Progress

Each week since March I've been dutifully following my schedule, working towards the goal of doing 100 pushups. And I've finally started running again, in the hopes of being able to run the marathon in Ottawa next May. So far so good. In general, I'm starting to spend a lot more time exercising. I have a weekly plan that consists of doing different various things each day of the week. I'm in the gym two days a week, which is broken down into three parts: Pushing (bench press and shoulder press), Pulling (lat row, pulldown bar, pull-ups, shrugs), and Legs (squats, leg press, leg extensions, leg curls, inner/outer thigh). I'm also doing several activities at home: Pushups 4 days a week, various chiropractic exercises each day, inner thigh stretching and strengthening (I'm slowly working towards doing the splits, like it will ever happen!), and some calf/ankle/foot rehab exercises (to be proactive about trying to prevent the running injuries I saw last season).

It's a fair bit, but I've scheduled things out to be very easy going and progressive. Gone are the days of 4 reps... instead, I'm starting with 10 reps and working my way up to 15 reps over a few weeks before increasing weight. It might not be as effective at building muscle, but that's ok, because my goals are to: 1) Not injur myself, 2) Increase weight/reps in a more realistic fashion that makes plateauing less likely, 3) Not kill myself at the gym so that I'm always tired / falling asleep. It will be interesting to see if I can keep this up for a year, and what the results will be.

UPDATE: Jan 2007: Yeah, shoot. I kept this up for maybe a month and then got lazy and went back to just doing the pushups and running. I need to get back to regular back, leg, and chiropractic exercise.