[LancelotsLover]

Good God Almighty! On Stage 1, workout A5 and it was hell! Worked on my form a lot, due to the threads I've been following. My squats were good, better than I thought, paying attention to lower back rounding. I wasn't doing it today, probably because I widened my stance, and that helped. The step ups were HELL doing them the right way! I've been doing them wrong all my life, and here I thought they were wimpy easy. Now I know why; I've been cheating like anything with the back foot, even when I thought I wasn't. I was doing them with 20 lb DBs and thinking it was easy. I dropped to 10 lbs today and tried not to use back foot at all, and I about died. COULD NOT do them more than one rep without push at all, on reps 2-10 I tried "brushing the floor" only with back foot, and it was near impossible. Much more quad and calf involvement; don't know how I'll manage to shift the firing to the glutes until I can do it this way. Maybe will have to lower the step some. Anyway, here's today's workout.

A5 6/6/09

Squat: 75/10, 75/10, 75/10
Push Up: floor/10, f/10, f/10
Row: 80/10, 80/10, 80/10
Step Ups: 10/10, 10/10, 10/10
Jackknife: Pike/12, Pike/10, pike/9 tuck/3

Like I said, hellish. Squats were getting hard at end of third set; had thought about going to 80 for it but didn't, and was glad. Next time I'll up it.

The push ups from the floor really bother my wrists. Today used hex DBs to grip on, it releases some of the wrist angle/tension. That helped, but third set was still hard. I can't keep my elbows close enough in.

Wish the row machine had 5 pound increments; 80 was too hard, I've gone up 10 pounds on each workout, and by the third set today I was having to use momentum from torso to get the weight pulled back. Will stick with 80 for a while until I can do it without losing form.

Step ups are gonna become my bete noire ("something which is particularly disliked or avoided; an object of aversion, the bane of one’s existence." Ok, so I said it was my waist size, now I've changed my mind, it's step ups.) Even dropping my weight in half and doing sets of 10 instead of 12 or 15, it was hard. The first set was hard, by the third I was almost screaming, and having to rest at the top of each rep to take some deep breaths.

Also, my rests between step ups and jackknives were longer than 60 today; more like 120. The pike jackknives I had gotten down really well before today, but after a set of proper step ups, the pikes were hell as well. I aimed to do 15 each set, but only made 12, 10, then last set only 9 in pike position, had to do three as tucks and about fell off the ball after. My heart was jumping out of my chest.

This workout, like the one two days ago, was late afternoon instead of early morning, and I wonder how much that affects me. I also only got 6 hours of sleep last night, which is not enough for me, so I had two strikes against myself. Hopefully next time I do this workout it will fall on a morning day. I am BEAT, this is 45 minutes after I returned from gym. Legs going to be sore tomorrow, I can tell.

I feel GOOD and PROUD!