Hi everyone,
Yesterday I went to the gym to lift some heavy stuff and I got the rage again because THAT PICTURE (see my last post) is still there. However I have received a reply from the Gym Manager about my complaint. At the minute he is looking into my reasons and has stated that the gym is trying to encourage more women to strength train.
Dog with a bone people!
I will keep you updated on “Poster Watch” 😉
Next, Bret Contreras emailed me along with 13 other women and asked us to name our 3 favorite Glute exercises. While ignoring my bikini shot, check out “Favorite Glute Exercises from the Fittest Females” for our responses and feel free to leave your own thoughts on the matter. I enjoyed reading Bret’s observations and conclusions on the choices. I also know that for those of you who are looking to get the best out of your glute training these answers will help you decide on the best exercises to rotate in and out of your training.
Lately I have been getting very inspired by the other Girls Gone Strong; especially with regard to Pull Ups (the weighted variety), TGUs, Squats, Deadlifts etc. The point is that I am inspired to improve on everything. But how can I focus on each goal when I love variety and I want to be good at everything! I am sure many of you can understand this too, which is why I am bringing it up.
Neghar Fonooni wrote about this exact same topic on her blog lately (Keep the Goal), which is what has got me thinking about it. I have to say that I can identify with her in many points, especially about having too many strength goals! I seem to go in circles around them and I never make good enough progress at any one of them and I inevitably neglect some of them, making it really hard to track. It doesn’t help when you are a natural Jack of All Trades like me (except maths and Chemistry), so it’s frustrating to never truly be outstanding at anything. That’s my “glass half empty” inner voice; my “glass half full” inner voice says “you are a Master at integrating your many skills”. The point is that being fairly good at a lot of things makes setting specific goals difficult and you tend to just plod along; you may even appear to suffer from what Martin Berkhan calls “Fuckarounditis” when in actual fact you just like doing a lot of different things.
This approach works very well for my workouts here, but not so well for meeting specific strength goals and I will be tackling this very problem in the near future. How to cure what I am now going to call TADD (Training Attention Deficit Disorder). What is a masterful skill when it comes to designing home conditioning workouts has become a pesky inhibitor of real strength progress. Or so I have decided. I’m not saying that we all need to have “one thing” to work on, but it does help from time to time having a more focused approach.
What I need is a program and the discipline to stick to it! I will keep you all posted 🙂 I would be interested to know how you all fair in achieving specific goals?
Despite all of this I have I have made a little progress on my pull ups. After reading Neghar’s post and seeing her, Nia, and Rachel Guy and many other strong women performing weighted pull ups, I decided to give it a go myself. It is way harder than these girls make it look! Here is me performing 2 reps with a 6kg Kettlebell on my foot. These were my 3rd and 4th “sets” of single reps because I was trying to film it at an angle where you could actually see the KB. Every day I have been doing one or two of these and I have improved drastically in just under a week. Next week I will try and do 2 consecutive reps with 6kg. Could this be the start of Marianne’s organised approach to training? LOL! We’ll see 😀
Now on with today’s VARIETY 😉 workout!
The Workout
Set your Gymboss Interval Timer for 24 cycles of 15 seconds rest and 45 seconds effort and complete 3 rounds of the following 8 exercises. My reps per exercise and weights used are in brackets:
- Kettlebell Goblet Squat (20kg) (18, 16, 13)
- Two Squat Jump Burpee (10, 9.5, 8.5)
- Kettlebell Alternating High Deficit Reverse Lunge (20kg, then 16kg for last round) (13, 11, 16)
- Two-Handed Kettlebell Swing (20kg) (32, 31, 31)
- DiveBomber (13, 10.5, 9.5)
- Lunge Jumps (21, 18, 17)
- Renegade Rows (2x16kg) (18, 16, 15)
- KB Vertical Swing/Pull Burpee (20kg) (12, 11, 10)
My energy seemed a little low today, but I will put that down to my nightmare shift pattern over the last week and a half. All in all I enjoyed this workout.
I look forward to reading your feedback on the topics today 🙂
Cheers
Marianne