Adventure Athlete Workout: Saturday July 31

Great day in the gym yesterday. I went hardon the warm-up and stretched it to 15 minutes. This is important, a workout schedule is a great thing, you need to have a plan when you go into the gym or else your time will be wasted and you will let yourself off too easily. Workout plans are best written unrealistically, sitting in air conditioning and feeling smug about your fitness. This plan will be too long, it will be too hard, but you need to finish it, usually.

Sometimes, the removal from planning and action is too great. Yesterday this was the case. The first 5 minutes of the warmup were specifically geared towards strengthening the lower back after a hard week of climbing, these stretches went well, and left me warm for the second part of the warmup, the boxer's complexof 50 hops jump rope x 50 strikes on the heavy bag. After the first five minutes were up, I didn't feel adequately warm, so I doubled the boxing complex to ten minutes.

Now I was ready for my three 5x20 lifts, but my anemia left me running on fumes by set three. The finisher to the workout was crucial, and I needed to have the energy to hit it with full intensity, so I lopped off the last two sets of 20, and transitioned into the countdown.

As a result, I left the gym with about two pounds less of sweat, and a little over an hour* of well-planed and efficient training under my belt, along with the sense of accomplishing a hard lift to the best of my ability.

*Yes, an hour, what? You think you need two hours to get some work in? Preposterous, long days are for the mountains, long approach marches and slogs up granite. When I'm in the gym, I work quick and with maximum cardiovascular output. I rarely let my muscles rest, because when I need them on the rock, I need them to work in sustained bursts to establish rhythm. A two hour session requires ample rest time between sets. The only rest that I get on the rock is on a belay ledge, and it comes sparingly, and so I seek to emulate that while in the gym.



Workout:

“An Easy Ab Day”

30-seconds at each station:
GHD Sit-up or Floor Wiper
Tuck Sit (on parallettes)
Forward Leaning Rest on Rings (feet same height as hands)
Sit-up (feet anchored)
Side Plank (right)
Atomic Sit –up
Side Plank (left)

30-seconds between stations during which 5 perfect reps of the following must be done:

Round 1: Pull-ups
Round 2: Triangle push-ups
Round 3: Chin-ups

Three rounds, total duration of workout is 24 minutes

From Gym Jones