Building a Better Jay

Good news - I brought my dad home from the hospital yesterday.  Sure, he looks like he recently got run over by a freight train, but he’s feeling OK and everything is healing well.  (For reference, he had a triple bypass last Friday.)  He certainly does get all the good drugs, too.  I mean, damn, if you’re gonna live, live right, eh?

My mom called last night, determined to make my dad something he could eat but completely clueless about what that might be. Interesting conversation. She had never heard of salsa or hummus. She didn’t know there were other oils besides vegetable. She has never cooked chicken with any sort of spice or marinade except gravy. She didn’t know there was anything available besides butter and margarine. It will be a renaissance for them. I get to open up her eyes (at least hers, hopefully his) to fresh veggies and fruits and proper ways to cook them. I’ve been trying to do this for years and always met so much resistance. This should be fun!!

After all of that, I slept well and got in a killer leg workout this AM.  After my final set of squats, I literally fell to my knees after racking the weight.  Fun fun fun!!  (I like to say it three times ’cause it deserves emphasis.)  See the workout below.

I’ve been slowly adding ab work back in.  While I was bulking, I didn’t do any specific ab work.  My theory was that while I’m trying to gain muscle, working out the abs would only serve to increase the size of the muscle.  I’m happy with the size of my ab muscles, I just want them to be tight and not covered by a layer of fatty fatty fat fat.  Now that I’m cutting, I just want to tighten them back up and make sure there is something still there once the layer of vanilla frosting is removed from my torso.  So, as I said, I’m wading in with ab work.  For now, it’s only 1x / week.  I’ll add a day every 2 weeks until I’m doing abs every other day so I can work in more exercises.  I love core workouts.  Those muscles feel awesome when they burn and that tight feeling lasts most of the day if you work hard enough.  Fun fun fun!  (Yes, three times again.  It’s a magical number.  For example, if I say I really enjoy cardio - it’s fun fun fun, then I will / do really love it.  However, there is no magic that could make me love certain things.  A prime example is mayo.  How can you put that in your mouth?  It looks like whipped fat.  Oh wait, it is.  My bad.  Still, blech.)

Anyway, where was I?  Oh, my workout.  OK, here it is:

dit da dit dit dit, this just in: the wind in the D is blowing at ~40mph as the temperature has dropped in the last 12 hours from 50 degrees to 9 degrees. This is not pretty, but makes me glad I’m not driving a big SUV to work anymore.  I saw several bigger vehicles veering all over the road every time the wind blew.  That is all for your local BB.com weather forcast.

The power went out temporarily at some point during the night, so I didn’t know what time it was when the cat woke me up. The clock was blinking 1:30am. I assumed I was probably going to be late to the gym. I was actually 15 minutes early. Not bad for a cat without a watch!  Well, she was probably waking me up because she needed her morning dose of Xtend and didn’t want to go catabolic.  Unfortunately for her, I didn’t spill any this AM, so she’ll have to break into my whey stash while I’m at work.

When I did get to the gym this morning, I think I was a bit tired.  I’ve been doing incline and flat bench on alternate weeks.  I sat down on the flat bench and started warming up with some light reps.  Then, I realized I was supposed to be doing inclines.  Fortunately, no one was around that early so I wasn’t overly embarrased to switch to inclines after doing one light set of flat bench.  "No, really, I was only planning to do one set - wooo, I feel buff now."

After that, I went on to some incline excitement.  I was struggling a bit with the final set.  Because I was early, there wasn’t anyone around to spot me.  On the final rep, I got about halfway up before reaching that "oh no" zone where I realized that there was no way I was getting the weight back up to the rack and the only hope was to rest the bar on my chest.  I dropped the bar gently onto my sternum and tried to recoup enough for that last rep.  After about 15seconds of rest, and with awful form, I was able to push the weight up and rack it.  Luckily, no one was watching yet (that I am aware of).

The rest of the workout was uneventful - working to failure on a lot of sets.