Saturday, January 24, 2009

Upper body

I did a little playing around with the timing and sequencing of exercises, hopefully without doing too much violence to Thibaudeau's basic concept of including heavy weights, high acceleration, and lactate-threshhold work all in one training session. Here's what it looked like:

Alternating sets: pullups, 6x4xBW, rest 30 sec.; BB flat bench press, 1x6x75, 1x6x80, 1x5x85, 1x5x90, 1x5x95, rest 60 sec.

superset: KB clean and press 1, 2, 3 ladder (so, a total of 6 reps per side per set), 5x14 kg; KB swings, 5x20x14 kg

circuit: 1-arm DB row, 3x10x30, no rest, high speed alt-arm pulling with tubing, 3x45 sec., rest 30 sec.; high decline pushups, 3x10xBW, no rest, high speed alt-arm punching with tubing, 3x45 sec., rest 60 sec.

In a perfect world I'd have followed up with 30 minutes of low intensity cardio, but my niece needed to come over to do laundry so that ended up not happening.

I'm really happy with how my shoulders and back are looking. I know conventional wisdom is that it's high volume that adds size, but for me I really feel like low reps with heavy weight are key.

Thing is, I really question how well this rotation--or any upper lower split with longish rests between sets and no HIIT--will work for fat loss. What I'm really expecting to see are gains in mass and strength, and no real change in my body fat. Which, actually, I am okay with right now, because I don't have any plans to perform in the near future and no plans for a beach vacation either until late March at the earliest. My weight's a little higher than I would like--maybe 115 or 116--but nothing I can't get rid of pretty fast when the time comes.