Body And Fitness Blog

I didn’t mean to train today, but as I was staying at my bro’s last night, he invited me down the gym with him this morning. I’d had an average leg workout down my gym yesterday, so I didn’t feel completely ruined (mostly as I’ve finished the stack on their leg press machine) and therefore thought it was a good idea to workout my legs on two consecutive days, genius!

Today’s workout for me was really about doing squats again, an exercise I’ve not done for at least a decade, since I was in my teens. I was actually looking forward to doing squats as I think it’s the King of all free weight exercises, and for me anyway, better than deadlift. Yeah, I feel strong after a heavy deadlift, but I think it’s far more impressive to have a big squat than a big deadlift.

We started off with a few warmup sets, just the bar, then 40kg for a couple of sets. After that, we went into my brother’s working weight for last week, which was 84kg (including the bar) a weight which he thought was a bit puny.

I tried this weight, and it was fairly heavy, but I knew I’d be able to do it, so I did a set of 10 reps. After this we put it up to 90kx including the bar and proceeded to do another three sets, of 8, 7 and 5 reps. My last set I made the mistake of going very low (probably too low from what my bro said) in an effort to get a full range of motion on the exercise. This was a bit of a mistake as it resulted in me failing and collapsing under the weight after the fifth rep, trying to achieve the sixth. Luckily we were training in a squat rack so the bar only dropped about six inches into the rack, with me buried underneath it with nothing more than slightly bruised pride at not having got eight reps from the last set!

After doing squats we moved onto the leg press machine, which unlike in my gym is a proper leg press machine that takes plates rather than having using a pulley to lift the weight, the weight is added directly onto the footplate. God only knows what the whole assembly weighs, but we guestimated it must weigh about 30kg without any weight on it!

We started off with a couple of warmup sets of 100kg and 150kg, both performed for 12 reps. Then I did a working set of 200kg for 7 reps, which was failure for me, the last three reps being very hard and only managed through much encouragement from my bro.

After finishing on the leg press, I decided to do three sets of calf raises, just 135lbs for 12 reps each set. After that I did a few sets of pull-ups just to see how many reps I could do while my biceps and back were fresh (I usually work them on a Monday). I managed three sets of three - pretty pathetic at the mo, but hopefully I’ll achieve my strength training goals for 2009 for my back in the next few weeks, by the end of April I hope!