Tuesday 12 August 2008

Waiting for my hols and weighting my dips.

My supplement stash was replenished courtesy of my friend James who purchased 25kg of unflavoured whey about a year ago. I can only wonder as to what the people in the office were thinking as I confirmed "I'll take a kilo off you", but never mind. The last two weeks have been pretty intense with work, I had to do a number of small simulations that I'd forgotten about as well as a monster one; a time dependant multiphase volume of fluid species model on a 2D CSO. Not exciting but very long winded and trying to get all of the different models to interact was tricky, not to mention time consuming. Each time a new model is enabled a number of additional algorithms are added at each computational stage, therefore a high number of models eats processor power and the run time is hhhuuuggggeee. Get it wrong and start again.
As I write this I'm waiting to see my supervisor having ticked 2 of the 3 boxes she set me to do whilst she was away. The last is only a short report but it's the front end for my transfer report so it must be well written, with a sound plan behind it. I don't have a plan.
Despite not being able to enjoy my weekends due to the amount of work on I told myself that I wouldn't let it get in the way of me doing some things that I enjoy, mainly exercise. The gym has been going well with a few of the weights increasing although not at the same rate I'd previously seen. My chest workout is fine tuned and I really enjoy it. The Gironda dips have been feeling fairly easy as of late which is a miracle compared to the first time I did dips at the foundry 4 years ago, my chest felt like it was about to tear in two, Paul Reeve proceeded to blast out a lot. As nothing should feel 'easy', I decided to add weight to my dips, first session 5kg, still too easy, next 10kg but still not failing and the third 15kg which just about crushes me. On another weight related note Keith and I have a new challenge, I won't go into it further but I'm currently at +12.5kg which I'm sure the man muscle will crush.
I remember writing not so long ago that the day I decided to train legs was the day that I'd really lost interest in climbing, well it's nearing that day. It feels so unbalanced ignoring the lower half of your body, I can't work out a training split that allows me to split out chest, shoulders and back without adding a lower half day (or I guess another rest).
My family popped in for an hour or so yesterday to pick up a few bits and bobs and it left just enough time to go out for lunch which was nice.

Oh james also gave me a film to watch, more of a documentary really

BIGGER, STRONGER, FASTER



it's very similar in style to Michael Moore type documentary's but this time it's about steroids.

5 mins to my meeting so I better leave it at that, it's likely this will be my last post before my hols.

Thursday 7 August 2008

Two Weeks, No Fun

Due to my sneaky trip plan failing at an early stage I was pretty sulky for the start of last week and hence not very productive, another reason for this is that last time I worked myself for stupidly long days in order to produce a report for a silly deadline, I got it all done and dusted and then caught the dreaded man flu which is not a position I want to be in generally, even more so with a holiday coming up.
Despite the above I've been fairly consistent at the gym (besides today). My workout needs changing up a bit and I'm not quite sure which direction to take it, I dabbled with 10 sets of 3 in my last workout but I have to admit I didn't enjoy it as the majority of the time you just clock watch (which is what I do when I'm writing things usually!). Maybe its time for 5 x 5, it'll certainly be a bit of an ego boost as the weight I'm lifting will dramatically increase. Back to the 10x3, it's a very strange feeling; you fail without the usual feeling of failure that you get from weights, your muscle doesn't feel tired it just CANNOT lift anymore. Personally I prefer the 'pumped' feeling.
I posted up some questions about what I could/should do on a fitness forum and some of the responses were very amusing, I mentioned that legs were not going to be trained as I climbed which caused quite a stir, i know strong legs help with rockovers etc. but I've never struggled to push my slight frame upwards. The additional weight however would be annoyingly pointless. Anyway they suggested I take a look at this for pullup variants:



trying to explain to them that the above looks like what happens when a load of strong climbers get bored and start dicking about (apart from the planche type stuff) fell on deaf ears.

My supplement stash pile is dwindling and I've left it too late to order some extra whey and be sure that it arrives before we depart for Egypt. DAMN!
Unfortunately I was dragged around Meadowhall to buy stuff for the trip, one purchase was an O'neil surfing top to stop me getting badly burnt (it'll take more than that) which was highly embarrassing as it can only be described as somewhat 'tight'

Today is a wholly unproductive day as I'm sat in showing estate agents the apartment. Basically a financial opportunity has popped up and we need to know where we stand before considering our options. The other thing is that despite being a full time student in Sheffield, my studies don't really require me to be in a specific place, wherever I lay my hat is my home so to speak but in this case replace hat with "computer with a silly amount of RAM and processors used to run fluent at a hell of a pace". Nat commutes daily for what ends up being 45 mins each way and it really eats into her free time. Add her fitness regime to that and the days fly by without seeing each other much at all.

I forgot to add:
I was at the works one evening this week (on spotting duty as per usual) and watched two people one m one f, climbing. Being bored I started mentally weighing up their climbing styles, strengths and weaknesses. The funny thing is that they both were completely opposite but yet saw fit to undertake the same rings routine at the end of the session. Why is it that people train the same way as their friends, even if that clearly isn't their weakness? Merely for companionship throughout the session? I know its hard to work your weaknesses but it is the most beneficial thing you can do (something I wish I'd understood the importance of earlier on!).
Now...where is that stretching article?
Please disregard anything you read on this page. It's all just random thoughts and opinions based on very little. Therefore it's not worth getting upset about. In fact; just don't bother reading it, it'd make life easier for everyone involved.