Yay for strength

Lame title, hahaha.

Okay, I did basically the same workout as last week. Made a few tweeks, and cut out the core work, because I want to be able to work tomorrow. But nevertheless, I got a great workout. Took like 40 minutes or so with warm up and some stretching during and after.

Every once in a while I like to use the opportunity that this blog affords me to offer people some tips on working out. This is one of those times: I did two of the most challenging and complex (in muscle usage, not performance) exercises that I've done in quite a while. Here they are:

1) Straight arm lat pull down-- At the lat pull machine, stand up, grab the bar and back up far enough that your arms are straight. Pull the bar down, keeping your arms straight, in an arc until either just before the weight stack hits the top of the machine or as far as your strength and flexibility will allow. Focus on keeping your arms straight and keeping your body from rocking back and forth with your movements. The move uses your chest, shoulders, biceps, triceps, abs and back. Take it from me, start out with light weight to make sure that you maintain good form and are able to perform the lift correctly.

2) Lunges with twist-- I used a stability ball, but you can use medicine balls, dumb bells, milk jugs, anything that ha some weight, or if you can just use empty hands. The important part is that you keep your arms extended fully in front of your body. Perform a traditional lunge, keep your knees roughly in line with your ankles at about 90 degree ankles, a little bit of leeway is okay, but injuries can happen if your knees get too far in front of your ankles. When you get to the bottom of your lunge, with your knee just above the floor, or as far as you are able to go, rotate your arms as far as you can in one direction, rotating your torso, keeping your legs still. Return to the middle, then repeat the movement in the opposite direction. Then return to the standing position and repeat with the other leg. This is a very exhausting and difficult exercise. Make sure that you perform the same number of repetitions with each leg. Remember to only do as many reps as you can with proper form, for this type of exercise stop as soon as you can no longer use proper form.


Okay wow, those were kind of long winded descriptions, lets just say, I'm better at demonstrating than at describing, haha. Regardless, those are still two completely kick ass exercises.

I just got an idea. Would any of you be interested if I were to record myself demonstrating exercises and post them on here. That could be an interesting new feature to this blog. But I'm only going to do it if my readers like the idea. So now is the time when I'm asking you guys to give me a little feed back.

On a bit of a different topic. I really like strength training, weight lifting, olympic lifting, all of it. I've enjoyed it ever since I started doing it in high school. Actually, thats probably the thing I enjoyed most about being on the football team. God knows it wasn't because we were particularly good, and I barely even got to see the field. But I've always loved lifting weights. And to be perfectly honest, throughout this whole process of getting back in shape, over the past few months, the most athletic I've felt has been tonight, and last Wednesday night, when I was getting in a really good lift. It gives me a nice little confidence boost too, which is freaking awesome, and always helpful.