Weights, round two!

I thought about doing cardio yesterday, but I was SO sore from Saturday's weights and I didn't want to make it any harder to do squats today than it needs to be. My new plan is to do cardio the day after my squat days, and obviously not so much that I can't swing a leg up on my horse.

Today's exercises were squats, bench presses, and pull ups. I know that I'm entirely too wussy to attempt a pull-up, so I'm substituting lat pull downs for them til I can pull down about 150.

I started out with some yoga stretches (I should take a couple classes again and re-learn the moves!) and 5 minutes of cardio. Then, on to the weights!

Here's the animated gif of a squat. I also reviewed the helpful little videos at stumptuous. My sets today were 0/15/20, with the 0 weight just holding a broomstick. (Yes, my gym has broomsticks; I was kind of surprised.) You can hurt yourself pretty badly squatting poorly, but it's a great exercise if you do it right! After TWENTY WHOLE POUNDS, my legs were all quivery.

I'm not super at bench presses, either, so I'm sticking with dumb bells for the time being. A full size weight bar weighs 40 or 50 lbs, and you add 10 lbs of weight at a time, so I need to be doing 50/60/70 pretty comfortably before I try the bar. Cause, you know, how embarrassing to drop the bar on my chest and die. The only thing about barbells is that my gym doesn't have 25 lb weights, so I did 40/60/40. Had to drop back to 40 for the last set because I only managed 7 reps at 60 lbs. Whew.

I really pleasantly surprised myself with the lat pull machine. I figured I'd suck, so I tried one rep at 30. Could've done it one-handed. One rep at 40 - still way too easy. Ended up doing my full group at 50/60/70 - and then I squeezed out another 5 reps at 80! Next time I'll definitely do 60/70/80 and it'll be a challenge.