Skip to main content

The recovery week is here

I have been doing my strength and mass gaining exercises for about 6 weeks now. Time to take a break. Let the muscles recover completely before my next bout of extremities. I just completed shoulder and trapezoids exercises today and I did not feel good about it.

All this week my performance has not been so good at the gym. First I did fewer reps than before week on my bench press this past Monday. I also did not do as well as I expected on my deadlifts too. Then I had a very weak bicep curl on Tuesday. Today (wednesday) I stepped into the gym with very low confidence. My body does not feel all energized. I felt tired even before I started. Not good. I picked up 42.5 lbs to start my shoulder press but again could not do any better than previous week. I could not finished my 3rd set at all. Not even a single rep. Which is bad news. My body is demanding rest. And rightly so too. It has been a little over 6 weeks since I started my mass gain phase. I need some rest.

Respecting what my body is telling me I decided to give myself this week off. I have been lifting very heavy for the past few days and that compounded with a very busy week at work aggravated the situation. It feels great to even think about the week off. It is unlike the feeling I get when I have to miss gym because of other reasons such as I am busy at work or because I have to travel etc. Looking forward to a restful week...
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Stats for Oct 2009

So it has been a month since I started bulking up. How am I doing so far? Here are the raw numbers Exercises Squats: 170 lbs, 8 reps Deadlifts: 185 lbs, 10 reps Bench Press: 110 lbs, 4 reps Pull ups: Body weight + 25 lbs, 7 reps Overhead Press: 75 lbs, 6 reps I am doing well in all exercises except bench press. The exercise that is already closest to my goal for end of december is my pull-ups. I can already do 7 reps with 25 lbs hanging off my waist! You can check out my previous post for the goals I have set. Body weight and fat Weight: 120.8 lbs Fat %: 12.2% I am able to add weight as expected. But my body fat % shot up too much. My goal for end of december was to weight 125 lbs at 12% body fat. But I am already over the limit for my body fat %. So I have to lower it and at the same time increase my weight. Very unlikely. I might have to revise my goals, but I will see how it goes and hope to make better predictions for my next bulking phase. It is not at all easy to ke...
12 comments
Read more

Strong Lifts 5x5 log

I started strongs lifts on Februry 23, 2009 and ended it about 3 months later on May 13, 2009. Here are the logs of my workouts by day and weight lifted. All the weights are in lbs. The cells marked with a blue background indicate that I could not do 5x5 and so I had to repeat those weights. As you can see I had some good progress overall. I never did squats and now I know what those are and how much I can squat. Bench press has always been my weakest workout. I could not go over the 100 lb weight (even today). For push-ups I used a weighing scale below my hands and checked how much weight gets exerted on it when I try to do a push-up. The scales showed 70 lb (I weight 120 lb). So I am not lifting my full body weight when I am doing push-ups. I was able to do 3 sets of 5 reps each. Then for my next push-up day I kept a 5 lb plate on my back and did my push-ups. If I was able to do 3x5 then for the next time I added another 5 lb plate and so on. That is how I got those numbers for m...
2 comments
Read more

Chin ups and Pull ups

When I first started P90X I could barely do a couple of chin-ups. But in P90X video I see people doing 15 and 20 reps and that is not just in the first set. They consistently do as many chin-ups in every set. I used to question whether I can ever be so strong. I always hated my chin-up days. Not anymore. How did I do it? I just kept doing them even though I could only get 2 or 3. When I could not do any more I used to do negatives. For this I would jump to the chin-up bar so that I am in the top most position. Then I slowly came down. I kept doing it for all the sets where I could not get even 1 rep. Coming down slow is the key. I kept doing as many negative reps as I could get without hurting myself. The next time I did chin-ups I could get 1 or 2 extra reps! That worked very well. I later found another trick that helped me get more energy. The trick is to tighten the abs as I am doing chin-ups. This helped me do a few more reps. I am not doing negatives any more because now I can...
Post a Comment
Read more