Thursday, September 18, 2008

A Little Redemption Goes a Long Way

Well, here it is, Thursday of my second week back, and I'm still standing (so to speak). After last week's workouts, I thought, for sure, that I would have a huge mental battle to fight for a couple of weeks before I could really start to get into training again. So far, that hasn't been the case this week. As usual, this week started off with back, which always tends to go well. 5x5 on dead lifts left me with another small increase in strength, going 245 for 5 on my final set. My goal is to hit 280 for 5 in two more weeks. I think that four weeks of training should put me back on track or at least pretty damn close. Nothing too crazy to finish off the rest of the workout...Dorian style bb rows, seated cable rows, WG pull downs, one-arm T-bar rows (love them!), and finally reverse grip pull downs. I know it looks like a lot on paper, but we tend to do only 2 or 3 sets of each exercise to keep variety. Hmmm, I guess that still makes it a lot--overtraining is a word I've often heard associated with my workouts (good thing my training parters overtrain too).

Tuesday was chest, and that's certainly nothing for me to write home about these days. You know, it's funny...before my surgery, a lot of my girlfriends who've also had the surgery done were so excited for me because they said I wouldn't have to train chest anymore. Now don't get me wrong, I've always disliked training chest and I've never been one to hide that fact, but as far as I know, the sport of bodybuilding is largely about symmetry and muscularlity. Neither of which can be achieved if you don't train the bodypart. While I knew that I would not be able to get back and start hammering chest right away, I simply cannot understand the rationale of just not training a bodypart. In fact, the way that I've tried to approach training chest post-surgery is that now I can REALLY kill it (once I'm fully recovered, that is) because I don't have to worry about my boobs shrinking...something that was always in the back of my mind before.

On to yesterday's workout...quads. I had the typical leg-day anxiety surrounding last night's looming working with the added stress of my failure to complete the workout last week. I knew that if I had as bad a workout last night as I did the week before that it would likely mess with my head. Fortunately, last night's workout went pretty damn well. We started off with some isolation exercises before moving into the big stuff...3x15 single-leg extenstions followed by 3x10 lunge step-backs on the smith machine. Then it was on to a big superset...10 reps just short of failure on the hack followed up with a heavy set just short of failure on the leg press. Now this was particularly difficult for me because I have a bad habit of ALWAYS training to failure, and sometimes beyond. After hitting failure on my second set and getting yelled at by Captain Crankypants, I managed to pull it together for the rest of the exercise. We did 4 of those supersets then added a little icing-5x10 strip set. So what I did looked like this:

6 plates (total): 10

4 plates and two 25's: 10

4 plates: 10

2 plates and two 25's: 10

2 plates: 10

Then we went back to hacks for two more sets of good ol' one and a half's. And of course, we still weren't done. We finished with 6x10 squats with light weight and perfect form (taking it aaaaalllll the way down) and then 3x20 leg extentsions. So, needless to say, my legs are F-R-I-E-D, but I felt pretty good about it-relatively speaking.

Tonight is shoulders, which is usually enjoyable for me. Seems like once I get past legs, everything else is cake...mmmmm, cake. I love the offseason.

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