An Exercise in Frustration

This morning I did the first weight workout of my new training plan. I found the whole process immensely frustrating. A workout that probably should have taken me a half hour ended up taking me an hour and a half. That was after I spent at least a half hour working on planning for it last night.

While it's true that the plan is pretty much spelled out for me, there were certain things I had to figure out. Since we don't have any free weights and we have a Bowflex, I first had to determine which Bowflex exercises were the most similar to Friel's exercises. That's the part I completed last night. This morning I had to use the Bowflex book to try to figure out how to set the machine up for those exercises.

But there's more. In order to determine how much weight to use, you have do some calculations. For example, for one of the exercises, you're instructed to do 40-60% of 1RM. First, however, you have to figure out what 1RM is for that exercise. That means you have to estimate what amount of weight you can use that would allow you to complete four reps but no more than 10. Then you have to do math (or use a calculator) to determine what 40-60% of that number is. I'm horrible at estimating things, so this was difficult. At times like these I really wish I had a coach to tell me what to do.

I finally got my workout completed, though, so I'm done with training for today. Hopefully, it will go much more smoothly next time since I wrote everything down and won't have to figure it out again.

I'm doing these exercises for the first part of training:

• Squat
• Seated row
• Seated oblique crunch
• Lat pulldown
• Knee extension
• Standing row