A weighting game
May. 27th, 2011 06:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peterbirksI haven't written much about the training recently, partly because I'm sure that it would become tedious if I did so at length with any frequency, and partly because the progress has been slow and steady rather than exciting. But progress there has been.
We've actually given the dead lifts a rest for a short while - focusing instead on individual muscle groups and building up the strength in these. On Monday I broached the tall "pull-up" machine for the first time. Basically this is a very high machine that you can use either to push up your entire body weight when in a vertical position (think vertical push-ups with your feet dangling in the air at all times) or, if that's a bit girly for you, actually trying to pull yourself up from a vertical hanging position so that your elbows are at 90 degrees - rinse and repeat.
Relax, I didn't go for that. What we did was personal trainer Nick (henceforth PT Nick) 'pushed' me up to the 90 degree position, and then I tried to let myself back down to the vertical hanging position as slowly as possible. Then he pushed me back up again. We did just 2 x four reps of this, interrupted with a 30-second stint of me hanging on the handlebars and just trying for the smallest upward movement (little more than the hint of a shoulder shrug), repeated 10 times. This was a bit like that scene early on in Kill Bill when Uma Thurman is trying to will her toe to move. Just get a little bit of movement going, and eventually the full lift will come.
I hadn't realized until a couple of days later how much this Monday session hit my "lats" (those muscles at the side of your back that start low down on your ribs and move up diagonally past the side of the shoulder blades to the top of your arms) when they and my triceps were still hurting. For the first time I actually took a day off any training at all so that they could recover. A pity that it took until Thursday until I realized this was necessary.
That didn't stop me smashing three other personal bests this week. Just for my "warm-up" row I beat 4 minutes for 1000m on the rowing machine. Not sure that PT Nick was happy at me thrashing myself in a warm-up, but I recovered fairly fast, and I have to push hard for at least 600m on the machine to get the body temperature up.
Then on Wednesday, and perhaps unwisely, I went for it over 4km on the rowing machine and managed 17 min 37 sec. That was 10 seconds inside my previous personal best, and, when you consider I would have taken 20 minutes for the same distance about three months ago, it was pretty good. But that really exacerbated the strain on the aforementioned latissimus dorsi, and on Thursday I accepted that at my age, if I had really zapped a big muscle pair, it is best to take a day off to recover fully.
So, by today, I felt fine again, and I went for a personal best on the leg press as part of a quadriceps (front thigh muscles) routine. I'd never done more than 151kg on that before, but I got it up to five reps at 160kg and then a single rep at 169kg. Whoof!
So, all in all the training has gone well. And I'm beginning to say to myself "hmm, I don't remember seeing that muscle before" (curiously, this was the neck muscles, which I haven't been isolating at all!). There's a danger here that, if my weight creeps up a bit, I can use as an excuse "oh, it's extra muscle", when the chances are what it really is was that slice of honey on toasat that I had the previous night just before going to bed. Even if I should only be focusing on my waist line (down about 2.5 inches in three months, by the way), I can be fairly sure that there's a fair amount of fat that still needs to be disposed of, and that means less weight. No muscle that I put on at the moment should be counteracting the weight loss from eliminating excess fat, and I shouldn't be tempted to fool myself that it's otherwise.
Tomorrow and Sunday I try to do 8am sessions, and I might be strong enough to do some back muscle stuff again.
_________
We've actually given the dead lifts a rest for a short while - focusing instead on individual muscle groups and building up the strength in these. On Monday I broached the tall "pull-up" machine for the first time. Basically this is a very high machine that you can use either to push up your entire body weight when in a vertical position (think vertical push-ups with your feet dangling in the air at all times) or, if that's a bit girly for you, actually trying to pull yourself up from a vertical hanging position so that your elbows are at 90 degrees - rinse and repeat.
Relax, I didn't go for that. What we did was personal trainer Nick (henceforth PT Nick) 'pushed' me up to the 90 degree position, and then I tried to let myself back down to the vertical hanging position as slowly as possible. Then he pushed me back up again. We did just 2 x four reps of this, interrupted with a 30-second stint of me hanging on the handlebars and just trying for the smallest upward movement (little more than the hint of a shoulder shrug), repeated 10 times. This was a bit like that scene early on in Kill Bill when Uma Thurman is trying to will her toe to move. Just get a little bit of movement going, and eventually the full lift will come.
I hadn't realized until a couple of days later how much this Monday session hit my "lats" (those muscles at the side of your back that start low down on your ribs and move up diagonally past the side of the shoulder blades to the top of your arms) when they and my triceps were still hurting. For the first time I actually took a day off any training at all so that they could recover. A pity that it took until Thursday until I realized this was necessary.
That didn't stop me smashing three other personal bests this week. Just for my "warm-up" row I beat 4 minutes for 1000m on the rowing machine. Not sure that PT Nick was happy at me thrashing myself in a warm-up, but I recovered fairly fast, and I have to push hard for at least 600m on the machine to get the body temperature up.
Then on Wednesday, and perhaps unwisely, I went for it over 4km on the rowing machine and managed 17 min 37 sec. That was 10 seconds inside my previous personal best, and, when you consider I would have taken 20 minutes for the same distance about three months ago, it was pretty good. But that really exacerbated the strain on the aforementioned latissimus dorsi, and on Thursday I accepted that at my age, if I had really zapped a big muscle pair, it is best to take a day off to recover fully.
So, by today, I felt fine again, and I went for a personal best on the leg press as part of a quadriceps (front thigh muscles) routine. I'd never done more than 151kg on that before, but I got it up to five reps at 160kg and then a single rep at 169kg. Whoof!
So, all in all the training has gone well. And I'm beginning to say to myself "hmm, I don't remember seeing that muscle before" (curiously, this was the neck muscles, which I haven't been isolating at all!). There's a danger here that, if my weight creeps up a bit, I can use as an excuse "oh, it's extra muscle", when the chances are what it really is was that slice of honey on toasat that I had the previous night just before going to bed. Even if I should only be focusing on my waist line (down about 2.5 inches in three months, by the way), I can be fairly sure that there's a fair amount of fat that still needs to be disposed of, and that means less weight. No muscle that I put on at the moment should be counteracting the weight loss from eliminating excess fat, and I shouldn't be tempted to fool myself that it's otherwise.
Tomorrow and Sunday I try to do 8am sessions, and I might be strong enough to do some back muscle stuff again.
_________
