Exercise Log 12.12.13 (Dev Day, No Cardio)

I guess I should start planning to publish my exercise log as my personal memoirs because they keep growing out of control every day. I just have so much to record, so many thoughts go through my brain. Some people think exercise and fitness are jockular, brain-disengaged activities (PICK THINGS UP PUT THEM DOWN PICK THINGS UP PUT THEM DOWN). To some people it probably is. But I’m quickly discovering that fitness is easily a very nerdy, neurotic and downright geeky thing to do if you approach it with the right mindset.

Today I skipped the gym because I woke up and it was stupid cold, like so cold I felt stupid being awake and not in my bed. So it took me two hours to get up and eat breakfast, which depleted the time needed to really roll over to the gym. So I decided instead I’d just have a short, fun, quick workout at home.

I wanted to keep it simple, so I went with something I don’t normally do – extra high volume very few exercises. First I did 6 sets of curl bar front squats (which I showed off a few weeks ago in my Youtube channel… one of these days a sexy lady will buy me a barbell and power rack, and in return she’ll get my undying love… fair trade right?). Since the weight on the curl bar is minimal I decided to go with high reps… 12 reps. Focused on depth of squatting and hip contraction, particularly in the glutes. I superset this with bicep curls with the same curl bar (6 reps) focusing on form. The weight was light for squatting but heavy for bicep curling. 6 sets is normally beyond the volume I’d normally do, but I felt like it was well worth it.

Second superset not to neglect other major muscle groups was to use my makeshift “roman chair” at home and do a core workout, 10 reps of suspended ab crunches and then I did 10 reps of hip pressing the curl bar. Again, I did 6 sets of this… in fact I’m convinced somewhere I lost count and did 1-2 extra sets, but whatever. It was a lot of reps is all I recall now that it’s over.

Finally I did a new exercise, because my dumbbells are only singles no pairs, I did a one armed dumbbell snatch. I am not trained in snatching motions although I know I should use them more often. The dumbbell snatch I always felt was almost like a somewhat cheating shoulder pressing type motion, due to how the dumbbell goes over your head. In fact what it is though is a force coupling exercise of your hip motion because the hip motion you make is what actually drives the weight up. If done correctly the arm just holds the weight slack and taught at the right times to guide it straight up and down so it’s not flailing everywhere. Here is a great video with Christian Thibaudeau teaching the move.

The next time you get a dumbbell and a little free space, give these a shot

Actually after doing this 10 reps each arm for 4 sets, my butt felt pretty damn sore as I used a tight hip squeezing action to drive the weight up. Sometimes when I felt fatigued I did a little double bounce at the bottom to go back up. Surprisingly my arms or shoulders felt not much work. Done right it really is a lower body exercise, and great to train the nervous system and learn the force coupling actions of the squat motion and also snatching in general due to how you do practice a little shoulder shrug at the peak of the motion to do the final drive up.

All in all a fun time, all at home with very minimal equipment (one curl bar with little weight and one relatively light dumbbell). A workout like this is definitely a great way to get warm on a cold morning.