Lesson Learned

Posted Thu Aug 19, 2010 in

I woke about a half-hour ago, not able to settle back down into sleep. The coffee finished a few minutes ago and my Nalgene bottle is filled with water. I’m hopeful the coffee will help stir my gray matter and the water will rehydrate my body.

Today is aerobics (cardio) day and I’m about ready. I’ll go ride the HealthGlider in a half-hour or an hour, once I completely waken. I want to have my head totally in the game, which is required for interval training.

My muscles are “twingy” this morning. One of the things I noticed long ago is that whenever I make an adjustment to one or more exercises (or exercise groups), there are unexpected changes in muscle groups that are not the focus of the change. Even without “cheating” during the exercise regimen, our bodies call in additional muscle groups when we really stress the primary. A great example of this is the impact of increased weight on the bench press on deltoids, triceps, and biceps.

I pushed the weight up a notch (one notch too many I’ll note) yesterday on the bench. I wasn’t able to complete the double-pump portion of the metaset; I maxed out on the first half of the double-pump. So, there were no flyes in that set. Although I was disappointed that I couldn’t complete the meta-set, it was still a good exercise. I pushed my chest muscle group to failure.

I also pushed my deltoids, biceps, and triceps pretty hard in the process. My deltoid metaset follows the chest group. The delts were pretty tired, although I made it through their routine. My arms got a bit of a rest on the upper-back metaset, but they were pretty tired when their turn came. They received a pretty decent workout during the chest exercise and didn’t have to be pushed quite to hard to get to failure.

The lesson learned for the day was that I should make adjustments to major muscle group routines and leave the others alone. If I’m not adjusting major muscle group weights (and exercises), then adjustments to minor muscle groups are fine.

On Saturday I will complete my second week on this program. It isn’t easy, but it is straighforward. I will complete the entire cycle one time — upper and lower body routines three times each and cardio six times. I’ll also have a decent estimate on my weight loss over a one-week period (just got the scales last weekend) so I can track that statistic. I am logging training and eating patterns and will have those data to review. I’ll do a full review Sunday and plan the next one- and two-week cycles.