Annie

One thing to take seriously rather than shrug off: if the soreness gets dramatically worse instead of better, a limb swells noticeably, or your urine goes dark like tea, that's a same-day call to a doctor rather than a gym question. It's rare and it's much more likely after an extreme first session, but it's the one situation where normal soreness advice does not apply.

Vinegar does have a use here, just not the one it's famous for. Running an empty hot cycle with two cups of vinegar and nothing else strips soap scum out of the machine itself. As a fabric treatment in a loaded wash it's mostly folklore.

Twice a week is the single biggest change most people can make on upper body lifts. Second session doesn't have to be heavy, just there.

Worth checking whether it's really a loading problem or a volume problem. Five weeks at the same weight with three sets of five is fifteen reps a session, and for a lot of women that's simply not enough bench volume to drive progress. When I went from 3x5 to 5x5 plus a set of dumbbell press afterwards, the same weight started moving again without changing anything about the jumps.

Track for one week what actually interrupts you and how long it takes. Most people discover it's the same two or three recurring things, and those can be scheduled rather than absorbed. My plan stopped breaking when I realised the interruption was always a specific colleague on a specific day and I just gave that a slot.

Worth naming why this particular story spreads. It's memorable, it's morally charged, and it lets the teller be the person who knows something dark about an ordinary phrase. That combination beats an accurate but boring explanation nearly every time, which is roughly how all folk etymology works.

It does a small amount of something, and much less than the packaging implies.

Baking soda neutralises acidic smells, so it has some effect on things like sour milk or a bit of old fruit. It does essentially nothing for the volatile sulphur compounds that make an old fridge genuinely unpleasant, which is most of what you're smelling.

The bigger limitation is surface area. Only the top layer in the box is exposed, and it's a few square centimetres of powder against a hundred and something litres of air. Tipping it into a shallow dish helps more than leaving it in the box.

If you want the version that actually works, activated charcoal has far more surface area per gram and takes on a much wider range of smells. A few quid, lasts months.

It's the same reason a carbon filter is a big fluffy block rather than a brick. Contact area is the whole mechanism.

It neutralises acids, which is a much narrower thing than absorbing all odours. That's why it does nothing for the sulphur smells that bother people most.

Don't keep training into it hoping it resolves. Pinch under load is your body telling you a structure is being compressed, and the useful response is to change the position so it isn't, not to push through and find out. Box squats, front squats or split squats will all keep your legs strong meanwhile.

Parchment or a fold of paper between the slices if you want to take out two at a time. Otherwise you get one brick shaped loaf again in a different form.

You didn't get unlucky, the fridge is genuinely the worst place for bread.

Stale bread is not mainly bread that has lost water. It's bread whose starch has reorganised itself from the loose disordered state it reached in the oven back into an ordered crystalline one, and that reordering is fastest at temperatures a little above freezing. A fridge sits right in the middle of the worst range for it.

A freezer is cold enough that the molecules can't move into position, so staling nearly stops. Room temperature is warm enough that it happens, just more slowly than in the fridge. So the ranking is freezer, counter, fridge, from best to worst.

The fridge does slow mould, which is the trade-off you were making. If you need a week, slice the loaf and freeze it and toast from frozen. That works genuinely well and nobody can tell.

Neither as written. With 35 usable minutes, the deciding factor isn't strength versus hypertrophy, it's rest periods, and heavy 5x5 is the worst possible fit because it needs three minutes between sets and you can't afford them.

What I'd run in your slot:

• Three full-body days, two big lifts each, alternating squat/press and hinge/pull
• Top sets in the 5 to 8 range rather than 5x5, so 2 or 3 hard sets not five
• Everything else superset in pairs that don't compete, so a row while you rest from a press

That gets you roughly 6 to 9 hard sets per big movement per week, which is enough for both strength and some size, and it fits. The 5x5 template isn't wrong, it just costs more minutes than you own.

It only costs you if the two lifts share muscles or leave you out of breath. A row between press sets is basically free and it buys you back six or seven minutes a session.

Worth knowing that the 25 year claim assumes three hours a day. That's the standard basis for those numbers, so a bulb on for eight hours in a living room is on a very different clock even before you seal it in glass.

One more filter: who benefits from the story. Origins that flatter a nation, a trade or a subculture spread faster than boring ones, and you'll notice the confident competing claims for OK each attach it to a group with a stake in it. Doesn't make them wrong, does make me want the citation first.