bradl’s weight training

A while back Jason asked how useful or valuable the visits with the trainer have been for me. I haven’t seen her in a few weeks because of my work schedule, but I’m bout done with the visits I paid for.

She reviewed my form, provided an exercise program to follow, and demonstrated a number of the exercises for resistance tubing / cord that I hope to do in the coming weeks here in Svalbard. The program was a four-day split with alternating 6-8 and 8-10 each week. That was a useful experiment to try, but I don’t think the time with her was worth the expense.

She thought that experiment would be a way to keep my muscles guessing by mixing things up. Having tried it for seven weeks, not eight because of this travel, I can see that the muscles don’t care, it’s just work, but the brain gets messed up. Is it six or eight reps, maybe I can do seven or nine because I’m not sure how much I can do with this weight? It’s in the brain not the muscle.

Joesant also asked about the protein bars bought for the trip. I like the Pure Protein (chocolate peanut butter) and Detour (caramel peanut) ones but not the Carb Conscious Supreme Protein (peanut butter crunch). The latter have a thick caramel and are chewy so they don’t chew and dissolve well, but get stuck between my teeth. I have to remember to eat something after them to clean it up.

Last I wrote I was about to go out of town for a trip. That trip happened but I only had time for the gym there once, but squeezed in all my workouts when I came back. We were supposed to have another trip the week after, which didn’t happen, but I kept working out with no rest days as the schedule for the big trip kept getting pushed back a day or two again and again. All those delays wore out my patience when I don’t want to go on this trip in the first place. My last workout was the morning of 5 Jul. That evening was the flight to Longyearbyen, Svalbard, which is a "state" of Norway. I’ll be in Ny Alesund for the next month. Ny Alesund is at about 79d N 12d E. They supposedly can only work us 14-h days, on working days, but I don’t know how many of those there will be. I hope to make it to the little gym on off days.

On these trips with my PDA, I can’t log into BB.com, so can’t post blog entries or leave comments in my name, so I had discounting using it while on travel, especially if I can’t work out, so have no training-related stuff to write. Once our equipment arrives, apparently, I’ll be living with one of the laptops and can send this then. Another snag was that any blog posts are supposed to be coordinated through the project manager and censored, I mean filtered before release but I decided that’s for the project web site’s blog and not personal ones. I’ll try not to write too much about project stuff.

One thing I have to get used to is the Norwegian kroner, which is about 6.3 kroners per dollar, so the numbers are large.

Before I left I finished reading "This Charming Man", by Marian Keyes. The most interesting quote is from Grace, a journalist, who thinks: "It felt immoral to celebrate a woman who earned a shockingly large amount of money from the frivolous business of pretending to be other people."

Last week I saw a news article online about the scrawny guy who dieted and exercised to have visible abs as his primary goal. Fitness people commented on him because he didn’t do much for his health and fitness, but just to have visible abs. I don’t have Rippetoe’s book with me, but he wrote about that mentality, something like: you have to build the refrigerator before you can put the six pack in it.

On the plane I read an article in Fitness RX about the effects of combining aerobic and resistance training in the same session. The conclusion was that the combination, either cardio before or after caused interference in the anabolic effect, so it’s better to do the two types of training separately. However, following lifting with cardio reduces appetite, so doing them together helps with fat loss.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 12:53 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.