Thursday, March 29, 2012

Week 2! Day 7 (Chest and Back)...pushing more

First, thank you to all of you reading the blog.  I can see from the stats that a number of people are following and I hope this will help you.  I believe you can now leave comments in the blog without registering.  Please feel free...I can always use the extra encouragement and/or advice if you have it.

Started second week today which is identical to week one.

Today's workout (Chest and Back) is basically push ups and pull ups with some extra stuff mixed in.  I totally did NOT feel like doing this when I woke up.  But once you get through the warm up (9 minutes), you feel a lot better.  However, it is still hard to do those first few pull ups.  By the way, it didn't help that I put in the wrong DVD and went though 9 minutes of the wrong warm up.  Oops!

To review, the workout today is 12 exercises and then you repeat them with more intensity.  The idea is to pace yourself through the first repetition.  Last week, I paced myself too much (made it too easy) the first time around so I pushed my self a little harder this time.  Even so, I found I could actually do less pull ups today than I could last week.  It may be because those are incorporated into two workouts a week so I've done them twice in the past seven days.  Still, it is a little embarrassing to see a 3 or a 4 as the repetitions I write down.  But what can I do?  That's the best I had this morning.  I did a lot better with the push ups.

In the second half, I really tried to get past the psychological block to quit when things got hard.  If I had done 15 push ups and I was dying, I pushed myself to do 5 more.  That definitely had an effect...I couldn't lift my arms in the shower later on!

One thing I learned today...I need more weights.  I did not have enough weight to push myself on the deep pants or the lawnmowers.  I would like to shoot to max out at 8-10 reps and I could do way more than that.  Today, I used 15 and 20 lb dumbbells.  I need to get enough weight to increase those in 5lb increments.

Ab exercises tonight and then plyo tomorrow.  I'm actually looking forward to those.  I think the pull ups are my Achilles heel.