Finally for the first time since this new urge to train has hit me I've gone to the gym to do my old work program. Minus the running of course. For those of you who don't know my gym routine is as follows. I start with a series of stretches mostly on the legs and a few on the upper arms. I then go for 42 push-ups with the hands in line with the shoulders elbows going in tight to the body. I then flip over and do 120 sit-ups with my feet braced under a handy bit of boxing the gym have placed next to the mats. The sit-ups are done with the hands either side of my head. I then change styles of sit-up going for a twist as I begin each sit-up so at the top of the sit I'm facing to either my left or right placing more strain of that sides muscle groups. with 40 of these out the way I flip over again and do 20 squat thrusts and then flip back to do some 40 more sit-ups this time without my feet braced and with my arms straight out in front skimming over my arched legs. Back onto my front and into the press up position for 30 more. Its then down the stairs to fill up the water bottle and hopefully jump onto the pull-up bar. Currently only able to do 8 of these but hoping to get better. Usually I'd then start up a tread mill and get into sprint intervals 2mins cruising at 8.8mph and then 1min at 10.9mph and keep going until the timer hits 30minutes but not today. I'd like to do the odd one of these just to see if my level is staying the same or better or....worse. Usually next its onto the weight machines but I went onto the cycle machine and did 15minutes on a random hardness program set to a max of level 18 out of 20 and fought to do 5 miles which I usually achieve by the 14th minute. As I hadn't run during this session I found this quite easy to do given that fact I thought I'd tack on an extra 15mins on a manual set level of 16 and pushed for the 5 mile marker again. This out of the way I went back on track with the weight machines and went through chest presses (60kg at 3x 15rep cycles) bicep curls (52.5kg at 3x 15rep) and chest-flies (70kg 3x 15 reps) Usually this is when I'd switch back to the bike but as I'd done this I jumped on one of the leg extension ones that work the quads and did 80kg 3x 15reps. I was feeling a bit drained by this point and still had the swim to go so I missed out some of the other exercises and went for the isometric stuff back on the mats holding myself in the plank position and doing a weird leg extension thing that works my core muscles that the gym PTI showed me. I find one of the problems with the gym is that I try to do too much and haven't got the time. I'm currently in there for about hours. Not all of this time is spent exercising. Some is spent getting changed and I have rest intervals of about 1 minute or so between reps or exercise types to cool down a little. There's plenty in there that I'd like to do if I've got the time like the rowing machine, reverse flies and a whole bunch of stuff on the free weights, assuming you can ever get near them. That is one of my pet hates about the gym. There seems to be a class of gym goer who only do free weights and form little groups that rotate through the position doing a massive amount of upper body stuff. The result is the limited number of positions at peak times get dominated by these blokes and no one else gets a look in. Its not like I've got the time to do any meaningful work out on those weights but it would be nice to know I could if the fancy took me.
All that out of the way and it was back to the swimming pool. I found it much harder to swim having murdered my upper body a bit and instead of the constant swimming I was able to do the last couple of times I found I was back down to doing patterns of 6 lengths or less. I managed to get the full 30 lengths done but it wasn't quick or very pretty.
I've now managed to do my first days proper training according to the plan. Right time for the weekend and a nice little break.
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