At the start of the summer I set myself a challenge – Get Strong! As a fitness instructor I consider myself to be fit but I’ve never been very strong. There have been periods in my life when I was definitely stronger than I am now; in my teens I spent my weekends at the local yard mucking out stables, riding and shifting lorry loads of hay bales. But now I’ve hit the grand of age of 42 and I can feel my body losing it’s strength. I’m pretty fit aerobically but strong…… no. I can push out 5 ‘not very good’ push ups before collapsing in a heap!
Inspired by the Olympic and Paralympic athletes I sat down and drafted a training programme for myself. School holidays and a couple of minor injuries slowed me down but last week I finally made it to the gym.
I want to record my progress on the blog for a couple of reasons:
Accountability – Holding myself accountable to you, my readers, means I am much more likely to stick to my programme and less likely to skip a training session
Progress – Tracking your progress and improvements is great motivation. Strength doesn’t come overnight, it takes a lot of hard work and a long time and sometimes you need to look back to where you started from to realise how far you’ve come
So this is my programme. I plan to get to visit the gym once a week for heavy lifting sessions. In between these weekly visits I will do 2-3 conditioning workouts at home. These home workouts will be short, generally no longer than 30 minutes, and high intensity using kettlebells and bodyweight – I’ll post details of some of these workouts along the way.
This is what I completed at the gym last week:
Chest Press: 25Kg 4 sets of 6 reps
Deadlift: 45Kg 3 sets of 3 lifts (I did these right at the end of my workout and my legs were fatigued from the leg press & glute bridges)
Shoulder Press: 15Kg 4 sets of 6 reps
Glute Bridge: 25Kg 10 reps, 45Kg 10 reps (I love this exercise but the disc weights at the gym aren’t big large enough which means it’s really hard to wriggle under the bar!)
Bent Over Row: 10Kg 1 set 6 reps, 12Kg 3 sets 6 reps (use a higher weight next time)
Leg Press: 60Kg 1 set 6 reps, 70Kg 3 sets 6 reps
