Bicep And Tricep Workout Friday 17th April 2009
I went into the gym today feeling a bit down, I played squash last night and was truly awful. I couldn’t seem to hit the ball and lost every game. I couldn’t for the life of me work out what was wrong, but I just seemed to be a bit under the weather.
It took all of my will power to actually get into the gym and decide that I was going to have a hard workout today, and I was going to make some progress on the weights. In short, today was a day that I could easily have just said "sod it, I’ll go back home and do my workout tomorow!". But I didn’t, I managed to turn my mood around and motivate myself to do the workout, and more importantly, improve on last week.
What this illustrates to me is that weight training/bodybuilding may appear on the outside as if you are training your body to be big and strong, but actually, it’s you mind that is being trained to become stronger, and more able to cope with punishment. Clearly, I don’t mean physical punishment, as your mind doesn’t actually do any of the lifting, I mean the punishment that is the monotony of training every morning, eating the right foods and dealing day in, day out with the knowledge that you have to keep (albeit slowly) improving everyday. In short, it’s a lot of pressure. Today was a day when the pressure almost got to me. Luckily I pulled through, and here’s what I did in my workout.
First exercise for biceps was the cable curl. I’ve been trying to overcome a plateau on this for the last few weeks. I was stuck at 30kg for a number of weeks before that, but I’m now training a bit heavier for less reps in the hope that I’ll be able to get over the hurdle. I did a few drop sets on this last week, but today decided I was going to set myself a target number of reps for each set, today I wanted to do three sets of 10 reps.
- 35kg x 9 reps
- 35kg x 9 reps
- 35kg x 7 reps
So I didn’t quite achieve my target, but next week I can aim again for three sets of ten, and hopefully I’ll achieve it for one or more sets.
After doing cable curls, I moved onto the dumbbells and did some hammer curls. Again, I set myself some goals for the number of reps I wanted to do and it was three sets of 10. I’d been doing 3 sets of 8 reps the previous week, so was looking for some progress.
- 14kg x 8 reps
- 14kg x 7 reps
- 14kg x 7 reps
Unfortunately, I didn’t even manage to equal the previous weeks’ number of reps, so this was a bit dissapointing. I guess that some of this may have been down to the fact that I was on a bit of a downer in the gym, or maybe because I played squash the previous evening, who knows. All I know is that next week, I’ve got to get some more reps out of my hammer curls.
After hammer curls, I moved onto triceps, my first exercise being tricep dips between two benches. I didn’t bother with any extra weight as I’ve instead opted to do bodyweight dips before I do my pushdowns, so my triceps are pre-fatigued.
I managed three sets of dips, each set consisting of twelve reps. After which I moved onto the cable machine again for my cable pushdowns. My aim with my tricep pushdowns was to increase the weight slightly and do three good sets of 8 reps. Each rep would be performed fairly slowly, and I would squeeze the triceps down and hold the static for at least a second.
- 25kg x 8 reps
- 25kg x 8 reps
- 25kg x 8 reps
This was a good tricep workout, they were feeling pretty ruined by the end of it! Next week, I’ll aim to get a few more reps out of my tricep pushdowns, maybe 9 or 10 reps per set.
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