What Was Your Work Out Today?

Ghhaa. Friend called, wanted to go to movie/dinner, of course I said yes. All I had time for was the satisficing level of activity to keep up with the low-goal C2 challenge currently in play, so I did a mere 2 x 500m rowing machine, with 1' easy rowing after each. That's a whopping 7 minutes of workout, folks . . . and not Tabata-paced, either.

Movie was good, though; and so was dinner.

I really am pretty poor at logging.

Here is some recent stuff:
Wednesday
Climbing, 3 hours. It was a high gravity days; I was out of form.

Friday
Climbing, 3.5 hours. Decent, I got a load of v3s and one v4. I also probably did around 12 miles' walking; due to a slight miscalculation about where the gym was.

<Non-temporal ordering>
Thursday
It was around minus 5. I really should have investigated if the local lake was frozen; i',ve always wanted to try ice diving. Instead, I made do with an 8 mile walk.
</Non-temporal ordering>

Saturday
14 mile walk and 2 hour's climb. I started pretty well but faded; I got loads of v3s but no v4s.

Sunday
Rest day, so 9 miles' walk.

Rowing machine, 3 x 2k with 2' row out/drink/row in between the pieces, and 3' CD at the end. 7018m all told, negative splitted the 2ks (2:33.4, 2:28.6, 2:26.5 at 18 spm). 7:50 in Z4, 18:31 Z3, the rest of the 37:25 below that.

Followed that with a slow, light upper body dumbbell circuit, mostly push movements.

Lower Power

Rack Pull 5x5
BB Hip Thrust 5x5
One-Leg Press 5x5 <superset> Leg Press Calf Extend 5x15
Roman Chair Knee-Ups 4x20

Swapped days for the cable crunches and the knee-ups, since the Roman chair is right next to the leg press for Tuesday's workout and the cable crunch is right next to the leg curl machine for Friday's workout.

As a whole, without knowing your sets/reps/rest, I'd say your routine looks pretty good. You hit all the planes of motion, start with legs before moving to torso before moving to arms/shoulders, all very correct. Everything looks good...right up until you land on deadlift as the very last exercise. When you are tired across the body, that is when you try to perform an exercise which taxes the entire body? It should be the FIRST exercise done, or at the very worst following the leg press.

nossmf wrote: »

As a whole, without knowing your sets/reps/rest, I'd say your routine looks pretty good. You hit all the planes of motion, start with legs before moving to torso before moving to arms/shoulders, all very correct. Everything looks good...right up until you land on deadlift as the very last exercise. When you are tired across the body, that is when you try to perform an exercise which taxes the entire body? It should be the FIRST exercise done, or at the very worst following the leg press.

Thanks for the feedback. I wrote them in the order I do them. I will absolutely move the deadlift. That's actually something I had thought of a couple months ago. I think the only reason I do them last is I added them to the bottom of my list. Thanks for helping me realize it DOES make sense to move them to first or second. Duly noted!

I am working back up to three sets, but now just do two because... I don't know why. I'm striving for 15 reps, but sometimes can't complete them all. I've recently read about doing lower weight and higher reps for strength, and I'm considering that.

For what it's worth, the other routine I was doing was:

Cardio warm up

Three rounds each:
Goblet Squat
Right Lunge
Left Lunge
Deadlift

90 second rest

Three rounds each:
Pushup
Smith Machine Incline Reverse Pull-Up (that's what I call it)
Dumbbell curl to press
Assisted (weighted) pull-up


90 second rest

Three rounds each:
Triceps Press
Dead bug
Plank
Static Back Extension

Cardio cool down.

The person I worked with wanted to give me a routine that I could complete in an hour. What I didn't like about it is that I was running all over the workout floor from one place to another and back over and over. It felt silly, and while I really don't care what other people think, they often gave me a funny look. I felt funny actually.

I often do a short swim after. I like to swim on days when I don't do strength work.

Back to stationary bike, 15k at 113W, 3' CD at 96W. 82% Z3, nothing above.

mtaratoot wrote: »

nossmf wrote: »

As a whole, without knowing your sets/reps/rest, I'd say your routine looks pretty good. You hit all the planes of motion, start with legs before moving to torso before moving to arms/shoulders, all very correct. Everything looks good...right up until you land on deadlift as the very last exercise. When you are tired across the body, that is when you try to perform an exercise which taxes the entire body? It should be the FIRST exercise done, or at the very worst following the leg press.

Thanks for the feedback. I wrote them in the order I do them. I will absolutely move the deadlift. That's actually something I had thought of a couple months ago. I think the only reason I do them last is I added them to the bottom of my list. Thanks for helping me realize it DOES make sense to move them to first or second. Duly noted!

I am working back up to three sets, but now just do two because... I don't know why. I'm striving for 15 reps, but sometimes can't complete them all. I've recently read about doing lower weight and higher reps for strength, and I'm considering that.

For what it's worth, the other routine I was doing was:

Cardio warm up

Three rounds each:
Goblet Squat
Right Lunge
Left Lunge
Deadlift

90 second rest

Three rounds each:
Pushup
Smith Machine Incline Reverse Pull-Up (that's what I call it)
Dumbbell curl to press
Assisted (weighted) pull-up


90 second rest

Three rounds each:
Triceps Press
Dead bug
Plank
Static Back Extension

Cardio cool down.

The person I worked with wanted to give me a routine that I could complete in an hour. What I didn't like about it is that I was running all over the workout floor from one place to another and back over and over. It felt silly, and while I really don't care what other people think, they often gave me a funny look. I felt funny actually.

I often do a short swim after. I like to swim on days when I don't do strength work.

I'm with @nossmf... The major compound lift should be first (i.e. Deadlift, barbell squats, bench) then move to the rest. Either way, the workout looks killer!

Back to the gym for weight machines.

This time deadlift first. I really had been wondering why I was doing it last since it was a compound movement focusing on legs and bigger muscles. Fixed. I went ahead and upped the weight and was still able to do more reps than my target. I was able to increase weight and/or reps on all other movements. There was one that I thought I had done fewer reps on my second set, but when I went to write it down.... Nope. Two more than last time.

Still just two sets.

I decided to utilize some of my rest time between sets by going ahead and working opposing muscles. I did let curls and leg extensions one after the other without a rest between. By the time one was over, that was rest for the other movement. I did the same with the dumbbell curl-to-press and triceps pull-down. I am a lazy person so wanted to speed things up. I think I used the "bonus" time in the sauna....

mtaratoot wrote: »

I think I used the "bonus" time in the sauna....

At my age, I consider time spent in the hot tub after leg day as a mandatory part in my recovery process, lol.

Glad the workout worked out for you, including doing supersets to accelerate things. Just remember as the weights go up, you need to factor in adequate warmup for the first exercise per body part. As in warmup on deadlifts before going heavy deadlifts, then other leg exercises should be good to go without further warmup; but once you start your chest/back work, the first one for each needs warmup as well. No warmup needed for the shoulder or arm work, they already get adequate warming through the chest/back work which precedes it.

How much warmup needed? Depends greatly on the weights being used, but a good rule of thumb is 3 warmup sets at 25%, 50% and 75% of working weight. Once the weight is high enough that the 25% jumps are more than about 50 pounds, then break the warmup into as many 50 lb jumps as needed. In other words, since you deadlift first now, if you deadlift more than 200, your warmups will be 50, 100, 150, etc.

Not trying to brag, but my squat routine requires me to do 7 warmup sets as I slowly increase the weight, making sure my muscles are primed to work hard without the shock of suddenly working hard out of the blue.