Steve_T’s BodyBlog

Well, despite not much of a change in overall size or weight, my strength has been on the climb lately and I’ve seen some significant progress on chest and shoulders.  My chest has long been one of my relatively weakest body parts and a true laggard for real gains.  I’d been slowly ramping up weight on various chest exercises and recently decided to try my luck at 225 pounds on Olympic bench press, long a storied benchmark for pretty much all guys who work out in the gym.  Keep in mind that up to this point I’d never done it for even a single rep in my life, and was intimidated by the weight.  With a spotter standing by, I squeezed out 2 reps of 225 by myself, and a third rep with a bit of help.  Definitely a great feeling for me!  A few days later I managed 175 for 5 reps on Olympic incline press, and was tremendously pleased with myself on that too.  For shoulders, long a problematic muscle group that I’ve been rehabilitating, I managed to lift 240/8 on a machine based shoulder press today, which is an all-time record for me.  So, I’m definitely quite pleased at how things are going lately, and I’m doing my best to keep my diet up, my rest plentiful, and my focus and dedication levels high.  Hopefully there are more good milestones to come!

This entry was posted on Monday, October 5th, 2009 at 7:36 pm and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.