Gym regimen - June 2010

29 June 2010
88 kg, BMI 25-25.5
30 mins
Core/cardio "sprint"

Warmup: 60 jumping jacks and stretching

Cross-country ski mill: 15 mins (150 pulse)

Leg curls (hams): 15x 15x 15x @ 30 kg

Seated leg press (+calves): 20x 20x 20x @ 180lbs

Seated oblique twists: 30x 30x @ 35kg 30x @ 30kg

Lever back extensions: 12x 12x 12x @ 50kg

Ab crunch machine: 15x 15x 15x @ 30kg

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This is a "surprise" entry in my bodybuilding log, since originally I was going to wait until Wednesday to hit the gym. My plan is a 4-day split on Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. But by the time class was over, I was itching for at least "a quickie," so I scrambled out of the school, bought some cheap gym shorts and a towel (since I hadn't packed my own), and dashed to Central for what was a lovely little sprint workout. I was reading online during my dinner break tonight, looking for a basic four-day split routine to get me started, and I read how Arnold said the last few reps were the key, because those were when you could push yourself into the pain, or, of course, you could ease back and "try again next time." That's a little of what I felt on the leg curl machine: grunting my last few reps, knowing I'd have that much more of an edge the next workout. I also read in The Education of a Bodybuilder how he learned from his first real mentors in Germany not to dally between exercises. He was accustomed to spending 3-5 hours in the gym and was perplexed why his German mentors kept buzzing from station to station. They said there's no reason to spend all that time in the gym if you can rip your muscles in less time. That's the buzz I felt tonight doing three sets in under 30 minutes. Woot.

Here's a cultural observation: tonight there were a handful of much bigger guys than I had seen my first day there. Initially impressed, I also took it with a grain of salt when I saw many of the guys' form: terrible! Just yanking on the grip for high rep, low range of motion. What I call "bodysculpting" versus bodybuilding. Just getting mass on their bones without really altering the physiology of their muscular tissue, says I (well, I and Arnold and plenty of others). I was also bemused to notice at least three of the bigger guys ended their workout by smoking a fag or two outside. Does that happen in the USA? I'm genuinely curious.

In any event, I didn't mention it in my longish post yesterday about fitness (though I have gone back and edited that post to "make it so"), but one of my great intellectual and spiritual role models, Fr. Stanley Jaki, told me in our one encounter, less than three months before he died, that he had rowed in high school (in Hungary). He was much more robust than I had anticipated when we met, so his background in crew made sense of his well known and evident vitality.

I also failed to mention that another lasting factor in my development as a "jock scholar" was my dad's many years of running. I don't remember a whole lot from my childhood (unless, I suppose, I were to start cataloguing what I do remember, at which point it might seem like quite a lot...), but two constants about my dad were his love for movies and his commitment to running. I don't know how many years he did the River Run (in Jacksonville, FL), but I vividly recall seeing all kinds of running paraphernalia in the house. Love for movies and love for physical fitness have become lasting impressions from my dad, an inheritance which finds its perfection in the fact that he introduced me to Chariots of Fire.