Exercise Log 10.13.13 (Leg Day + Cardio)

Well despite having the first hangover I’ve had in probably 15 years, I did manage to get to the gym. I admit the bodily disrespect had a huge impact on my ability in the gym, but I’m happy… my workout was short, tough and I was sweating rather severely by the end. The first place I saw a diminishment in my performance was squatting, I did front squats into back squats into smith-machine assisted back squats (with some calf raises inbetween sets). So a lot of squatting, but not as much as I did last time I did leg day. I did however front squat a bigger weight than I had before, 135 lbps, but I had a huge problem holding good form and made maybe 2 good reps.

After the squatpocalypse, I decided to have a shorter set of marching lunges than usual given my diminished energy but with a tradeoff, if I’m going less volume then I’m going to go higher load. I upped my dumbbells and marched back and forth across the gym, then upped them again and did another series of marching lunges. I was beginning to have the adrenaline at this point and other energy from workload starting to shoot into my system, so I went and hit the vertical leg press machine pretty hard starting higher than usual and ending with vertically leg pressing 630 lbp of plates (not including the platform weight)… that’s 7 45-pound plates on each side. Felt pretty good about that and made sure to do calf raises while on the vertical press. I decided to do some hip extension presses and I’ve been coming close to pressing the whole weight stack on that machine, so today after doing several hard sets of 8 reps of incrementing weight, I decided to wrap up by doing a series of short one time reps… counting one set as just one press max weight with each leg. I did that 10 times in a rapid succession and felt really good about that.

My cardio today was a bit held back because of the low energy… I was going to walk initially but I got kind of bored of that and ran at a modest pace for 2 miles. Despite the lower energy I definitely didn’t take any breaks… I felt kind of good actually and considered going longer but I was getting very sweaty and I knew I shouldn’t push myself too hard. As I was getting ready to leave, I saw a girl doing some stretches and it hit me… I NEVER stretch! So I took 15 minutes and did some nice, relaxing, calming stretching. I can’t say how much doing that just cleared my head and made me feel good.

So long story short, don’t drink the night before a workout (like I ever intend to do that again, ick) and always stretch after one, and you’ll be good. Lessons learned!