Round 2, Day 1, Chest, Shoulders, & Triceps

We started the workouts from the beachbody mass building variation of P90X today, see here. The gist of this thing is lighter on the cardio, no abs on weight training days, and low reps high weight constantly increasing intensity throughout the 12 weeks. I like the no abs on the weight training days because it frees you to work that much harder knowing there is not an extra 15 minute workout after you are done. I added weight to the push-ups for this workout by putting a 10 lbs. dumbbell in a backpack and placing it low. This worked out well and really kicked things up a notch. Both Sarah and I really pushed very hard in this workout and we talked after we were done about how we probably dogged it a little in round 1. I think I could have pushed more for increases all the time and got a little lazy about that. Not this time, we are going to ignore the rep recommendations in the plan spelled out in the beachbody newsletter and go with our own approach to hypertrophy, well not our own ideas but something different from their suggestion based on our own research. We are going to target a maximum of 10 reps on each exercise and work to always be gaining from one workout to the next. For example if I did 9 reps at 25 lbs when doing the scarecrow this time next time I will do 10 reps and then the next time I will increase the weight and do as many as I can, presumably something less than 10. The idea is to always be increasing and it is something we did not do well enough during our first round. We are going to follow the workout schedule beachbody recommends though and see how that goes although depending on the week we may do only 5 days instead of six if I have a hockey game or something.