First time I tried this, I didn't know that an introduction with some personal details and athletic history might make the thread more interesting.
I'm 60 years old and have been exercising regularly since 1972 when I weighed 240 pounds, smoked Luckys, and worked part time at the door of a bar where kids drank. With the exception of July 1983 through December 1985, when new work meant long hours far from home, I have worked out, run, rode my bike or played hard six days a week. Mostly I exercise because I like it, but I like it enough to have finished 23 marathons, 3 fifty mile runs and 9 ultra bike rides.
I really like working out at the local gym, although I often limit myself to one hour. After doing variations on the same super-set routine for 30 years, I read RWOL which got me here. I'm too much of a hippy to follow plans that require bringing forms to the gym and filling them out with sweaty hands, but I have taken to heart some the ideas and exercises in the book.
My only real fitness goal is to celebrate my 70th birthday by running 10 miles and doing 10 pull-ups.
Any advice or suggestions about what I'm doing will be appreciated.
09/02 bike commuted - 10.5 miles each way
2 hard miles on the way home 2:46 and 2:47 - not as fast as I'd like them to be.
25 minutes of abs, twists and lower back exercises. The ideas of totally planned workouts and carrying a pad and pencil around the gym are still new to me. It doesn't come naturally after all these years of doing what I feel like doing and doing something else if a bench or bar is taken. I left the pencil home and the pad in the locker and didn't get it out til I started on the bench.
Bench presses
115 x 12 tossing the bar
145 x 10
155 x 9
165 x 5
165 x 6 not going all the way down to my chest.
Seated cable rows
160 x 10
180 x 10
60 x 10 - alternate arms
70 x 10 - "
70 x 10 - "
Man Makers
45 x 7
45 x 7
50 x 6
50 x 6
60 x 5
Rode home - 5 miles, standing each little climb to hit 'em hard.
Ran for 47:05 - mostly on the wooded trails in the park up the street. 1st run in 5 weeks and the hamstring felt good. Can't say I never noticed it, but none of the weak feeling climbing or tightness coming down the hills. Hope it's a good sign. Did some dynamic stretches walking the dogs when I got back.
core, back and twists for 26 minutes. lower back felt looser than usual.
Super sets bench press pull-ups
135 x 10 10 x palms out
155 x 10 10 x palms in, hands touching
165 x 8 10 x palms facing eachother
175 x 6 9 x easy grip
135 x 10 12 x wide grip assist on 8
Seated Cable flys radial raises face down incline bench
70 x 10 15 x 10
70 x 10 15 x 10
70 x 10 15 x 10
80 x 8 20 x 8
80 x 8 20 x 10 shorter arms
Curls on incline bench
30 x 10
35 x 8
40 x 4
High cable curls
35 x 10
35 x 8
Rode the bike 3 miles to the gym. Rode 6 miles home with a pretty good climb done comfortably. Pushed back on the pedals to slow the bike down the steep descents to the house. Breathin hard much of the way home.
Should call it jogging. Slow motion and poor stamina, but what did I expect after 6 weeks off. Oh well, the hamstring seems to have survived if not exactly pain free and the adductor muscle was totally pain free.
Guess I'll get off the legs tomorrow and hope for a better Wednesday.
Rode my bike to and from work. Nice ride in the morning 11 or 12 miles just riding along. Rode 9 miles home.
Warmed up to the bridge.
1:55 all out climbing than accelerating the down hill
7:51 spinning through traffic
1:37 all out sprint on relatively flat land
4:06 recovering
2:45 mile
3:43 recovering
:50 all out sprint
13:22 for 2.4 miles, mostly up hill to the house.
Not bad overall. The mile is still too slow, but I'm able to hold the sprints well. The recovery pace up to the house is good, too
OK, carrying a pad and pencil around the gym sucks the joy out of my workout. It turns play into work and I'll accept any decline in my performance as the price I have to pay to play in the gym.
20 minutes of crunches, back extensions and twists. It's great that there are so many different exercises to do and I kinda make up my routine as I go along. Today the novel stuff was twists on the Swiss Ball using a medicine ball and then doing a set on each side using the back extension apparatus.
Pull-ups kinda sucked. I'd like to blame the guy who used the station with the multiple pull-up grips to do all varieties of cable raises while he chatted with his buddy. I had to use different bars to keep moving and the sequence was different. I wound up having to take short breaks in the middle of sets to get the number of reps I wanted.
Push-ups weren't much better. I did my usual 5 kinds and got enough done, but hardly got any air on the explosive set.
Man makers - 25 pounds each hand for 3 sets of 7, 1 set of 6, and 1 set of 5 with 30 pounds in each hand. I was greatly relieved when my son told me that he could do them with 225 on the bar, but never did more than 5 no matter how little weight he used. I find myself gasping to do 7 with 50 pounds.
3 sets of curls for the fun of it and off the floor in 1:01:21.
Great to be alive, 61 years old, and still doin this stuff.
I hope somebody finds reading this more interesting than a list of exercises numbers and X's.
Welcome aboard. I found your earlier posts about your fixed gear bike pretty interesting since I've never ridden one. I live in Minnesota and I've heard that some people here prefer fixed gear bikes for winter riding because they have fewer moving parts.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tattooed phat man
I hope somebody finds reading this more interesting than a list of exercises numbers and X's.
Definitely.
__________________
"Time and patience are the 2 elements that most people don't include in their plans."
-Alan Aragon
"The scale simply tells you how much the earth loves you on a particular day."
-Ogedei (Keith)
It's true about the fewer moving parts although a single speed with a bmx cog allows coasting and only adds a rear brake to the set-up I use on the fixie. I think more appealing than the simplicity of the machine is a kind of connection to the bike and the ride that comes from feeling what the wheels are doing. I also enjoy the extra work that you have to do because you can't coast and also push back against the pedals to slow down. Still at the end of a fixed gear century ride a few years ago we were all surprised that we felt no more tired than after 100 miles with gears.
I tried it and was hooked the first day. My sons both like it a lot and my older son bought a nice fixie this summer. My wife, a very strong rider, felt silly not being able to shift and coast with the technology so readily available.
If it helps... I typically bring my workout on an index card. I'm currently doing stage 3 of NROL4W. I've got workout 3A on one side of the card and its cousin 3B on the other side. I remember my weights for the sake of recording them later. No pen required
09/10 Ran after work in the park up the street. Took Stella, our blonde dog, for a lap so it was 1.25 miles with lots of stops to sniff and leave interesting sniffing for the next dogs. Brought her back to the house and ran another 37 minutes by myself. I feel stiff and cumbersome after 6 wks w/o running, but my time for getting onto the loop was much the same as it was when I stopped. Legs felt good.
09/11 Played in the gym. 15 minutes of crunches, twists and back extensions. Added some weight for Swiss Ball crunches which worked well.
4 sets of bench presses, one set of incline presses when another guy was starting to take plates off the bar and I asked him to leave 'em up. Hadn't done those in ages, but handled the 135 easily for a last set.
5 sets of seated cable rows, 3 alternate arms, 2 both arms. Alternating arms feels a little better to me than using both arms and my hands get more tired since I'm holding the weight longer.
5 sets of dead lifts/upright rows. Did the first 2 sets regular dead lifts and 40 pounds in each hand. The last 3 I did straight legs with 35 in each hand. The difference in the 2 kinds of dead lifts is profound enough not to interchange them in the future, but either way jacks my pulse right up where I like to get it.
3 sets of 10 curls with the 70 pounds on the ez-curl bar.
1 more set of crunches and twists on the Swiss Ball.
Wasted a little too much time talkin with a buddy I hadn't seen for a while, but that's ok. I don't want to relive the 70's when I was the only guy with long hair in a gym full of jocks and cops. Never talked to anybody until Rocky came out and I had the quickest hands on the bags that everybody wanted to try hitting. Suddenly I had friends.
I recently started getting back into riding (read: took a few rides after 10-15 year gap and I'm 50).
To help my enthusiasm/committment, I bought a book - Bike for Life. I think you might like it. The subtitle is something about riding a century on your 100th birthday.
The hubby and I have recently taken up biking - and DH bought the Bike for Life book, and well as the Run for Life book for me! I haven't managed to get it away from him to read it yet!
My wife and I rode from CT to Montreal and back for our honeymoon back in 1987 and ran a trail marathon together in 2006 - where the photo in my avatar was taken. Endurance sports are wonderful for sharing with your SO. We find that time spent running and riding helps me communicate more; helps her feel more comfortable when nobody's talking; and makes both of us feel lucky to have eachother.
took Saturday off. Rode to the Uconn game - about 6 miles and home about 9 miles, but never worked hard enough to count it. Just transportation.
ran 57 minutes in the park near the house. decent level of steady effort. gasping a bit on the uphills, but didn't lose any speed on 3 x 1.1 mile laps. hamstring seems no worse than when I wasn't running which may well be continued healing. hope so. will be starting another marathon training program for a race next Spring. 4 days a week running and 3 days a week in the gym.
took Saturday off. Rode to the Uconn game - about 6 miles and home about 9 miles, but never worked hard enough to count it. Just transportation.
ran 57 minutes in the park near the house. decent level of steady effort. gasping a bit on the uphills, but didn't lose any speed on 3 x 1.1 mile laps. hamstring seems no worse than when I wasn't running which may well be continued healing. hope so. will be starting another marathon training program for a race next Spring. 4 days a week running and 3 days a week in the gym.
rode 58 minutes to work. tried to keep my cadence high on the flats after I timed, counted and discovered I'd dropped to 80 rpm, which is a little bit slow. hope to ride home easily and get to the gym while my bride does Quaker stuff.
Woohoo on the marathon training! I'm currently training for the Palm Beach HM in December, and hope to do my first marathon in Feb./March. I'm looking forward to following you along here.
Rode home from work - 8.5 miles - concentrating on my cadence like this morning. Had every intention of walkin the dog then goin to the gym. Then I took a peak at Roger Federer and Juan Martin del Potro and watched til del Potro was done beatin the champ. Too late for the gym, so I cooked some rice, at dinner, and read about training.
My plan is to run 4 days per week with workouts taken from "Brain Training for Runners", FIRST and a plan from "Run the Planet".
A rough outline for the plan is:
Monday - 50-60 minute run
Tuesday - jog to the track, 20-30 minutes of intervals, jog home
Wednesday - NROL workout
Thursday - 2 miles easy, 2 miles faster than marathon pace, 2 miles easy
Friday - NROL workout
Saturday - long slow run in the hills
Sunday - My old superset workout - legs day off
For the leg work in NROL I'll focus on exercises that use light weights and concetrate on moving quickly over as long a range of motion as I can.
Got home from work last night and ran about 3 miles with Stella, our blonde dog. She sniffed around less than usual and we stayed in motion much of the time. Pretty much a day off.
Good day at the gym:
15 minutes of crunches, twists, back extensions
5 sets of bench presses. tossed the weight on the first and last sets
5 sets of seated cable rows. last set on the machine with levers
5 sets of dead lifts/upright rows
5 sets of push presses
5 minutes of crunches, twists, back enstensions
Probably the most satisfying gym workout since the 1st time for this year that I got 10 pullups. The dead lifts/upright rows and push presses that I did like a shallow squat into the press got my pulse and breathing up to where I feel like I've really worked. All the running and riding sets the cardio bar higher than makes sense for weight training.
Tracey:
No days off on my plan because experience teaches that life interferes with working out and I average 6 days a week regardless of how I plan.
65 minute run after work. took Stella for the 1st 28 minutes. she made for a few stops, but not too bad the last 10 minutes. dropped her back at the house and took off again. shuffled the hilly single track trails in the back of the park. hadn't been back there since July and there were some new blown down trees to climb over. got back to the main trail and did 6:00 at my aerobic threshhold pace. the experiment with very light, flimsy running shoes seems to be a good one. less leg and foot pain than with the big soft motion control shoes I'd been wearing.
push-ups and pull-ups this morning.
20 minutes of crunches, twists and back extensions.
5 varieties of pull-ups - sets of 10 even if I had to get down and back up
5 varieties of push-ups - sets of 20 except for 11 dips
3 sets of man makers - sets of 7 with 25 pound dumbbells
interrupted by a chatty friend
2 sets on a curl machine - 10 , add a plate then 6
2 sets of cable curls - 10, add a plate then 7
as one who takes some pride in aerobic fitness, i'm amazed each time by how hard it is to do man makers. after each set i'm sitting on a bench gasping. can't wait to adapt.
Phat Man tries again - with intro
Linear Mode
