bradl’s weight training

This first part is non-training and the last paragraph has some training info in it.

Last week Mon was the first day at the marine lab’s island. It’s pretty much the same as it was in previous years. Hot and humid, rainy, with lots of iguanas roaming around. I almost stepped on one, though I usually watch where I’m going.

I didn’t get much done that I had planned to do there or get a chance to get out for a walking break, because I was helping one student in particular with a problem related to this project. It was still working on this project, but not the stuff I planned. There were a few students wearing jeans and a shirt who wore sweaters in the computer lab part of the days, while I was hot all day in just a shirt, shorts, and sandals. The lab is air conditioned, but not heavily.

Anyway, not much to say. Just a week at the office, more or less.

We have been going to Puerto Rico to take measurements and pictures of a number of transects there in Nov since 2005. It’s a ten-day trip and we get back the Tues night before Thanksgiving. In previous years I have bought a Puerto Rico beach towel with dolphins on it for our daughter, but she has three of them so doesn’t really need another, but I bought another one anyway. Most of the tourist stuff is junk made in China, so nothing I really want to take back.

The last day down in SW Puerto Rico, we went to Cabo Rojo to visit Los Morrillos light house and the neighboring beach yesterday. It’s at the tip of land in the SW corner of PR. It was hot. We old folks left after a couple hours, but the graduate student with us stayed for a while with the other students from the lab that went too. We checked out the beach and sat around a little while then walked the path up to the lighthouse, but were then ready to move on.

The next day we drove back to San Juan to catch the flight back to California yesterday. Puerto Rico is four hours ahead of here, so I woke up really early this morning.

In the afternoons, I had a little free time before dinner, when I would stretch and do tai chi, but though I had the stretch tubing for exercising, I didn’t use it. After we arrived in San Juan, we walked around Old San Juan for a while and split up. After I did my little bit of shopping, I walked back to the hotel, which I see in Google Earth now was about 2.5miles. I took a shower, dressed, and went to the gym. The hotel was big, so had a big fitness center with something like four ellipticals, four treadmills, and two or three stationary bikes, but it also had some machines, a Smith machine, dumbbells (up to 50lb), and short barbells (up to 110lb). One of the machines was an assisted pullup/down and dip machine, which I had never used before. I pulled the pin on it and the kneeling pad floated up and down below my knees. A guy used it after me and I saw he folded the pad up. Duh. I didn’t know it did that. Anyway, I did a full-body routine, since I squeezed everything into one workout. The Smith machine made squats seem easier than normal. The Smith machine didn’t go low enough for deadlifts, so I had to use the 110-lb short barbell for deadlifts. I did five sets of sixteen, but on the other exercises, I used the 5 x 5 approach that is used for the dino training (two warm-up and three work sets).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 10:45 and is filed under Training, Other. 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.