Deadlifts!

It's been a while!  I ended up taking a few days off from the gym to rest my right wrist.  It was the right move.  Saturday I went back in and did some deadlifts, and felt much better.  Here are the sets.

Saturday - 3/9/13

Deadlifts - 4 sets

135x8

225x6

305x5

305x5

305x5

305x5

Bent Over Barbell Rows (from DL position) - 3 sets

95x10

135x7

135x8

135x7

The deadlifts felt great, but kicked my ass.  I was thoroughly exhausted afterwards.  The rows went well too.  

In other news, I went to a chili cookoff at a friend's house after the gym on Saturday.  My wife and I brought our 4 month old son, and we had a blast.  Ate tons of chili, everyone loved the cute baby, and really just had a lot of fun with our friends.  

Life Changes!

All right.  Time is short.  A few quick things.  I HAVE been going to the gym, not quite as often as I want, but I've been going.  Been doing a 4 workout rotation.

Squats/Chinups
Clean/Press/Bi's
Deadlift/Row
Bench/Dips

It takes me about a week and a half to go 4 times and complete 1 round of this.

Most recently, on Saturday I squatted.  Here are those sets

Saturday - 12/15/12
Squats - 4 sets
135x8
185x5
255x3
235x5
235x5
235x5

Weighted Chinups - 5 sets
25x5
25x5
25x5
25x5
25x5

Short, sweet and to the point.

Also, I have a new addition to the family.  A 1 month old son, named Anthony.  Life's been different.  Sleep is more difficult to come by, and my time is always limited.  He's been great, but it's been a completely different life for me these past few weeks.

Anyway, as always I'll try to get on and post my lifts after each session.

It's been a while

It's been a while.  I haven't posted for a lot of reasons, most of which revolve around me being too busy and even just plain being too lazy.  Rest assured, I have indeed been going to the gym, and while I haven't been doing anything fantastic, I've been at least keeping up with squatting and benching.  And some sprinting.

But, I haven't been keeping track of my lifts.  I tried backing off of bench and doing lighter weight for 10 reps.  I guess I'm still kind of on that kick, but I just can't bench more than 165lbs for 10 reps.  It kind of sucks.  I've been squatting too, steadily increasing from jack shit to jack shit plus a little bit.  I'm doing 245 low bar squats, going down as far as possible and coming back up.  It's nice.  And finally, I sprinted twice over the past month or so.  A couple of sessions of 10-12 sets going all out for short distances, with the walk back to the starting point as my rest in between.

I haven't done much pulling at all, because each time I've tried, my wart scab rips open and puss oozes out.  This happened twice while doing rows with a bandage on it.  So I stopped even trying anything pull related for 2 weeks.  I did sneak in some biceps here and there.  Today, I still have a scab, but it's much smaller.  I'm going to try deadlifting.  Maybe RDL's.  Light weight, nothing too crazy.  Just enough to get me back into the mix again.

Anyway, here are my sets from Monday.

Monday - 9/10/12
Bench - 3 sets
165x8
165x7
155x8

Dumbell Bicep Curls - 3 sets
30x10
40x8
35x12

My life has become very busy lately.  I've been given much more responsibility at work, and I've been working more hours.  My wife is almost 8 months pregnant now, and time has been scarce.  When I get to the gym, which has only been maybe twice a week the past few weeks, I can only spend about 20-30 minutes.  As such, my output has decreased.  And my eating has sucked.

My plan is to improve both.  For now, I'm going to continue posting without all the filler.  Just a quick log of what I lifted and for how many reps.  If I can get in 3 sessions a week I'll be very happy.  I'll let you all know tomorrow how things went today.

Cheers,
Chris

The full shoulder story

The saga of my shoulder problems continue.  Get ready for a long story.

To sum up the whole experience up to this point, a while back (probably something like 6-8 months ago), I injured my shoulder somehow.  I don't remember a specific event causing the injury, but I do remember one day I was doing seated overhead press, and when I went to rack the weight above and behind my head, I felt sharp pain in my right shoulder.  It wasn't the pain of an injury happening, it was just pain as if I was aggravating something in there.  The next week, I tried overhead shoulder press again, and again had the same problems racking and unracking the weight.

So, I switched to different shoulder exercises.  It didn't hurt to press, so I continued to press, but not seated military.  I would use dumbbells, or a machine, and even a standing press in the squat rack.  Eventually, I noticed that I wasn't able to go up in weight.  Literally, months of me barely pressing 125 lbs.  No improvement.  So I come up with this hypothesis that it's my shoulder, and I should let it rest.  So I do.

I stopped doing any kind of shoulder specific lifts for about 2 months.  But I still felt the pain in there whenever I did anything weird with my shoulder, like a throwing motion.  Or stretching the my shoulder with my right arm above and behind my head.

Eventually, softball season comes around.  At our first practice, if you could even call it that.  My 1st throw of a softball was terrible extreme pain.  I try to shake it off and "warm up."  10 throws in, and my arm is KILLING me.  The rest of the practice I was underhand lobbing the balls in from the outfield.

The thought of not playing ball terrified me.  I love baseball.  Played it as a kid, played it as a young adult in highschool.  And from 18 onward, I've played softball with my friends every year.  And now I can't fucking throw a ball.  So I began icing it every night.  Then I tried trigger point therapy on myself.  Then I tried stretching every day.  I tried icing, stretching, and trigger point therapy all at the same time.  No dice.

So, next I went the route of the doctors.  2 orthopedic surgeons, an MRI and an x-ray.  Both orthopedists don't know what's wrong.  Evidently my MRI and x-ray both look good.

Fast forward to now, about halfway through the softball season.  I'm able to throw, but I have to do it like a girl.  I throw with my elbow, not my shoulder.  Anyone who played little league baseball might recognize the term "short-arming" it.  It's able to bypass most of the pain.

According to the doctor, the next step is to put me through physical therapy for a month and see if my condition improves.  If not, the next step is to inject me with dye to try and get a more accurate MRI done.

And if they STILL don't see a problem, they can begin to inject me with cortisone shots to see if it improves the pain, and helps them locate where it's coming from.

I'm reluctant to go to physical therapy.  First, the Doctor wasn't sure it would even help.  Second, I have to pay a $40 copay for each session.  He wants me to do 8 sessions minimum, which adds up to 320 bucks.  That's a lot of money to shell out for something I don't even know will work.

I've got another idea.  Before I commit to that kind of a monetary investment, I'm going to give 2 weeks towards working out the "non-pressing" part of my shoulder and see if strengthening the muscles around where I'm feeling pain will help anything.  Why?  I don't know.  Call it a last shot at something other than paying hundreds of dollars towards a possible fix.  Plus, a while back my uncle (who's been lifting for over 20 years) gave me some sound advice about giving this a try.  I didn't follow it then, but I'm going to follow it now.

At this point, who knows if it will help.  But I'm willing to wait 2-3 more weeks before throwing $320 at the problem.

So, Monday started my weird shoulder workouts.  I did rows first, nothing to do with shoulders, but I wanted to squeeze em in.  As for the actual shoulder stuff, I used the universal machine, and brought one of the cables with a handle down to about chest height.  From there, I either internally or externally pulled the cable away from the universal, either towards or away from my body.

For the internals, picture grabbing a cable to your right with your right arm and pulling the cable left across your chest, keeping your elbow at your side.

For the externals, picture grabbing a cable to your left with your right arm and pulling the cable right across your chest, keeping your elbow at your side.

Finally, I did 3 sets where I moved the cable to the floor, and pulled it up and away from my body.  I'll call them shoulder pulls.

For the shoulder pulls, picture grabbing a cable from your left foot with your right arm and pulling it up and above your head.

Here are all of the sets from the day.

6/25/12 - Monday
Machine Cable Rows - 3 sets
90x8 (warmup)
120x8 (warmup)
165x8
180x7
165x8

External Rotator Cuff - 3 sets each arm
30x8
30x8
20x8

Internal Rotator Cuff - 3 sets each arm
30x8
30x8
20x8

Shoulder Pulls - 3 sets each arm
30x8
30x8
30x8

It's Wednesday, and while my shoulders both feel a little sore, my right one feels more sore than the left.  I'm going to try throwing a ball on either Friday or Saturday, depending on how it feels.  I'll throw VERY LIGHTLY, and again - see how I feel.  I'll work out my shoulders this away again next Monday, and maybe one more time during next week before my next softball game.  I want to see if doing this 2-4 times has any improvement on my level of pain and ability to throw.  If not, I'll go the physical therapy route.  If it helps, then great!

I'll keep you posted.

My Wife is Pregnant

In the relatively short time I've had this blog, I 've done my best to keep it focused mostly on lifting, and occasionally mention things like my diet and some general things that are going on in my life.  Like softball, or the shoulder injury.  I try not to get TOO personal.  I know this blog isn't even really read by too many people, but it's still public, and I don't like to put myself out there too much.

It's been tough to talk about anything here without mentioning this huge change in my life.  So, here it is.  We have a baby on the way!  We've known for a while now, and she's about 13 weeks along, just into her 4th month. We've done multiple sonograms, we've seen the baby moving around, and she's taking the giant sized prenatal vitamins.  I'm feeling really excited, happy, and yes, a even little scared too.  But I think that's normal.

Look, I can even make a joke about how it's "obviously" a boy! ::wink wink::

My wife, Anna, is handling it very well.  She's eating right, and she's still going to the gym.  She's been lifting heavy for a while now, and she doesn't want that to stop.  She's just using common sense with her workouts.  She'll squat, but she's not going for PRs.  Same with deadlifts and the other big exercises.  We've read that it's no good to bench press because of the pressure while laying on your back, so we've switched to incline bench.  (Hence, my incline bench post the other day)  And even then, she's not going too heavy.  On top of all that, she's doing rows, shrugs, and a few chinups here and there.  Nothing too crazy, but she's making sure that she stays active, which is great.

She's taken to walking more often, and while her diet hasn't been perfect, she's been doing a fantastic job.  Getting lots of protein and fat from meat and dairy, and she's been staying away from grains for the most part.  She is eating some carbs, mostly from potatoes, fruits and vegetables.  Did I say she's been loving dairy?  Anna's been having lots of cravings for milk, cheese and greek yogurt.  Dark chocolate too.

All in all, we're both tremendously excited, and we can't wait to see what's next!

Warts Suck!

It's Monday again.  I went a whole week without posting.  Lets just say life has been busy.  I went to the gym just once last week, on Friday.  I squatted with 195 lbs again, and while I still didn't hit 20 reps, I nailed a solid 17.  I struggled mightily to get that last rep up.  I'm happy I made some kind of progress, even if it's only 2 reps higher than my previous.

As for life... Last week was busy.  My wife and I are making an offer on a house we like.  It's a short sale, which can complicate things.  Needless to say, we took 2 trips to the house to give it a really deep look, and then kind of scoped out the neighborhood.  If things work out, the house is nice, but really needs a LOT of work.  And not just painting and cleaning.  The basement would need to be gutted, bathrooms would need to be redone, one of the bedrooms would need to have the carpet ripped up and the ceiling dropped.  This is just off the top of my head.

On top of all this, I've been working late almost every night.  It makes getting to the gym difficult.  Top that off with the house hunting, and these crazy wart blisters on my palm... lifting isn't so easy.  I picked up some dumbbells the other day and immediately I felt it tearing at the blister.

I'm gonna bench today, and I don't think it should be a problem.  The way the blister's forming, I don't think pressing should be a problem.

Here are the sets from squatting.

3/16/12 - Friday
Squats - 1 set
135x6 (warmup)
135x8 (warmup)
195x17

Happiness is a Choice

Happiness is a choice.  My wife said that to me today while I was whining and being extremely negative (aka being a little bitch) about how my sleep has sucked lately.  Granted, my sleep HAS sucked lately.  I keep waking up at like 5ish AM, and then toss and turn and half-sleep till the alarm goes off around 7am.  In short, it blows.  Anyway, as I get less and less sleep each night, I get crankier and crankier, and I've been acting like somewhat of an asshole lately.  Talking to Anna today, she helped me realize that I'm being somewhat of a little bitch about my stupid sleep situation.  While it may suck, I need to man up and be myself, not the guy who's suffering from sleep deprivation and gets depressed and acts like a dick because of it.  I'm better than that.

Happiness is a choice.  Whatever is happening with me and this sleep bullshit, it has no impact on who I am, or how I treat others, especially the people I care about.  It shouldn't change my view of the world, or make me pessimistic.  I'm still the loving, driven and overly optimistic sonofabitch that I've always been.  And that's never gonna change.  I choose to be happy, not some depressed piece of shit that you scrape off your shoe.

Thanks Anna for reminding me of that (in not so many words).  I love you.

PS - I did squats yesterday.  Here are my sets.

12/9/11

Squats - 3 sets

135x9 (warmup)

185x6 (warmup)

245x5 

235x5

235x5

Looking back on this blog, I haven't squatted since November 10th.  Christ.  I think I may begin sacrificing weight to get more exercises in.  For example, doing cleans and bench press in the same day.  My bench would suffer (if I did cleans first) because I'd be tired, but I also wouldn't go so damn long in between each exercise.  Squats and shoulder press?  Deadlifts and rows?  I dunno, I have to plan it all out.  And I'm not the best at planning.  

Since I hadn't squatted in such a long time, after my warmups my groin and glutes were all sorts of tight and strained.  It all worked itself out in the end though.