight and you have to concentrate on every rep. “Does this bore me” is my number one reason to NOT do a form of exercise. I don’t have anything against high rep/low weight workouts; I just mostly get those from putting on a weighted pack and going for a walk, which is a separate discussion altogether.)

 

I RECOMMEND LITERALLY NOTHING ELSE IN THIS BOOK besides the workouts organized around those principles. It’s full of fatphobia and says things like you shouldn’t lift weights and train for a marathon at the same time. I thought it was maybe this book that said you shouldn’t stretch because stretching lengthens muscle fibers and you won’t look as hot if you stretch, but I can’t seem to find it in my copy, so maybe I’m misremembering and it’s another dumb book that says that. 

 

Did I mention that these books all seem to be written by judgy weirdos?

 

I am sure that somewhere there is a better book, but I don’t actually know what book that is because I try to avoid splashing into the dreck of judgy weirdness as much as possible.

 

People always say things like “discuss any health plan with your doctor” and this is hilarious, because what doctors have time to discuss specific exercise regimens with their patients? This is obviously just a thing people say to avoid lawsuits and I can’t imagine it actually helps. 

 

Sure. Discuss it with your doctor in the 0.2 seconds you have. My addition is this: despite what far too many people say, exercise is not supposed to hurt, and anyone who says “no pain, no gain” has never experienced the excruciating pain during a workout that is your body saying “no, don’t do that, stop that instantly.” My philosophy is “no pain, hey, that’s awesome.”

 

If you want to get this book, where I recommend only the workout plans and otherwise suggest searing your eyeballs out rather than reading it, it’s linked below.

This has been Courtney's Weekly Tea, a weekly newsletter about tea, books, and everything else. If you don't want to receive this email, or do want to receive additional emails about Courtney's books/book events/etc, please use the links below to unsubscribe from this list or to manage your mailing list preferences.