Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Oh man, been a while...

Well, I was feeling a bit uninspired, and then the bleeping surgery sidelined me for weeks, dammit, and various things sidetracked me.

Anyway. I'm still coaching A. - his shoulder mobility has improved somewhat though I'm still nagging him to pick up the phone and make that appointment with a physiotherapist. We'll see how he does today; the mobility restrictions in his shoulders means he can't squat due to not being able to hold the bar. Not being able to squat is teh suck for my favourite beginner's program so I've been making him do stepups instead. He thinks I'm mean and says he's got trouble walking for days afterwards, which I think is a good sign ;)

'Course, I've but on a couple pounds due to the downtime that I could do with not having on me so I suppose I'm going to have to start counting for real again if I want to get the sixpack instead of this 4-pack I have right now. The interesting thing is that while I've gained about 10-11lbs since my low last summer, I haven't lost much of anythign in the way of definition. Which I think is pretty encouraging, all things considered.

Some notes on today's workout:

I'm engaged in what I have to call general physical preparedness right now; I'm not pushing myself nearly as hard as I am capable of. I'll be sticking to a conditioning program like this for at least this week, and then I think I'm going to commit to doing one of Alwyn's workouts again.

Warmup: Tabata jump rope intervals - these are probably not true Tabatas, that would require a bit more loading to hit 170% of VOMax but 4 minutes of 20sec all-out/10sec rest still kicks my ass. especially since it's been forever since I've done them.

Exercises performed:

superset 1: Chinups/stepups - 5 chins, then 5 stepups ea. leg. No weights, no rest between sets.

Superset 2: 1-arm elevated t-pushup*/1-legged elevated stiff-legged deadlift - 5 reps ea. limb, 60lbs DB on the deads.

superset 3: Gironda dips/1-arm row 5@60lbs ea. arm.

4: curl-to-overhead press, 38.5lbs, 3x5 reps ea. arm.

Each superset performed 3 times.

*elevated pushups look like this - I added difficulty by continuing into a T-pushup on reaching the top of the elevated pushup. Fun ;) One-legged deads performed on top of same elevated blocks, so ROM is increased. Also fun.

Well, when I count reps I must say that the last chinup series I didn't get 5 reps, I got 3, then had a 30 second pause and did 1.5. So 3x5 with the recovery period being the time it takes me to do 5 stepups per leg is more in the way of a goal than actuality.

Yeah, exercse 4 is pointless when I've already done chins, but it was still fun to include ;)

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