Social Workout

April Fools' Day Workout

This is my first blog for the Body of Work Challenge. It's going to be a tough month for me to exercise (and blog about it!) 6 days a week, since I'll be out of state for a week and a half, but I will try to come up with some creative way to stay fit and connected on the road.

My main fitness focus lately has been on increasing strength through resistance exercise. After some research online, my approach has been doing weights in five sets of five reps at 85% of my one-rep max (calculated using Brzycki formula -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_rep_max). I've seen reasonable gains so far, though I haven't been recording them as precisely as I should.

I'm trying a new workout format this week. I'm discovering that full body resistance workouts every day or even every other day is a little too stressful on my body. This week I'm changing things up to give major muscle groups a little longer time to recover, but pushing them a little bit harder when I do. So I'm trying a new split.

Monday was my upper body "Push Day". In general, I focused on my extension muscles -- triceps, deltoids, and pectorals mainly. The main exercises were chest press, shoulder press, dips, flies, and triceps extension, generally on machines, though I did decline chest press using free weights.

Tuesday was upper body "Pull Day", focusing on my flexion muscles -- biceps, trapezius, and latissimus dorsi mainly. The main exercises were pull-downs, rows, upright rows, shrugs, and biceps curls, again mainly on machines, though I did upright rows and shrugs using free weights.

Normally I would separate my upper body workouts with a day focusing on another area, but I was just at the end of recovering from a muscle spasm in my lower back/hip, so I wanted to take it easy on my legs. Today my back was feeling well enough, though, that I decided I was ready to get back to my legs -- "Leg Day". Next week I will probably swap Pull Day and Leg Day. I didn't have as much time this morning as I'd hoped, so I focused on the four major leg muscle groups. I was hesitant to try to do free weight squats while I still wasn't entirely confident in my back, so I used a squat sled instead. In addition, I did horizontal leg curls, leg extensions, and horizontal calf press. The exercises I'd intended but missed included hip adduction and abduction and the glute machine.

After this week, my weight lifting split should look like:
Monday: Push, Tuesday: Legs, Wednesday: Pull, Thursday: Core, Friday or Saturday: Limited Full Body, with Sunday and either Friday or Saturday off. In addition, I'm going to try to run one long (8+ miles) run each week (on Sunday), and hopefully a couple of shorter runs or other aerobic activities other days during the week when I have the time. The long run is because my fitness goals are not entirely coherent right now -- I may want to try to run a half marathon or marathon in the near future.

Given that my back is still recovering, I'm not sure what tomorrow's "Core Day" will look like. I'll probably include the hip exercises I didn't get to today. My limited full body day will likely include one or two major exercises from each other the other days -- probably bench press, pull downs, squats, and dead lift (since that's the exercise I hurt myself doing, I may wait a while before I get back to that. In the mean time, I'll probably replace it with lower back extension or cobra).

I'll get into more detail about the specific exercises I'm doing, and clarify my goals in later posts.