Appalachian guy’s BodyBlog

After a week of limited workouts I tried to do a little more today. Instead of doing just legs and some ab work I expanded my workout to arms and chest on the machines.  Since my injury seems to have gotten better with the prescription strength ibuprofen I used machines only fearing free weights would put too much strain on the injured area.

I’m writing this about two hours after I finished and so far I don’t think I did any damage. Took my regular dosage of ibuprofen and hoping all will be well.

For the record I did three sets of the vertical chest press, one set at 100 pounds, one set at 110 and one at 120. I did three sets of pec flyes two sets at 80 pounds, one set at  90 pounds. I then did three sets of triceps push downs, on set at 80 pounds, one set at 90 and one set at 100. I finished up with three sets of biceps curls, one set at 40 pounds and two at 50. Normally I can do three sets of 177.5 on the vertical chest press, 110 on the chest flyes, 130 on the triceps pushdown and 75 to 77.5 on the biceps curl.

I hope to be back at those levels soon.

You may be wondering what happened to my back and shoulder. Somehow I managed to strain something in the area near the right shoulder blade, which can be extremely painful. It seems there is no such thing as a comfortable position. As soon as you’re comfortable siting, it hurts and then you try to lie down and after a minute of two it hurts again. Over and over.

The way I managed to get this injury is odd. I was helping my dad wash down the walls of his front porch and the pain started about three hours after the job was done. Nothing strenuous there but It was a repeated movement back and forth up and down. The doctor said it wasn’t strain from weight but the repeated movement causing my problem.

<meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type" /><meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId" /><meta content="Microsoft Word 10" name="Generator" /><meta content="Microsoft Word 10" name="Originator" />

I meant to be more frequent on this blog than I have been but life has a way getting in the way.

Unfortunately my workouts have been infrequent at best. At work my schedule was changed twice in just a few days. First after a couple of layoffs and the combining of the paper’s two editions into one, it was decided by somebody somewhere that my schedule had to be changed, they could not leave it as it was. After 10 years of working from 2 p.m. to 11 p.m. I now work from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

While I’m trying to get into the new swing of things another change hits from the other side.

The reporter who worked Saturday and Sunday decided he didn’t like his new schedule so he quit, no warning, he just resigned and that was that. So guess who gets to take his place on Saturday UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. At least I have not been forced to work Sunday. Now I work from Tuesday to Saturday. For now my job is safe, there are five people with less seniority than I and only three with more.

On the home front I’m facing a change. After my mother’s death in March my Dad has decided he would like to live with me, and I have no problem with that.

My Dad is easy to get a long with and when he annoys me I can tune him out pretty much the way he does me when I annoy him. Since my house is too small for all his stuff and mine a larger house is in order. Looking for houses is my least favorite thing.

Workout wise I’m just waiting to get back into it. In mornings I’m ready to go but at 5 p.m. I just seem to loose the desire so I just drive on by the gym and forget it. I don’t understand since in the past I always worked after work but for some reason or another I just have a hard time to force myself to go while the sun is still out.

I hope I don’t have to wait until winter when it’s dark by 5 p.m. to get back into my routine. Anybody have an idea or two on what I should do? Certainly others have faced similar problems and found a way to get over it.

I have been meaning to resume my blog for some time, but it seems like life has a way of getting in the way and we can’t do what we want when we want.For me this blog will deviate from the usual subject matter here and will deal with a part of the life cycle.I recently suffered the death of a parent. While it is hard to deal with the loss of a loved one, especially a parent, my mother’s death at age 77 was not entirely unexpected.Since 2002 she had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and had been in a nursing home since May 2003. She had been under hospice care since November 2007. Since December she had not spoken and stopped eating at the first of March. On March 13 my dad told me the hospice nurse said they did not expect her to live much longer. At first I didn’t believe it, since we had been told she was near death at least two other times in the past three years.

I’ve been meaning to do this for some time. I’m busy so my entries will not be frequent.

Right now I’m coming back from a series of colds. I got one around Thanksgiving, gave it to my dad and them about two weeks later I was at his house he gave it back to me.  It was a bad cold: constant coughing, sneezing, sore throat and a low fever at times. I was misearble, everything I did, I felt like I was in slow motion.

When I fanally got back to working out on Dec. 28, I couldn’t believe how much I lost in terms of strength. On every exercise I had to go down 10 to 15 pounds. To say the least it was very discouraging. As of this week I’m almost back to where I was before I got sick. I was hoping  to build on where I was in November so I will have to revise my goals for 2008.

Welcome to the Bodybuilding.com BodyBlogs. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!