Leg Day

OK, the Christmas and New Year's Day lull has passed and I am official back on my normal schedule again. That means I went to the gym Wednesday and tried to hit my legs with the usual workout, but a little heavier this time.

The fart position

I started with leg presses. I like the leg press machine this gym has. I can slide a bar to the side and separate each side of the sled so that each leg has to lift its weight separate from the other leg. That way if one leg is stronger than the other I can make it work harder instead of letting one leg do most of the work and never really noticing that it's happening that way. Also, if one knee bothers me, or one leg needs a few extra reps, I can take care of that with no problem.

Anyway, I did a warm-up set with 90 pounds loaded onto the sled and steadily added 45 lb plates on each side until I was up to 6 plates on each side. I tried to do 10 reps with each set and keep up an explosive speed for the lifting portion as best as I could, but on the last set I only managed 5 before my quadriceps started to complain that I was about to pull a muscle. I'm familiar with that pain. It's a warning right before the real injury happens. So I stopped.

Anja "legs" Langer

Years ago when I was young I remember a hot German female bodybuilder name Anja Langer who had legs that made men weak in the knees and a bit 'pumped' in the pants. She said she never got good results working her hamstrings on a standard hamstring machine. She always did stiff-legged deadlifts for her  hamstrings instead. So I went and grabbed a pair of 40 lb dumbbells and did 3 sets of 12 reps of stiff-legged deadlifts. My left knee wasn't overly thrilled about it, but it didn't seem to injure it or anything. I try to lock my knees when I do these. That's the old style. These days they say not to lock your knees on any exercise. I probably should change my style, but I never do.

Leg extensions

Despite my slightly injured quadriceps, I went to the quad machine and did 3 sets of leg extensions. I don't think the weight I was using was anything much. I can't remember what it was, but it was half as much as I did back in college. My quads haven't been the same since knee surgery, but it isn't as if I've really focused on forcing them to grow and get back to their old strength levels either.

I did some calf work on a funky machine while some college kid did a far better calf workout on the machine next to me. Then I hit abs and went upstairs to run.

I try to run at least a mile after every workout just to keep in some kind of aerobic condition so that it isn't quite so hard to get back into shape for a road race when one pops up that I'm actually interested in. I figured one tiny mile should never be that hard and I could steadily increase my speed with each workout. But after skipping more workouts than I made it to all through December this run was pure crap. I was slow and quickly huffing. Of course, winter dries out my sinuses and when my sinuses go completely dry then running makes me puke. Yeah, more information than you ever wanted to know, but it's true. My sinus troubles and allergies cause me to throw up when I run in seasons that screw with my sinuses, which is most of them.

I went to the lockerroom and showered and then grabbed my stuff to leave. Someone had left his military badge in my locker and I apparently hadn't noticed it when I put my stuff in. So now I have this guy's top secret missile defense government badge and I need to somehow get it back to him. I'm sure he noticed he was missing his badge as soon as he got back to work and couldn't get past the military police due to his not having it anymore. Anyway, I'll figure out what to do with that later. Right now my legs hurt and I need to go to bed.