My Training

So I figured I should start listing my own daily training. Not because I think I do something so amazing that I just need to share it with the world. Nothing I do is new or crazy. You don't need those things to get leaner, healthier, and stronger. I'm gonna start posting it to keep myself accountable and to show the 2 people that might happen across my blog that I do actually use the things I talk about. So here goes.

First you should know a couple things about me. I'm a big fan of planning things out in advance. That means as extended periods of travel (or off time) come up I like to make sure I'm doing something that will suffer minimal interruption from that time period. For example before this last week or so I was in the same city for several months for work. I took that time to find a cheap local gym that gave me a good rate (more on short term gym memberships in a later post) and really focused on serious heavy weight lifting. I knew I would be in town for a while and have access to weights so I planned the time to focus on that. Then as I got close to this week of travel and family time I switched over to my current body weight exercise plan. Its a week or two of travel and set up in a new town. Then Ill be there again and I can start incorporating more weight work into my plan.

So for the last couple of weeks I've been slowly adding reps to three simple exercises.
1) Body weight Squat
2) Push-up
3) Crunches

I started a a few weeks ago doing 5 rounds of each for 15, 15, and 30. I'd go for three days and take one day off. Each day adding one rep to each round. So it looked like this
Mon - 15 squats, 15 push-ups, 30 crunches x 5 rounds
Tues - 16 squats, 16, push-ups, 32 crunches x 5 rounds
Wed - 17, 17, 34 x 5
Thurs - Off
Fri - 18,18,36 x 5
Etc...

You do as much as you can with out stopping, and only stop in the middle of a round because of muscle failure. Rest should be kept to a minimum between rounds as well. This might remind you of my post on circuit training...cause that's what it is.

The wonderful thing is as this started I was flying through the rounds and this was a total sweat-fest. Then as the reps have gotten higher the tempo slows down a little but the intensity remains. Breaking the moves up like this also helps you do more total work than if you just did one exercise at a time. Doing just one extra rep each round also allows you to slowly add volume to the workout with out burning out.

If I tried to just bang out push-ups I could probably get to the mid 40's before I fell over, and it would take me days to be up to trying it again. By starting much, much lower than my actual threshold of ability I gave myself time to adjust. I was also able to come back day after day, with only a day off here or there. I just did rounds of 24 today so I'm up to 120 each squat and push-up and 240 crunches. I'm right at half way to my goal. I'm going to be keeping this up over the next few weeks until I get to 50, 50, 100.

I m going to be slowly adding days at the gym with real weights in along side this, but with those kind of numbers PLUS my new gig starting the weight days will be few and far between with time for my body to acclimate to the work load.

So there you go. I'm gonna see how this works, and if anyone wants to join me feel free to give it a whirl. Remember though start much lower than you think you need to. The numbers will catch up just fine. Have fun and safe travels!

J