ESP-XC preaches throughout the whole program that "Legs and abs separate the pros from the Joes" Pretty much every workout in some way works the legs and to a lesser extent the abs, and that makes the leg workout, at least the one I've been doing in Month 1, extremely difficult.
It doesn't help that my legs are weak. Weak is a relative term....they're actually the most defined portion of my body. We were being dumb in the gym last week showing calf and quad muscles, and somehow mine were the most defined of the group. I've been working out a while and have always done sports and activities that require a lot of leg, so my legs are pretty awesome looking. But strength wise, or maybe it's endurance wise, they give out quick and this workout is excruciating!
The workout goes back and forth between holding something with your legs for a minute or two, followed by slow movement exercises like lunges and squats. There's almost no weights used, but it's still so painful. The frog sits in the beginning got my legs feeling sore within a minute, and the second minute was me holding for ten seconds and then taking a five second break over and over. The rest of the workout went similar. On a few sets of the one leg lunges I felt like my quad was going to explode. It's a genuinely painful feeling, like a muscle became a knife and is determined to rip through my skin. I pushed through and did the whole exercise, even though one set has you going ten right ten left, and I could only manage five right five left.
So overall a good workout, but I don't understand why my legs hurt me so much! I want to be a pro, not a Joe!
Anyways, that was started around 6:15, so I finished right as the group was arriving for workout. We talked for about five minutes and then hit the gym around 7:15.
The first thing we did was a round of Ab Ripper X. We had talked about it via Facebook during the day, and since it'd been a while (not once in 2012 so far!) since we'd done Ab Ripper we decided to START the workout with that. Ya, start....
So we hit play and all found room on the floor. No one made it through, and we probably should have done a better warmup, especially for our legs. Mine were already killing me (obviously). But we did Ab Ripper and all of us got an excellent ab workout in!
We hit up 300 next. I did pullups for 2 sets of 5. I realize my numbers were higher a few weeks ago, but I'm really focusing on doing the full range of motion at a slow slow tempo, and that really does make it harder.
Deadlift was next and I did 2 sets of 10 and 1 set of 5 at 135. It felt good, but towards the end my legs were giving out.
I finished with 2 sets of 15 on bench at 135. It always amazes me that even though I can (or could) do sets of 5 at 175, 135 still feels extremely heavy. I was proud of my two sets of 15.
After that I went inside to check on Heather but she was sound asleep on the couch. I didn't want to wake her but was pretty sure she hadn't eaten all day, so I did a quick stretch, called it quits on the gym for the night and got started on dinner. I made turkey burgers and rice.
So ya, I'm pleased with the night's workout. After the workout and dinner I got started on some work. My company is creating a very cool, unique new product (I'll post a link sometime soon) so I'm going to be working around the clock for a few weeks. Stayed up til midnight working, then went to bed, and got up this morning about 30 minutes ago to work some more. I'm just using this blog to wake myself up (working good so far!).
Tonight I'm going to get my Cardio/Combo workout in and follow it up with more work or sleep depending how I'm feeling.
Bring it!
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