Back to Blogging (Briefly)

Just got back from school, so I took a little time to refresh the blog with some of the newsletters I sent out this spring. However, I will be leaving for Italy on Monday morning and won't be back for three weeks. I'll be in Italy to for an art history class, but it will be a cultural and culinary experience as well. I doubt I will have the time to write any posts, but I should come back with plenty to write about.

In the meantime I'll post my recent workouts since coming home. Yesterday was a short, fasted sprint session in my Vibrams at a nearby terf field with the focus on quality and not conditioning. It looked like this:

Brief warm-up
10m sprint x6
50m sprint x3
100m sprint x1

I hope to include more outdoor training in the future.

Today's workout was a typical free-weight workout. It might be the last one I have for awhile, so I went pretty hard.

1A Weighted chinups +50 5x5
2A Front squat 185 4x5, 1x7
1B Neutral grip, 1-arm military press 50 2x7
2B Bench hip thrust 215 1x12, 235 1x10
C Moving pushups with bands 2x8
D Standing 1-arm cable row with forced negatives 110 1x8 +2 negatives
Pallof presses, TRX (planks, bodysaw, rollouts)

It took a little over 75 minutes, which is long for me although today was a full-body workout. I hadn't done much heavy front squatting in several months, but the movement felt good. I still love weighted chinups and the hip thrust. The standing 1-arm cable row was a new exercise I was trying out. It takes a lot of core strength to perform well and I can do a few forced reps by using two hands on the concentric portion of the lift. The core work at the end was not too intense and I tried out a few of Nick Tumminello's pallof press variations. I still like the original the most. The lateral version felt okay and the vertical version put a lot of strain on my elbows.

On a more random note, I am reading "The Red Queen," which is about sex and the evolution of human nature. I'm about 80 pages through it and it is fascinating. It confirms some of my vague theories and I'm learning plenty more. I hope to keep reading that in Italy as well as a few others: "The Miracle at St. Anthony's," "Wherever You Go, There You Are," and some assigned books about Italian art.

Speaking of Italy, I'm not sure what I'll be able to do for lifting, but I'm bringing my homemade TRX with me in hopes I can find somewhere to use it. I'm also excited for the World Cup, which starts in a week. I'm not a huge soccer fan, but it's hard not to follow the World Cup in the US let alone Italy. Should be a great time and I'll be back with some posts soon enough.