If it's an arms day, it's a good day

I was torn tonight. On one hand, I could have done legs and taken a chance on whether or not I was 100% after Friday's parking lot wipeout. On the other hand, I could have done arms and spent the next week dreading the inevitable legs workout.

It's a wash, really.

We played it safe and went for arms today, which was the sensible choice.

It was a mix of old and new exercises today, starting with this variety of lat pulldown:

Weight plates are loaded on the back and the handles can be pulled independently. Same muscles as the cable lat pulldowns that most folks are familiar with, but a slightly different approach.

Variety is the spice of life, or so they tell me.

Alternated the lat pulldown with a plate hammer curl, which the guy at the link looks so terribly excited to be doing. We did a compound move and went straight from the curl into an overhead press, which had the added benefit of forcing me to be very conscious of how my body moved and where that plate was, even if I couldn't see it while staring straight ahead and grimacing. I haven't smacked myself in the face yet. Yet.

We moved over to the Smith machine next, which looks like this:

It looks like a medieval torture device, but for those of us who do independent work without a spotter, it can be a fantastic piece of equipment. That long bar on the off side of the machine is the same bar you find on a bench press station, and you load weights onto each end. On the Smith machine, however, the bar slides up and down a pair of guide poles, meaning the range of motion remains stable and regular even if you start to tire. The hooks on the inside of the bar catch on pegs when the bar is twisted inward, so with a simple twist of the wrists, the bar can be safely racked.

In all, a pretty cool machine that can be used for a wide variety of exercises. Tonight, we dragged over a bench and used it for a standard bench press. In all the time I've been going to the gym, I've never really done a plain old bench press before, so I was a little excited.

We went through a few other exercises - triceps extensions and pulldowns, upright rows (which are the lifts most likely to make my body shake and all my chins jiggle elegantly), pectoral flyes - and then headed for the mats to finish with abs.

Y'know, I'm starting to look forward to abs. Really and truly.

Tonight's ab exercise was sit-ups with a medicine ball catch and throw.

I can't possibly explain the look on my face when J said that he was going to throw a weighted ball at my head every time I sat up. He needed to elaborate. Not at my head, just near my head. Okay.

The trick of this was not letting the momentum of the catch affect my sit-up. The tempo should be the same regardless of if I've added weight, and I challenged myself to make the exercise more difficult by holding the ball close to my chest. Holding it out in front of me would have acted as a counter-weight and made sitting up a little easier.

So we started with a set of standard sit-ups, catching the ball at my chest. We switched to a sit-up with a twist, with J standing first to one side for a set, then the other. Next was a set where he threw high, above my head, which was wicked hard. I had to fight the momentum of the ball to keep from falling backward.

We finished with a final set of standard sit-ups, only this time, J didn't stand on my toes. He stood back a step or two. I thought this was terribly unfair.

I didn't tell him this. He would have made me do more.

I just realized that I can type about this all very cavalierly, but that's such a lie. The first set of sit-ups weren't bad. I think I did twenty, no big deal. The next set, twisting to the right, we did ten. I started making the angry face (ie. "I am exerting myself and I'm not going to quit but I want everyone to know I'm not very happy about it") around number seven. On the left, I did a little better, holding off the angry face until number nine.

Then, all bets were off, and I glared so hard at J's stomach that if he's not currently suffering from some curiously unidentified gastric issues, I really wasted a lot of energy.

Still, tonight was one of those nights when I was sad when it ended. The past week has been hugely successful for me, starting with Monday's triumphant eval, progressing through Thursday's new mile record of 12:12, ending with another two pounds lost. At 214, I'm currently the lightest I've been in two years.

After all the miserable cheat days, the even more miserable day-after-cheat days, and the weeks where I work so hard and the number refuses to change, it's good to remember that this is all for a reason. It's worth it. Every day, it's worth it.