swampman posted:

I had a really great pull day yesterday... thought I would share:

Warmup:
Band pull-aparts. palms supinated and raised, pulling elbows out and down
Low weight horizontal cable rows with the double row accessory. Leaning slightly forward, tension in hamstrings, lower back flat. Do not assist the row by leaning back at the hips. Focus on pulling with shoulders first.

Barbell rows: I never seem to fit this one in between other lat work. I did a warmup set at light weight and 3x10 at a challenging weight, with sets of 15 pushups in between sets. I like to include pushups early in a back day to help me connect with my upper back.

Wide grip weighted pullups: 2 sets with a dumbbell grasped between the ankles, knees bent (and then 1 set with no weight). Holding the weight like this makes cheating the pullup much harder, and keeps the posterior chain engaged without having to focus on it. After the pullups, 2 sets of wide grip pulldowns at rough equivalent to body weight (body weight minus 20-25lbs since you don't lift your arms in a pullup).

Note for pull ups. Use your fingers as hooks, do not try to squeeze the bar in your fist. Your palms and forearms simply hang there, they do none of the work; everything that matters is between your elbows.

T-bar row machine: 4 sets on the bastard.. i achieved a deep and satisfying awareness of body symmetry on this one.. highlight of workout

W-raises and Y-raises superset with bicep work: I just stayed put in the row machine for the W and Y raises. I started biceps with a set of high cable curls but the towers got taken over so i switched to drop sets of seated dumbbell curls. A drop set involves doing reps until you don't think you can do another with proper form, then immediately dropping to a lower weight, and repeating the process until you are struggling to lift the smallest weight available.

What is the function of a drop set in strength training? The body makes several adaptations to the trauma caused by exercise. After extremely heavy lifting, the muscle will adapt by increasing the number of proteins responsible for muscle contraction. After lifting to exhaustion, the muscle will respond by increasing the amount of delicious fluid per muscle cell. Or: lift heavy to get strong, feel the burn to get big. Personally, I have pretty inflexible biceps from a lifetime of computer, so I don't really feel comfortable loading them heavy after a lot of rowing work, anyway.

Last: two rounds of "farmer's walk" with the trap bar, and two long sets (25 reps) of horizontal cable rows with the bullhorn-lookin accessory at a low weight.

Nobody promised you that this post would be interesting

pee is stored in the balls

toutvabien posted:

i did it y'all, i'm lifting again. on both Sat and Mon i did (with 30lb dumbbells):

5x5 overhead press (1x10 w/ 10lb dumbbells as warmup)
5x5 squats (same warmup)
5x5 bench (same warmup)
2x10 "lift 10lb dumbbells out to the side, t-pose style" workout whose name idk

and then a 20g protein bar, and lots of water throughout. feels good, even tho my form is probably not perfect

don't worry about form, only computer programmers obsess about that shit

nearlyoctober posted:

i think it's way too easy to let your form get away from you. you start lifting, you're doing great, but then a year down the line you suddenly realize you're benching 75lb dumbbells using nothing but your nervous system as a network of pulleys and abuse of the laws of momentum. your form "feels right" but really it's all you've ever known so of course it feels right.

you really do have to concentrate on your form, meaning that you're making sure you're actually engaging your nervous system effectively to target the muscles that correspond to the motion. training your form isn't about emulating exactly what you see on youtube or whatever. it's about integrating the reality of anatomy and dynamics into your psychology. people think the goal of weight training is to put the weight up, but it's really to strengthen the mindbody connection.

yes maybe i'm a computer programmer. i wish i could rewind 10 wasted years of sawtooth-like (on-and-off) progressive overload weight training and tell myself this. i think all of this comes intuitively to some people, but it's a painful process for impatient egg suckers like myself

i was obviously being somewhat facetious. like 90% of form for most exercises is keeping your lower back straight, not buckling your knees, and keeping the weight evenly distributed. i've just found that a lot of new computer programmer-types in the gym obsess about doing everything properly instead of just lifting the weights.

dimashq posted:

I just did 3.5 miles of trail running without stopping, new record

I’m at 8 miles without stopping, regularly, now, although most of my progress shot up rapidly since January now that I run several times a week. Feels great

psychicdriver posted:

you're gonna do it

absolute banger