Oh, it is on now. I’ve been working up to doing more exercise and today I finally got the courage to get up off my couch and take the short walk to the little free gym at our apartment lease office. What I hadn’t been able to tell from peeking in from the pool previously was that there are 5 Cybex weight machines in there behind the treadmill (that makes a horrible screeching noise when you try to walk on it) and the stationary bike (with a seat that won’t adjust that’s in a great position if you’re 5′ 2″) and an elliptical (something that I still find entirely baffling).
The 5 weight machines include one for doing lateral pull exercises, one for military press type exercises, a leg lift machine, one that you sit on and press your chest against a pad to then push forward in a sort of ‘crunch’ type motion and then another that allows you to do a bench press from a seated position pushing forward. You might notice that my knowledge of the names of the exercises to be done on these things is rudimentary at best. I don’t figure that much matters as far as using them goes and hopefully you understand well enough to get a decent idea of what I was doing.
So, I decided I was going to do 3 sets, 8 reps on each of these at weights that I would be challenged, but to start with I wanted to do a bit of warm up so I did one set of 8 reps ranging between 20 and 40 pounds, depending on the muscles used as in some cases there was really no warm up to be had at 20 pounds and in others 40 would be too much of a struggle for warming up.
My lower body is much stronger than my upper body. I think this is fairly common in general, but for me I always feel like it’s more than normal. In the past I’ve cycled, done kung fu and done a lot more walking and leg based exercise than upper body work. The upper body work I can think of has been a very small amount of weight lifting, push ups and some small amount of upper body work in kung fu. Not a lot!
So I started with the lat pull and worked with 70 pounds. Thinking about this as I went through my sets and pulling through that last set I could definitely understand why I have so much difficulty with a pull up when I weigh more than 3x the amount I was pulling down. That said, I feel pretty certain I could step up to 80 on this one.
Next was military press. This brings me back to my 130 pound high school days. I’m talking about my weight at the time, not what I could lift! Yep. I actually was twice my high school size just a couple months ago and I’m not really that much smaller now! I had to do some adjusting on this one and don’t recall for certain (I need to bring a notebook or my netbook with me next time) but I believe I settled in at 50 pounds here, and on that last set it was all I could manage to push that last time. Will try 50 next time and possibly drop to 40 if I find that I must have been remembering incorrectly.
On to the leg lift! I started fairly light and immediately went up as I pretty much threw that weight up in the air. I settled in at about 80 pounds and when it was all said and done, this is one where I think I need to go up a notch. 90 for next time and we’ll see how that goes.
Abdominal crunch type thing. This seemed pretty easy at first. I think I ended up at 50 pounds. The last set was pretty tough, though not horrid. I’m going to stick with 50 for next time and see if I need to adjust up.
Bench press! (Or whatever it might be called in this case) Again… Last I remember doing this stuff I couldn’t lift much at all. At all. I don’t mean I couldn’t do 3 sets of 8. I mean AT ALL. Yeah. Back in high school benching a plate or two was about all I could manage. Well, that was then. Now I went for it at a whopping 60 pounds. Yes, I’m that weak. Last set was tough. It surely didn’t help that it was the absolute last thing I did. I made it through, though, and I’m really proud of it.
After all that was done I checked out the cardio equipment. Noting the disrepair and not wanting to do the elliptical (partly because holding my arms up at all was torture) I decided to go ahead and do a lap of the apartment complex before returning home.
All in all an enjoyable work out and in the end I feel like I put in what I needed to. I’m going to work on a log and try to get out there to push some weight around fairly regularly over the next couple weeks before we move out. Hopefully after the move is done I will get up the courage to start doing much of the same using free weights on a regular basis down at the YMCA. I’m not looking to ‘bulk up’, but I am definitely looking forward to improving my muscle tone and especially increasing my strength. After all, I don’t want to be that skinny high school kid who wished he could gain weight. I want to be strong!
