The Chances

How a 250+ Pound Couch Potato Got Healthy

Monday, January 12, 2009

Weight Workout + A Hundred Pushups?

Hey guys, today was yet another gym workout. After 3 weeks of basically the same thing, it's changed up a bit. Warmups are the same.

Warmup, w/45lb bar, 3 circuits
* Overhead Squat
* Squat
* Good Morning
* Barbell Lunge
* Romanian Deadlift
* Bent-over Row

Workout
* Bench Press, 3x7x115lbs
* Single-Arm Dumbbell Row, 4x7x45lbs
* External Rotation, 3x7x20lbs
* Swiss-Ball Crunch, 10x8 (80 total)

34 minutes, 164 calories burned

After work I picked up my son and was going to take him to Cub Scouts, but come to find out the meeting wasn't tonight. He begged to spend the night with my wife's mother, and she said yes, so that's what he got to do. That gave me the chance to get my mom's DSL connection going.

But it wasn't to be, at 9pm, after well over an hour on the phone with AT&T, I had to give up and come home. I had to watch 24, after all!

2 more hours of Jack Bauer, and I gotta say, two years was way too long to wait. I'm glad to have 24 back, I've missed it altogether too much. I will say this though, the long wait made me enjoy it more.

After 24 was over, I strapped the HRM back on to start the One Hundred Pushups plan. It's a simple 6-week (or more) plan created by my good friend Steve Spiers as a fun way to get stronger. You basically do progressive sets of pushups over the course of six weeks with the goal of completing 100 pushups in a row. As you get stronger, you test yourself, and if you're not quite there, you repeat as necessary. Simple intellectually, sure, but physically? That's another story.

There was a time when I could do 45 pushups without too much strain, but in the initial test last week I was only able to do 30. According to the plan, I was to actually start at Week 3 of the plan, at level 3. It was to be:

Set 1: 14 pushups
Set 2: 18 pushups
Set 3: 14 pushups
Set 4: 14 pushups
Set 5: max (minimum 20)

Rest between sets was 60 seconds. I had no problem with the first two sets, but fatigue started setting in on the 3rd. The 4th was a real struggle, and the 5th ended up being split in half, two sets of 10 with 20 seconds rest in between.

Do I have to repeat the day? I'm not sure, but I do know that I hurt now. It's a bit hard to type! This is just the beginning though, we'll see how far it takes me. It was only 7 minutes of effort, but maaan. At least I burned a whopping 44 more calories!

Sprint intervals tomorrow.

2 comments:

stevespeirs said...

Week 3, Column 3 is definitely a tough one! Stick with the remainder of the week and see how it goes. A repeat isn't the end of the world, but you may have shocked your system into being ready for Day 2.

Good luck!

--Steve

Pat said...

A lot of folks are doing the 100 pushup challenge. and the sit up challenge too.

I started but never finished. It got hard.