photo by Dallas Olsen

Time for a bit of gym talk....

Over the past couple of months I have been posting a lot about vitamins, supplements, nutrition, de stressing our lives and any other topic that I believe is important to the basics of living a healthy life. However today it is definitely time to talk about the Strength part of Strength and Beauty, and a little grrr to my blog.

After I returned from the States I had a few weeks off, and went to the gym maybe twice a week mainly to keep my squat technique fresh. So about 3 1/2 weeks ago I decided it was time to get a plan together and get back to doing what I love. The question was, what was I going to do? My next Powerlifitng competition is not until July next year, and despite a couple of interesting competitions earlier than that I am sticking my to plan of having 6 months rest from the pressure. I needed to find an objective; training is like anything else in life, you need to plan and program for success. So the following jumped out as obvious objectives;

1. Lean down from my off season so I will be at competition weight before I go back to my next powerlifting cycle
2. Grow some size in my upper body so I get close to my 100kg bench press dream.
   

To achieve my first goal I needed to look at doing high lactate training, higher rep ranges (10+ for me), with minimum rest. To achieve more upper body size a hypertrophy training range of 8-12 is needed, and as I don't normally do a lot of direct upper body training (shoulders - what are they) simply adding these into my program is going to cause muscle growth.

I decided that the leaning down goal was no 1, so I have hit myself with the Poliqiun 6-12-25 on legs weekly and arms bi-weekly to shock my body to adapt. Each of the other 4 days has 2 focus muscles and is in the 8-10 rep range with minimum rest. The best way to lean down is to do resistance training, so other then 1 RPM class on a Saturday with "the gang" I am not doing any cardio.

In 2 weeks time I will change the program again and remove the 6-12-25 and focus more on getting those shoulders I am after!

I am loving my training right now, and enjoying the freedom of having so many choices......well, I am off to the gym.

Stay Strong

Lisa