My first weight lifting workout

Cross Posted on Pick on the Fat Kid

Last night, I did my first weight training program.  Adam set me up a workout to get started with.  The idea was to do 12-15 reps, 3 sets of each of the exercise with only a minute or so in between sets.  Sort of a circuit type thing I guess.  Whatever it was, I really broke the sweat and today, I can really tell I worked out hard yesterday.  I’m not what you would call sore, just my chest, triceps, biceps, and shoulders feel like they don’t want to cooperate today.  Washing my hair this morning was tough.  I had to dip my head down and meet my hands half-way

The best part of the whole deal is that I have my best friend, Roger to work out with.  In fact, I’m working out in his basement.  He has several benches, a ton of free weights, various bars, dumbbells, and a multi-function machine where we did the Pec Deck, Lat Pull Downs, Tricep pushdowns,  and a Machine press.  It does other stuff, but I believe that’s all we did on that machine.

My buddy Roger has been lifting for several years, but then had not been doing it the past year or so.  He just finished up his schooling and wanted to get back into it, so we decided to work out together.  I made it over to his house before he was ready, so I figured I’d better start stretching.  That would keep me from getting sore!  I also banged around on the heavy bag for a few seconds to get a sweat started.

The actual weight training went well.  Having lifted before, I knew that good form is better than a big ego.  So I focused on using good form with the exercises as opposed to seeing how much weight I could fling around.  I did have some problems selecting the right weight.  I always did a warm-up set with very little weight and to get a feel for the exercise.  I had a good idea of what weight I was using doing these exercises several years ago.  However, that really didn’t fly here because I am definitely weaker now than I was.  I tried to select a weight that made that 12th-13th rep difficult to do.  On most of the exercises, I was able to get the first two sets in with 12-15 reps, but the 3rd set I struggled.

One thing I also did was try to only rest 1 minute in between sets/exercises.  This kept my heart pumping the entire time (and the sweat dripping).  The time also flew by.  All in all, I had a blast and can’t wait to do it again.  My plan is to do this 3 times a week.  Right now, it’s looking like Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays are my best options.