Monday 9 September 2013

Monday Strength training

Found a colleague at work willing to join me for a strength training Monday session. We seem to have settled on a wee pyramid session doing some old school exercises and it's great! So we've been progressing with a sets of 8/5/3/5/8 as we add weight. The idea is to quickly progress up towards what should be our maximal weight for the exercise, hopefully without getting injured or over-stressing ourselves on the way. We'll base the starting weight next week on what we attained as heaviest weight this week. after a 10 minute warm up on the trainers, we're pushing big weights on Deadlifts & Bench Press then using Clean & press as an almost aerobic allover body 'finisher'. Throw in a couple of sets of pullups & dips using body weight to remind ourselves where we are in terms of actual power to weight ratios and finally give the show ponies a wee pump doing a spot of Ezy bar curling - mainly for aesthetics, but perhaps in deference to the old school naivety of our program ;-)

Weigh-in 85 Kg; Still a bit heavy and mildly surprised that I'm not shifting any weight, as I definitely feel much better going about my business. Trousers fitting much better this week too!

  • 10 mins warm up - elliptical trainer

    ExerciseMax Weight (kg)
    Deadlift90.0
    BenchPress87.5 kg
  • 3 sets of 10 pull ups - failed miserably, attaining 5 on the first set then pretty much falling of the bars somewhere between 3 & 4 on the next 2 sets.
  • Did manage 1 set of 10 dips, before embarrassing myself on the next 2 sets also.
  • 3 sets of 10 Clean & Press with a 30kg BarBell - aiming to really get the heart going and get some power through speed into each movement.
  • 2 sets of 10 with 20kg on the Ezy bar.

    Felt a lot better at the end of the session than I did going into it. Old school chucking rocks about rocks!!!

  • Wednesday 4 September 2013

    Rowing challenge - update

    So, a few more detail have emerged on this rowing challenge, which my mate's evil personal trainer has decided is a suitable end of session 'metabolic booster' (He sounds pretty evil if you ask me!) (Just for the record, the task is to perform x6 250m spints on the rowing machine (ergometer) at a pace faster than 1:30/500m - it's a bloody tough challenge in it's own right, never mind one that follows a fast paced, personal training circuit with weights). My first few attempts have been miserable failures, but Ian posted a picture of the stats for him completing 1 set in 41 seconds... and I'm nowehere near that pace. The picture led to some interesting comments on facebook. An interesting development on the thread was this bit:
    1.25/500m is FAST. For people who don't know - the 2000m WR is a 1.22/500 pace. (Albeit for 4x longer). And that guy is obviously a professional rower. So for Ian to be close to that pace, even for a 250m is fantastic.
    1:24.6/500 average for a 5:38 2000m is the record (Rob Waddell from NZ back in 1999 n the man was a monster.) My PB is 5:48 - about 20 years ago (christ I am getting old!) Full respect for an amatur 1:25/500 split!
    And for reference on the age thing, Rob in 2008 broke the 30-39 age record age 32 in 5:38.6, only 0.3 seconds slower than his row 9 years prior.
    I bloody knew it was a difficult challenge! Anyway! Resistance (drag) set to ten. Loins girded, strategy decided (High stroke rate at expense of length), position assumed... and they're off.
    Predicted Finish time....Elapsed time
    41 sec 5 sec... ya beauty!
    43 sec10 sec... keep it together Jimmy, keep it together.
    45 sec15 sec... awwwww feck!!!!!
    45 sec20 sec...Yes! Yes!...
    "This is the engine room Cap'n... she cannae take it anymore!!!"
    Predicted Finish time....Elapsed time
    48 sec48 sec...och well, getting better...
    just need to shave 3 seconds off my best time, repeat it 5 more times then slip in a heavy weights session before hand, but I'm getting there.

    Monday 2 September 2013

    Different approach - same result...

    Instead of aiming to do 250m as quickly as I could, I thought this week I'd try rowing as fast as I could for the 45sec that the challenge should take... Best effort 215m... I honestly don't feel that I can row any faster than this... How can it be possible?