A Little Test

Yesterday I had track practice. Our head coach wasn't there, but she did plan a workout during the amazing thunderstorm. She planned an indoor workout, but it stopped raining before practice started. A few runners wanted to go outside and do their our workout (a better workout), but because I wasn't going go States for an individual event I didn't really want a harder workout and most of the team was doing the indoor workout, I did that. We did a stair circuit with pushups, burpees, crunches, squats, and lunges. Got a pretty good quad burn and a ton of sweat.

After the circuit we went off to the weight room. There is always big football players in there who seem to think they kind of own the weight room, so I let them do their thing and went with most of the team to the more cardio/body weight area of the weight room, where you don't find large football players.

I pretty much did dips and pull ups, but those got boring, so I went over to the weight area and grabbed a 10 pound dumbbell and did weighted pull ups and dips. That was pretty fun. Got a pretty good upper body burn and plenty of sweat. That was my test: to see how pull ups felt with the dumbbell. It felt alright. Good on the arms and back, but I could tell my legs could be the limiting factor. My hamstrings, groin muscles and glutes had to be partially flexed to hold the weight off the floor, and with more weight that would be tough. The hamstring and glutes can handle a ton of weight, but not so much the groin muscles. They are more of a stabilizer muscle and are pretty small. Also the leverage is against you because of where the weight is, so that makes the weight seem heavier. The same went for dips, but I can't do those at home, so I won't go into details with that. The nice thing is that I have a weighed vest. The weighed vest is limited to 40 pounds. That's more than I can handle right now, but Lord willing, not for too long. Anyway, back to my point: with the weighed vest I can add 40 pounds... I can also add dumbbells. That way I can go over 40 pounds! I want to be able to do that so eventually I can do a one arm chin up or pull up.

Needless to say, the weighted pull ups and dips worked. My lats and chest are pretty sore right now and my biceps and triceps are kind of sore.

Practice ended early, so a few of runners who were waiting for their rides played soccer for 30-40 minutes. That was pretty fun!

Yeah, so this post was pretty much a more in depth post about my practice then what I wrote about yesterday. Pull ups, for the win!