Well, I have to admit that my first hour with Rick at Gold’s really left an impression. Its been three hours, and my arms are still feeling the effects. That’s a Good Thing, by the way.

His theory is that muscles should be worked to exhaustion - actually introducing microscopic tears in the muscle fibers - and that only then will they start to rebuild in stronger configurations. We’re going to work primarily on my upper body, going for volume first and then moving to definition after there’s some more to work with. Today, we focused on my chest, shoulders and triceps. On Wednesday, we’ll cover the rest of the upper body.

I started out with a 5 minute warmup on the elliptical machine. After that, we moved over to the benches. On each exercise we did 10-12 repetitions, pausing about 60 seconds between sets. He did caution me specifically not to wait too long between sets, because the muscles start mid-workout healing which isn’t actually beneficial, since we’re trying to break them down. We had a couple of minutes between each exercise while he showed me the form that I needed to practice.

Bench press: 3 sets, 30 lbs (105 lbs total)
Incline press: 2 sets, 15 lbs (75 lbs total)
Dumbell press: 2 sets, 30 lbs (60 lbs total)
Inline dumbell press: 1 set, 25 lbs (50 lbs total)
Seated flies: 2 sets, 70 lbs

Whew! I’ve done all of those before, generally with more weight, but going through them in such a quick succession without any other muscle groups in-between is a different experience indeed. I really felt like my chest had given everything it had to give. Often, on the last set, I needed 5-10lbs of help to complete the last 3 reps with proper form, and Rick stressed that this was better than doing one hard push without help and folding, or taking a break to reduce the weight.

Next, we moved to shoulders. Started with dumbells…

Medial shoulder raise: 3 sets, 10 lbs (20 lbs total)

…but soon moved to a Hammer Strength machine - something I hadn’t used before. It was brutal. The standard dumbell shoulder press that I’d done (occasionally) before feels much easier:

Hammer Strength shoulder press: 2 sets, 25 lbs (50 lbs total)
Dumbell shoulder press: 2 sets, 17.5 lbs (35 lbs total)
Anterior shoulder raise: 2 sets, 10 lbs (20 lbs total)

My shoulders were really rubbery at this point. It was the first time that I really felt muscles being worked in a way that I had never really worked them before. We still had some time left, so we did a little tricep work on the cage:

Tricep pulldowns - V grip: 3 sets, 75 lbs
Tricep pulldowns - rope: 2 sets, 40 lbs
Tricep kickbacks - rope: 1 set, 10 lbs

And on the last one, I reached total tricep failure. This, apparently, is also a Good Thing. I couldn’t do more than about 5 lbs, just extending my arm out behind me. Whew!

Days remaining: 6
Miles remaining: 31.2

Popularity: 1%