Body And Fitness Blog

This was my last workout in my current gym as tomorrow I’m moving to a new gym, The Train Station gym, which is a small chain of gyms, based in Glastonbury, Shepton Mallet and Frome.

I started off my workout with a short run on the treadmill just to loosen the legs up, then went to use the leg press machine but found there was already a guy using it. Quite remarkably, this guy only had one leg, and he was still down the gym making sure that he got his exercise in, it’s really inspiring to see people who have obstacles like that in their lives, that choose to overcome them rather than be defeated by such things, hat’s off to him!

As I couldn’t do leg press, I decided to start on the hamstring curls, last week I was doing 62.5kg for 3 sets of 10, so this week, in keeping with the theory of progressive overload, my aim was to do 65kg for three sets of eight reps, and if I couldn’t achieve eight reps on each set, just do as many as possible.

• 65kg x 8 reps
• 65kg x 8 reps
• 65kg x 8 reps

Thankfully I achieved my aim, so next week will try for three sets of nine reps.

After hamstring curls, I moved onto the leg press machine as it was now vacant. I’ve been trying to increase my leg press by 10kg a week for the past few weeks, so far successfully. Each workout, I’ve aimed to complete three good sets of twelve reps, the aim being to get up to the machine’s maximum of 190kg for three sets of twelve. Now I’ve moved to a new gym, I wonder if I should continue with this strategy, or simply take advantage of the fact that the new gym has a proper leg press machine that is plate loaded, with hundreds of kilos of plates that can be loaded onto it. I’ll probably start trying to go a bit heavier.

• 90kg x 12 reps (warmup)
• 120kg x 12 reps (warmup)
• 150kg x 12 reps
• 150kg x 12 reps
• 150kg x 12 reps

In between the working sets, I performed some calf raises on the leg press machine. Two sets of 20 reps with the same 150kg that was already on the machine.

Last exercise for legs today was leg extensions, which I did 72.5kg for three sets of ten reps last week, my aim this week was to increase this to three sets of 12 reps. However, I didn’t manage that many on my 2nd set and I got cramp on the last set which limited me.

• 72.5kg x 12 reps
• 72.5kg x 10 reps
• 72.5kg x 7 reps (cramp stopped me)

This is the first time I’ve got cramp whilst working out, which is strange considering how much I do workout and how common it is for people supplementing with creatine to experience more muscle cramp than they would normally. I think my cramp was merely the result of having done some running the previous evening and maybe the legs weren’t at their best for leg press and quad extensions.