Friday afternoon
Top (lats, shoulders, and forearm) ST workout.
Good pump. I’m back to my old max weights on the pull-downs, now that my left shoulder has been good for several weeks. I’m just to the point where my body is starting to come up a bit as I pull down. Another 20-lb increment and I’ll be ready to graduate to a proper pull-up bar, so I just bought this:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003TYCVKG/ref=pe_175190_21431760_M3T1_ST1_dp_1
and will mount it tonight.
It’s taken a long time for my shoulder to get to this point! I’ve also been wanting to have a pull-up bar so that I can do hanging ab stuff:
With the shoulder feeling solid, I also did seated military presses for the first time in years. They're harder than standing military presses because you can't cheat and get that initial lift from your legs and 'core'. The shoulders seemed OK with the extra stress, but I didn’t push it. I did my mills again too. I’ll have to set aside some time sometime to learn how to do both hands simultaneously. It’s going to take more practice than I anticipated to learn how to coordinate both arms.
Finally, I put together another Indian club with plumbing supplies, similar to the one in the video below, to make a heavier club for a ‘mill cast’ exercise I came across on Pete Kemme’s excellent list of ‘functional fitness’ exercises (
http://kemmefitness.com/exercises/):
.
The club is more expensive than my sand-filled wiffle bats, but it's neat because you can adjust the weight by putting smaller pipes inside or taking them out. I have a 2" pipe on the outside, and then can fit 1 1/2", 1", and 3/4" pipes inside. With all the tubes the club weighs about twice what the wiffle clubs do, close to 15 lbs. If I outgrow that I suppose I could throw in some ball bearings too.
Today temps are over freezing, so I think I'll go on my first proper out-n-back run in three or four moons, to Como Lake and back, one of my favorite mid-distance routes at just over seven miles. Even if I encounter a fair amount of moisture along the way, I should be able to do the whole thing comfortably bare, and the slight windchill should be a non-factor. I was debating trying a nine-miler today, but think it's probably best to get in another week of running in the 5-8 mile range before adding another mile to my max distance. I would like my current max distance of 8 miles to feel a little bit easier on a consistent basis before adding to it. It's kind of the opposite of the ultra spirit, but I really don't like running after I begin to fatigue. Bad things seem to happen that way.