Two day recap

I'm feeling good about the last two days of working out (which is great, because officially I had a terrible day yesterday).

Tuesday night I came home, and after some clever convincing, the girlfriend and I decided to make progress on her 4 week challenge. We hit play on Kenpo X, and it went pretty well. It was really really hot in the garage that day though, and she and I were both tired, so after the 30 minute mark we decided to call it a night. But she's getting a lot better at punches, and she did a great job. Me, I like Kenpo X when I can hit the bag, so it was a decent workout for me as well.

Wednesday, the day, was a pretty rough day. I did not sleep much the night before, and the day was filled with long meetings, a big event where I was on my feet half the day, and lots and lots of caffeine.

I came home feeling very defeated from the long day, but when people started showing up to lift I got a second wind. We hit the gym and we hit it hard. Skipped warmup, but everything else was great.

I continued my progress on squats at 225 lbs. My depth is getting a lot better, and I think after one more day I'll be feeling great about this, with plans to move up to 230 on Monday.

Bench press was next. I've been reading a lot about touching my chest with the bar, and I decided that I am cheating my reps too much at 185. I dropped down to 175, but made sure every single rep I touched my chest. I managed to get 1 set of 5 and 2 sets of 4 at 175, and I'm very pleased with that. Every rep touched my chest, and I'm glad I caught this mistake in my form so early. I only had to drop 10 lbs, but doing a full rep is a great feeling. I was very pleased with this lift, and look forward to wrapping up 175 (the right way) throughout next week.

Finally came deadlifts. I've been having a terrible time with these for a few weeks, and dropped down to 135 (huge drop) last week. This week I put my ego away, and accepted that that's about where I should be until I get my form down. I upped it to 145 this time, and I also made one more change: I have really wide hips that bend more to the sides than straight forward when I squat down. That's been a challenge on my squats, but it's really been a challenge on my deadlifts. To combat this, I decided to keep my hands inside of my legs instead of outside. Somewhere online I was reading that the grip doesn't matter as much on deads, since your arms are just holding the weight rather than lifting. I haven't actually done any research on if anyone in the world keeps their hands inside the legs, but I've gotta say, for the first time, I felt like I really could do deadlifts, well, with my arms inside. Granted it was only 145 lbs, but this really felt right. I'm very pleased with deadlifts.

There will be more research on the arms inside thing, but unless I find some expert who flat out says not to do it, I'm sticking with this in the future.

We wrapped up with the usual ab routine, and that was great.

After that came dinner, some cupcakes for one of the friend's birthday, and called it a night. Unfortunately, the massive amounts of caffeine finally kicked in, and I got really dizzy and fell asleep very quick. No video games for me last night.

A few quick notes about last night too. Anthony, one of the three original guys, hurt his foot (it might be broken) about a week ago, and finally had to call out sick for a lifting night. I hope you get better dude. Also my buddy Caleb has turned into a semi-regular for lifting nights. He's a little sporadic with when he shows up, and we've caught him leaving the gym to go outside and take a break more than once, but it's cool having him over. Also an old buddy from high school ended up getting an invite, and it was cool to see him again. He mostly hung around the gym using the machines I have, but he did do a set or two on all of the lifts we did.

So that's the last two days of working out, and I'm proud of them. Tonight the girlfriend and I are doing cardio together with Cardio Challenge from Supreme 90 Day. Expect a recap in the morning.

Bring it!