First obstacle to fitness plan

 by The U.S. Army

I recently blogged about my first obstacle to my well laid financial plan, well I now have my first obstacle to my fitness plan.

To be honest, it's not really my first obstacle as I had a prior hiccup. This time, I had a planned session for Thursday but upon returning from college I was simply too tired and did not feel up to it. To compensate I'd planned on visiting the gym on the Friday, but little Ethan was just so demanding I just did not get an open window! So, as you can imagine I moved the session to Saturday, but then the weather was so gloomy and the gin and tonics I'd had the previous night (Friday) left me feeling somewhat lethargic and depressed so once again I moved my session to Sunday. Unfortunately due to working the Saturday night, I was totally shattered Sunday morning and slept through the early part of Sunday.

Good news is I've finally managed to get my session in today (Monday). The session wasn't too bad though I must admit I was not too happy with my squat. I added 5kg in weight, but after starting felt the weight might be a bit too much unaided. To compensate, I ended up doing 1/2 squats instead of going through the full range (the strong lifts program does not allow regression, and advocates sticking to a weight until it's mastered).

Learnings and Corrective actions

I am proud of the fact that I have forced myself to get back on track (really didn't feel like going today), but this doesn't negate the fact that I did not follow the plan. Going forward I need to ensure I get to the gym on my scheduled days regardless of weather or mood even if I just sit out or do light work.

I also need to be careful on the rate of weight increments as I want to ensure steady continual improvement. Often after the first set I'm tempted to load on the weight (a consequence of a previous training regime that consisted almost entirely of pyramiding i.e light weight for warm up followed by progressively increasing weight at reduced reps).

Another reason for careful increments is a previous knee injury (karate, affects squat), lower back injury (diving, affects squat) and bum shoulder (don't know where this one came from, affects bench press). None of them have presented any problems thus far and I attribute it to maintaining good form and not loading too much weight.