Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Back to the gym

After running on Monday night, last night's workout was in the gym. The workouts I'm following right now are deliberately broken into multiple phases, where you start with pure strength work and end up huffing and puffing from bodyweight exercises done at a fast pace.

There are four segments to each workout (note that the segment "names" are not mine; they come from the workout program):

Pure strength: 3 sets of 4 reps of two different lifts, 90 seconds between sets
Transition: 3 sets of 10 reps of the same lifts, only 60 seconds rest
Burn: 3 sets of 4 different lifts, rest for 60 seconds after every other set. At least one exercise hits the same muscles hit hard in the first two phases.
Metabolic: Bodyweight stuff like burpees, air squats, rope jumping, mountain climbers, etc.

Last night, the first two sets were snatch-grip (wide grip) deadlifts and bench presses. I hadn't done snatch-grip deads for quite a while and my shoulders are complaining today. I had forgotten how grip intensive the wide-grip is as well, and my grip was the limiting factor in how much weight I lifted.

The "burn" phase included explosive push-ups, which hit the same muscles as the bench presses. Three of the four lifts in this set last night were upper-body dominant. I thought I was going to throw up halfway through round 3 last night.

Today is supposed to be fairly warm and we didn't get any real snow yesterday, so I'm going to run outside after work - a short fartlek workout before my guitar lesson.

It might be tough to get in a workout tomorrow because I'm leaving work early to see Furthur (one of the many post-Jerry forms of the Dead that have toured) in concert.

But, it's nice to be working hard and feeling healthy again.

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