If I thought that last week was cutting it close, this week was almost impossible to hit my minimum exercise targets. I finally manage to scrape through the minimum third workout tonight and none of the three sessions I did this week were that intense at all.
It was fortunate that I had family visiting from Singapore on Monday, and one of our main family activities when we're together is to play badminton. But the rest of the week, I had to be in Singapore for a couple of days for work, along with worship practice and cell group for church.
I didn't even manage to make the regular Sunday hiking trip for the first time in awhile because of unexpected circumstances.
However, despite everything, I am quite relatively happy to be able to achieve the minimum targets but it's quite clear that it will be much, much tougher from here on out.
Work's getting to a rather crazy peak period and I'll be bringing home work every single day until after 20 December. At the same time, with Christmas season, things are also building up at church, family events and weddings.
So here's a summary of what I barely managed to do:
- Monday: 45 minutes badminton
- Tuesday: Rest
- Wednesday: Rest
- Thursday: Rest
- Friday: Rest
- Saturday: M-100s to 10 minutes on the punching bag
- Sunday: 45 minutes gym
It's much tougher than it looks.
He spent a lot of time going through the correct motion for squats and deadlifts, and I'm pretty sure I still can't get it right since it's my first time attempting it. I'm not supposed to add on any weights until I am sure I have the form correct every time so I'm starting with an empty 20kg bar with no weights added.
This was the series of exercises he put me through for three rounds: 10 squats, 10 deadlifts, 10 shoulder presses, 10 push ups, 10 inverted pull ups.
He focused on quite a few muscle groups I've never worked out before in the gym and I'm surely going to ache like mad tomorrow. A lot on the upper and lower back, shoulders, hamstrings and gluts, whereas in the past I would just work smaller muscle groups like biceps, pectorals and abs.
Apparently, pushing all the large muscle groups, especially those you are not used to exerting, activates more growth hormones to be released, thus helping your muscles to grow. Go figure.
And proper form makes it far more challenging. Even for push ups, which I thought I was pretty used to, 10 reps was not easy because I used dumbbells for handgrips. This allowed me to go very deep and touch the ground with my chest on each rep, where he would make me explode up and breathe out at the same time and then lower myself back to starting position slowly over four seconds while breathing in.
And you'd imagine that squats and deadlifts are rather easy without any extra weights but maintaining proper form and repeating it over and over in a slow and controlled manner still brought about some serious muscle fatigue at the end of the gym session.
I'll definitely be using some of these in my future routines in the gym; at least I'll know more than just bicep curls, bench presses and sit-ups. It was a really good session and I learnt a lot. If anyone wants a friendly, good-looking personal trainer, I can refer you to my friend, as he is surprisingly still single at this point of time...
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