Friday, December 23, 2011

Quiet Friday Morning Workout

I love hitting the gym on a day off from work when none of the usuals are there to distract you. That's what I did this morning and to my delight not only were there were about 10 people in the building but I pretty much had the weight area to myself! I skipped the gym yesterday and instead opted for a late afternoon walk around the back cove so I was ready to work today. Unfortunately, I've been hobbling around all week due to 1) irritated shins which I thought were due to the balancing one-legged deadlifts but a runner friend has scared me into thinking its shin splints and advised me to take it easy till the pain goes away and 2) my hiking boots caused bad blisters on yesterday's walk, making every step sting. Basically I'm a mess as usual.

Today's workout started with a 15 minute eliptical warm-up. I'll probably avoid running again until I'm healed. Usually when I do the eliptical I don't set it on anything specific other than "warm-up" but today I opted for the "fat burn" setting. I find it odd that the display seemed to think that I burned way more calories than usual despite the workout feeling far easier!

Moving on to weights, I chose to do back and chest today. To start, I did 4 sets of 8 incline chest flies. These were followed with 3 sets of 10 standing rows, balancing on the bosu ball. Then I moved on to abs and did 3 sets of 12 side crunches (each side) on the back extension machine. Since my pull-ups have been lousy lately I did a quick set of 4 pull-ups and then finished up my weights with 3 sets of 8 sitting rows. Lastly, I rounded out my ab routine with 3 sets of 20 knee-to-chin crunches while planking with my hands on a medicine ball.  I had already mixed in a lot of stretching between sets of weights and abs so I finished up with some foam rolling on the mats before heading out. I noticed the gym is only open until noon tomorrow so I'm sure it'll be a zoo in comparison to today!

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