I Sculpt my Arms by Using My Sink Every Night
By: Dan Stout
Tags: Health, Fitness, Exercise, Arm Workout, Life

Photo by pan xiaozhen

I have worked in the restaurant business for a very long time. First as a busser, then a waiter, and finally a bartender, the pinnacle. I have logged thousands of hours at ten different restaurants and met thousands of people along the way. I enjoy the service industry. They are my people. The thing I don’t like is the uniforms.

Every restaurant has a uniform code. Things you have to buy before you start your first day. This is something that I dread. I hate buying work clothes because they need to be of good quality to last. More quality means a higher price. So when starting at a new restaurant I just buy one of everything I need. One reason is cost, of course, but the other is anxiety.

What if I don’t like the job or the people that I work with? I don’t want to spend all this money on clothes and then not keep the job. Thankfully, this only happened at two of those ten restaurants. What a joke those two restaurants were.

So here I am. I have just worked my first shift at my new restaurant. I have also decided I would like to attend my next shift. I like the place, I guess. The only problem I have is my work clothes are dirty and I have to work tomorrow. I can easily just throw them in the washer and dryer, but that seems like such a waste. I am very much a hippie and do not like to waste resources if I can find a better way, and running the washer and dryer for just a couple of items is wasteful to me.

Off to the sink!

I throw the shirt, which smells like the restaurant I just worked at, into the sink with a tiny bit of detergent and get to washing. The water immediately turns a disgusting color but I press on.

I wash for a good two minutes. My forearms are already tired and I have just begun. Hmmm, I thought, this could turn out to be a good thing. I am going to get ripped! I flush the dirty water down the sink and work all the dirty water out. Then I add just a drop more detergent and give it a second quick wash and rinse.

The key here is I am exercising my arm muscles by grabbing and working the dirty water out of the shirt until it rinses clean. I focus on all of my arm muscles as I am washing the shirt. This is important. Focus.

I take the now clean shirt and form it into a ball and press all the water out by squeezing it with my hands. Great for the forearms! I don’t use the twist method to get the water out because it seems to stretch and damage the shirt a little. Plus, squeezing the water out between my hands gives me a much better “workout”.

Honestly, that is it. That is my arm workout. I repeat this process every night after work, or the next morning if I had too many drinks with my work family the night before.

I am able to keep this process going by having only one shirt. This way I have to wash it before my next shift. I do eventually, though, add another shirt to the mix as a backup. I will usually do this after I know I am going to be working at this restaurant for the foreseeable future. I still wash them both in the sink. Don’t be silly.

Washing two shirts in the sink at one time is twice the workout. Do this if you like. I usually just stick with the one though. It feels better. Less water dumped on the floor.

Also of note. You may be asking yourself what I do with my pants. Here is a little fact about the restaurant industry, it is a very popular thing not to wash your pants after every shift. This is just what happens. Most of us do it. Just accept it.

I think the reason for me was that I didn’t want to wash my pants in the sink. It was too much work. It is very hard to work the soap in and out of the fabric and rinsing is difficult. So I started throwing my work pants in with my regular clothes and they would go through the washer and dryer when I had enough clothes to do so. What I found though was that the black pants, a restaurant standard, would quickly fade.

Many of the restaurants that I worked at actually cared about how their employees looked. A good thing I think. Since this was the case, faded pants were usually deemed not appropriate. When your pants got too faded you were asked not to wear that pair anymore. So why wash them?

Faded shirts were frowned upon as well, but as a male, I had to wash my shirt every night. I know many of the females didn’t. I witnessed this first hand. Plus washing my shirt in the sink seemed to delay the fading process to a great extent.

There you have it. My little arm secret. Get started as soon as you possibly can. There must be something dirty that needs a good washing. Enjoy.

I have now had a restaurant job for most of the years since 1995. Which means I have washed my work shirt in the sink thousands of times. I have never gone to the gym and lifted weights to work on my arms.

I always get compliments on my arms and forearms.

I wonder why that is?