It might only be the third week of January, but today I achieved one of my goals for 2013.
It has been a bit of a rough week around here in many different ways. This week at work was crazy, I had a cold from Monday until Saturday, staff meetings and switched shifts made my schedule a bit full and water in my basement from the extra mild previous weekend meant I had things to deal with during the week and a bathroom floor to rip out and replace. All this meant the gym and fitness sort of had to take a back seat this week as I dealt with all of those distractions.
Thankfully my dad has built three houses (two log, one timber frame) and pretty much gutted and redone another, so he knew what to do when it came to fixing the basement bathroom.
Today I made my return to the gym and I really only had two objectives. Bench press and the spin bike. I ended up doing pretty much my whole arms routine as I would on a Saturday, but the key thing here is the bench press. At the start of January I said I wanted to be able to bench my old weight and today I did that. For seven reps I pushed 230 pounds away from my chest, up toward the ceiling.
I’m impressed with that even if no one else is.
Due to the way the week went I was only out running once, between work and the staff meeting and so I had a lot of kilometres to catch up on, and so I rode the spin bike for 15Km, did some back and ab work and then rode for 10Km more.
I discovered that ride the bike Sunday morning is much more difficult compared to Saturday morning. Since I play hockey Saturday night. This explains what makes running so hard on Sunday mornings. I think though that this is probably good training because if I can get my legs up to 20Km of running on a Sunday morning while I am training then when Hockey is done it should be a cinch to do those runs on a Saturday morning.
Congratulations!! I was just having a similar observation with my running. If I do cross training or weights between my running schedule, my runs are definitely not as great as they were without it. It makes for an interesting quandary in training: to weight train while working on endurance or leave it for later? For now I'm thinking about getting my running workout priority through my May half and then switching to maintain the running distance but focusing on weights. Doesn't really seem like there are enough hours in the day to get this done...
ReplyDeleteHi Chris! As usual, excellent workouts!
ReplyDeleteRe spotters: I've been bench pressing for years now. And I do feel I have that same super high goal thing you have. I hope you are lifting amounts you feel completely safe about. Always leave the set knowing that you probably could do one or two more unsafe reps--but you're too smart to put yourself at risk to get crushed so you *don't* do the unsafe reps, okay? Always, practice throwing your back into the last rep to see how you can get a little extra power that way to get the bar up if you ever need to. Be smart enough to know that if you ever need help, you should yell, "I need help!" really loud to other weightlifters or anyone around. Even a relatively weak person can be enough to help.
Otherwise, just get a spotter for the heaviest sets. Once, I was stopped by a weightlifter who told me that I was being *stupid!* for lifting so much without a spotter, and he was right. I now have a certain amount I will lift by myself, and I don't do those scary reps at the end that I could probably do. If I want to go heavier, I'm friends enough with guys around me that they'd spot me. My teen son spotted me when I lifted 160 pounds two times. This is not about shyness, it is about the real fact that a person's chest can get crushed and pride isn't worth that.
I'm always so impressed with people who can re-hab anything about houses. We have a Victorian house that we re-habbed. So much work, but it turned out great. Good luck with your bathroom.
:-) Marion