Three Strikes: Week 25

This week: four personal bests at the gym.

10 min run- up 1 speed

Lateral pulldown, palms facing face, hands shoulders-width apart: up 2 notches.

10 min old-style cross strainer- not sure what you'd call this machine. It works similarly to most cross trainers (i.e. like the one I warm up on), but it doesn't operate with the same kind of circular motion that my hands and feet are used to. Up 0.08 km.

I've come to the realisation that I was in much better shape before I started doing extra cardio in my gym sessions. When I moved out in 2010, getting my own place coincided with my previous local gym shutting down. 

I joined OCL, and found the facilities were in much better condition that Bodymatters' were. There's something about smart gym equipment that makes you want to use it- to give certain machines a shot, and keep using them. That's why I found myself mixing a lot more cardio into my workout, and hence cutting down on weight training. This, coupled with problems with the new flat, my memory, social life and money- leading to me eating cheap, salt-heavy food- meant that despite all the working out I was doing, I was falling out of shape.

Since then, I've overcome pretty much all of these problems. My diet's in order, I'm sleeping better (sort of- okay, I've got the pills for it-), I've overcome problems with friends and I'm doing better at the gym, as these blog posts reiterate.

Yet I've not got back to the physique I once had. I've tried doing long cardio sessions to burn off fat, I've kept up with weights and I'm mixing cardio in alongside it all. This is probably because the cardio machines at OCL are much better than Bodymatters' were. So. What if I cut back on cardio, only using the cross trainer to warm up? What if I spent the rest of the sessions purely weight training? It makes sense that, now that I'm eating well like I did when I lived with my mum and dad, and now that I'm on protein shakes, that I should be able to tone up really quickly if I skip the cardio machines and focus on strength. Especially seeing as you can burnmore calories doing weight training than you can doing cardio.

I'm going to give this a shot for the next month. Time to get shredded!