My gym doesn’t have a glute-ham raise machine. But what it does have is a seated calf raise machine, and if you have one of those you can improvise a GHR. Here’s how.
You load up the stem on the calf raise thing with plates until it’s not going to budge for anything. Stick a box or a stool in front of the machine. Then you kneel on the seat of the machine with your heels braced against the spot where your knees would normally be pressing. Lock down, fire up your glutes, and head on down. Catch yourself using the box and push against it to get yourself going on the way up again.
Man oh man oh man does this exercise kick my ass.
You know, literally.
8x3 good mornings @ 135. Felt great. Should have gone heavier. Emphasis on speed.
Some benching at light weights, but when I tried to go heavier with some chains it aggravated my injured shoulder. So I stopped. This injury has already screwed up my first PL meet next month. No sense making it permanent.
Leg presses on one of those diagonal sled-type things, butt raised off the seat to make the press harder. Gimmick was this:
5 reps @ 90
5 @ 180
5 @ 270
5 @ 360
Strip off the weight & repeat the whole cycle three times. Emphasis on going as low as possible and driving the sled up explosively. A woman using the calf raise machine next to me asked me if I wanted her to put on the last remaining 45# plate, ‘cause that way I’d have all the available weight on the sled. Heh.
The interesting thing at the lightest weight was to go as low as possible. I bottomed it out at one point. From this I suspect that my back squat proper has likely improved a bit recently.
Yesterday: my first experience doing any lifting with chains. Back squats with 40# of chains on a bar for a total of 175#. I realize that’s light weight for lots of you, but I did a bunch of sets there and was pretty happy with what I got out of it. Dynamic effort training right now, so I was working on speed up from the hole.
I wonder what I’m going to do next time I try for maxes. My legs are feeling great right now. My mobility is better than it’s ever been. Feeling good for a middle-aged chick.
Also: high planks (feet on whatever bench happened to be around). Split squats. A light set of barbell bench presses. Tate dumbbell presses with 20# dumbbells going to failure. Love the Tate press.
I built a machine yesterday to be my development workshop for my current project. This gets easier every time I do it, because cabling gets more & more sensible. SATA cables are so easy to deal with that even I can route them properly.
DanW wanted to know what hardware I chose, so here’s the exact list:
Supermicro X9SCI-LN4F mobo (Intel Sandy Bridge, socket 1155, micro ATX)
Intel Xeon E3-1230 3.2GHz
240-pin DDR3 ECC unbuffered RAM (not yet available in usable 8G size, unfortunately, so you can’t yet hit the mobo’s max of 32GB)
Samsung 64GB SSD (6Gbit/s SATA III)
2x Samsung 2TB HD204 (3Gbit/s SATA II)
SeaSonic X650 Gold PSU (all modular)
Have a USB stick with your Linux distro of choice (for me, Ubuntu 11 server) to boot from. No graphics, no CD/DVD drive, because all this is doing is sitting in our home rack being a server, storing data, and compiling things now & then. It would make a pleasantly capable desktop machine as well if you added some graphics.
Now I’m about to do another quick test with backbone.js. I am dithering about this decision about as much as I did about my storage choices. Part of it is sheer unfamiliarity: I’m a newcomer to client-side javascript development. I can fake it with some small-scale jquery, but this is a serious client-side application I am about to develop. I feel like I don’t know enough to guess about the long-term consequences of my choice.
For instance, spine.js ought to be used with Coffeescript, not straight Javascript. This means an extra build stage. Integration with my existing traditionally-structured app is more painful. I suspect there will always be some pages that I serve the old-fashioned way. How can I mix the two most smoothly? Doesn’t seem like spine.js wants me to mix at all.
Well, I’m sure I’ll be an expert by next month.
Scratch that previous stack. Ember.js turned out to be heavyweight and confusing. At the moment I’m doing a spike implementation with spine.js and it’s looking far more like a winner despite the CoffeeScript.
In my free time I’m hunting around for deployment tools. Don’t have to solve that problem just yet, however.
Ember.js most likely for the client-side application
Padrino & Ruby for the server-side application
slim for html templates; less for css generation
Ohm/Redis for objects & data structures I want around all the time
my forked Risky/Riak for larger objects & anything with lower access rates, possibly with some redis-objects thrown in
I have a couple thousand lines of working code already with this stack. It’s good enough. Once I decided to pull the trigger and implement I stopped fussing about the choices and just started cranking. It’s all replaceable anyway.
Node.js: I keep wanting to use it for various back-end data services (pushing data to web clients, f’rinstance), but every time I go to write Javascript seriously I want to hunt down its designers and beat them. It’s demented. People are only using it because of V8, I think. I will probably become reconciled to this as I will be forced to write a lot of client-side javascript. I have a vague idea that I might write first cuts of services in Ruby then rewrite in Node for speed. Maybe.
Yesterday:
8 sets of this pair:
10x barbell good morning @ 105
:30 extended-arm plank with toes on a stability ball.
The good mornings were the easy part. That ball really ought to be called an instability ball. Took me until the third set to figure out how to even get up onto the ball without help. After that was it was just pure core misery.
After that, core stability work. The upshot is that today my abs and hamstrings are so freakin’ sore. I need to work on my core so much more than I have been.
Today: floor presses up to 135, Hammer lat pulls, various cable pulls, the Tate press @ 20 lb dumbbells. All of the pulling exercises are done with strict attention to retracting the shoulders fully & keeping them locked through the motion. Damn, my upper back muscles got tired today. Not the traps, never the upper traps. To add to my ab misery: inchworms. Only unlike that guy, I kept my shoulders retracted the whole time and walked my feet out and back up again.
