Carnelian

About a month ago I posted excitedly that my gym had installed a new plate loaded belt squat machine.

I was eager to program it in, and now finally having had the chance to use it, wow!

It’s very comfortable, once you find a good angle. At first, my instinct was to sit very far back and upright to make it more like a hack squat motion. This provided a great quad stimulus, but the belt actually applied a ton of unwanted pressure to the inner thighs, and my training partner and I both ended up with big bruises on our adductors lol.

So the following week, we stepped forward, and angled our torsos to mimic a traditional squat posture. Despite this, the belt continues to dramatically reduce pressure on the back compared to a barbell squat, which is great. The belt and pulley also has much more room between your legs, so it glides freely without causing any bruising.

After finding my flow with the machine, I Iove it!

I’m someone who prides myself on being able to bring sets of heavy barbel squats to failure, but it has its downsides. For one, it’s just very mentally demanding, and there is a fear factor to overcome. Setting the weight down on the safeties after concentric failure is highly technical and while I believe it’s worth learning and practicing, it’s something I hesitate to teach others.

But the belt squat? Forget about it lol, you got one more! Take every heavy set to failure with no fear in your heart. The machine is also very easy to spot- you basically just stand opposite the person and deadlift the plates up. With that in mind, it’s actually also an amazing machine to do some super maximal eccentrics as an intensity variation. Once you hit failure, have your spotter minimally help you out of the hole, then do another super slow eccentric.

In that manner, it has several big advantages over a leg press/hack squat. I really haven’t found a way to meaningfully help someone out of the hole in a leg press. The belt squat also allows for complete freedom of motion, so it should work well for every body type.

All in all, 10/10! Very excited to progress with it for the rest of this program. It can also be used for many other exercises, such as RDLs, rows, shrugs, and more. I’ve taken to using it for standing calf press, which looks quite odd but is very effective. Since this is not an advertisement I don’t want to name the machine, but I will mention the plates travel directly up and down a tower, and it has a 1:1 weight ratio throughout the range of motion. Many other machines use a large lever to move the weight with a variable force curve, so I can’t comment on that style

I started seeing cakes appear on people’s usernames, and I realized that it’s been a full year now since the great debacle through which many of us discovered lemmy.

Seeing them all start to pop up at once has made me a bit nostalgic. Memmy was such an exciting and important project during that time, I believe for many people it is the reason they stuck with lemmy in the long term.

So, cheers to the devs, and to anyone who still checks on this community from time to time when memmy crosses their mind.

So, I noticed that a couple of my image uploads made using Voyager now just show a “?” graphic. Looking around this community, I’m seeing a lot of other people’s posts are like that too.

In other apps and via browser, the images are also missing. Is anyone else experiencing this/do we know what’s happening?

I noticed while scrolling All that whenever these posts are displayed, the app lags out significantly, but then returns to normal a few seconds after they’re off screen.

I suspect it’s actually just the top one because it’s a gif. Running latest test test flight version

Lemmy.world was experiencing authentication issues yesterday, making it difficult to comment and vote.

These issues were resolved some hours ago when lemmy.world updated to 18.02, but you may still be experiencing issues with your account on third party apps such as memmy.

If so, everything will start working normally if you remove your account from the app and add it again! Possibly just reinstalling will also achieve the same thing, but I haven’t tested that personally.

In Apollo, there was this really interesting feature that let you disable the gestures for voting/replying/etc. If you did so, then you could use the entire screen to navigate between posts instead of needing to swipe all the way from the side.

I struggle with a repetitive stress injury and this feature helped me a lot! I managed to grab a screenshot of the exact setting before Apollo shut down. It would be awesome if something similar could be implemented in Memmy