bjornwilde | (no subject)

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jedi training

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First day of week two for the Zombie 5K and it was a good workout. How do I know? It felt short and didn't drag. I'm definitely noticing good results from the work.

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As you do a particular motion or exercise, your body will adapt to that motion or exercise. You're seeing one of the principles of exercise science in action - specifically, what a lot of people in the industry refer to as "beginner gains". As you stick to this routine, you'll eventually start to plateau - I don't know your goals, so I don't know if you'd be satisfied with maintenance or whether you want to improve on it, but know that the option is always there.

In regards to plateauing, you might see talk about "muscle confusion" on the internet, with the connotation being you'll have to cook up some new crazy-ass routine every day of the week in order to get results. I'll level with you: muscles are dumb. A jump from a five pound to a ten pound dumbbell is plenty to confuse them. So long as you're getting eight hours a night, eating right, drinking water, and upping the stimulus on the targeted muscle to a reasonable extent, you should have nothing to worry about regarding plateaus. Keep at it and I guarantee by week six you'll feel like a brand new person.

You'll only get agreement with me there. I'm seeing the Zombie 5K running as the consistent form of my exercise and then the workouts from the darebee website, which varies what I'm doing from day to day.

I think soon I am going to be adding in weights as a matter of fact.

In a perfect world, we'd all have space for a treadmill, a squat rack, a rowing machine, a bench press, a pullup/dip station, and rows upon rows of dumbbells and plates in our garage (and significant others completely cool with such a huge investment in space, time, and money, and offspring who we could be 100% sure wouldn't injure themselves on that equipment). For your purposes, a pair of modular dumbbells (i.e., ones you can add/remove weight from) is probably sufficient for now - if you're feeling adventurous, you can also look into kettlebells, although if they make variable-weight bells I don't know about them. I haven't checked Amazon in years, but I can't imagine a good dumbbell starter kit would cost you anything more than $50, and plate pairs would probably run around $5-10.

I actually have a club right next door to my apartment that has all those things. I've even been paying for a membership for a while now!.\o/

=D

Then you're set!

Except for one more nugget of wisdom I want to impart on you, which is:

stay away from Smith machines. I'm too smoked right now, so I'll let my man Dom Mazzetti take it away.

As an addendum: know your body well enough that you can distinguish muscle fatigue from injuries. Sometimes it's obvious (something pops and you get an immediate pain feedback), sometimes it's not. DOMS doesn't set in until 48 hours or so - if you're sore immediately after a workout, you probably injured yourself. Don't try to be a hero about it - you're expected to work through muscle fatigue, but there is simply no reason to try to work through an injury. You'll only end up making it worse, possibly even something chronic. I'm not a physical therapist or a doctor, so that's the extent of the advice I can give.

Sounds golden. And once again, thank you for your input. At the very least it's been encouraging, but really it has been informative.

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