Strength Training

Hooray for being in Austin this week! I got in on Friday evening/Saturday morning, right at midnight. Boo for delayed flights. Had to get up early the next day for 2 wonderful days of Crossfit Southwestern Sectionals at Camp Mabry. It was waaaaaaaaaay cooler than the Midwestern sectionals where I just stood around doing nothing - this time I got to mark athletes with numbers as they prepared for the 2nd day of WODs!

After all the hullaballoo of sectionals, Ryon and I decided to hit up the Pure Austin gym by his house to get some strength training in. Luckily, it happens to be "bring a friend to Pure Austin" week, so I didn't have to use up a guest pass or pay for anything!

We started out with a 500m warm-up row, then moved onto machines for the leg press, shoulder press, bicep curl, decline bench press, and the assisted pull-up. The idea was to find our one-rep max of each by doing a rep scheme of 16 - 8 - 4 - 2 - 1, adding weight successively. Here's how my numbers shaped up:

Leg Press
90 - 180 - 270 - 360 - 450(F)

Shoulder Press
60 - 70 - 90 - 110 - 120

Bicep Curl
10 - 20 - 30(F)/25 - 25 - 30

Decline Bench Press
40 - 40 - 50 - 60(F) - X

Assisted Pull-ups (numbers represent how much weight was taken off my own weight of ~120#)
52 - 46 - 40 - 28 - 16

Obviously, upper body could use some more work, especially with the decline bench press. I had some serious issues with that machine, and I believe it was the same machine I used in my fitness assessment. I've decided that in order to build more strength, I'm going to cut back to 3x per week on the Crossfit classes (down from 5x/week...a lot!!!) and then add an early Friday morning strength routine. Nothing too major, but just keeping it constantly varied! Hopefully I'll see some more improvements for my next fitness assessment in early June!