This is taken from my weightloss blog:
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So I’d decided to take Bill Phillip’s Body for Life book as my template for the new, fitter me. It arrived over this weekend and I read through it, then made my workout plan. Tonight was night #1 - an upper body weight routine.
I haven’t done a weight routine since… well, for some time. I’ve been intimidated by the other people at the gym, as well as my own shortcomings and a sense of not belonging. Eff it. I pay my membership, I can go into the “iron room” with the big boys and play if I choose! Anyway, I get in and my first exercise is the Dumbell Bench Press. I grab a pair of 30lb dumbells, lay flat on my back and push up, raising them then holding for a count before slowly bringing them down, making sure I have resistance in both directions. By my second set, I’m sweating. By the 6th and final set I was dunzo. Instead of 12 reps in the 5th set, I managed 7, and when I switched from bench press to flys I managed a whopping 1.
Bill? I think I hit my “high point”.
Actually, I’m not bummed at all. Well, mostly not anyway. Big things that jumped out at me were that 1, my muscle endurance is completely shot. I went from a six-out-of-ten in effort on my first set to a 9.5 on my fourth and a total muscle failure on my 5th and 6th sets. I’m a bit let down at how weak I am, but at the same time Phillips has written in his book that training to failure is actually where you want to be. With him though, he is looking for failure on the last couple reps of the final set, not the final set completely! I’ve got some work to do.
After chest, I did my shoulders. Front raises, with a lateral raise for my final set. I muscled all the sets out, and was really sweating something fierce. It felt great, but again I felt somewhat turd-like in that my weights were 5, 8, 10, 12, 8, & 5 for my whole set. What kind of man struggles on lateral raises at 5 pounds? Apparently a 300-pounder does.
Having completed my shoulder exercies, I moved on to my back. I did seated rows for 5 sets, and then did lat pulldowns for my 6th. It was during this exercise that I realized how frustrating it can be when there’s only one pulldown machine and it’s in use. This BfL program really emphasises hitting a high-point, and at the end of the exercise you make a switch and do a related but different exercise with no time between sets 5 & 6. It gets your heart pumping and sweat… um… sweating (allow myself to introduce… my..self), but it can be out of your control. Having a collection of dumbells at your feet, while rude, would be a better solution to this problem.
Next I switched to triceps. At this point I found that my initial guesstimates were off and that I could have pushed more weight. The book says that if you find you under or overguessed to not change your workout, but rather to make a note and adjust as necessary. I can pushdown more with my tris than I thought I could. There’s my note.
The final exercise was preacher curls. For whatever reason, my biceps have always been one of the tougher areas to train. I’ve had training partners in the past that I’ve matched up very well with, but when we get to biceps I’ve found myself 10~20lbs under their weight consistently. I’m not saying that it’s good or bad - it’s just a thing. Anyway, I used the machines and not the dumbells for this, which I think I’ll make an adjustment to next time. I’m not feeling those machines. When I’m pushing the dumbells over my head, I find I have to focus more on the weight, and as it starts to sway I need to make those micro-adjustments to keep it up which in turn will help to develop those secondary or helper muscles. When I was at the machine doing the preacher curls, I was focused more on the butt of the woman doing the StairMaster 20’ in front of me. My endurance was shot, I was working the muscle I like working the least and I wasn’t forced to concentrate because Mr. Nautilus was taking care of that for me. I’m going to make a better effort at using all dumbells in the future.
Anyway, that’s Day 1, in the books.
