Well we ended up doing things today, so I didn’t get a lot of what I wanted to done. I’ll get measurements and physique pictures tomorrow so we can compare before and after. I don’t have a scale, so I’m not planning on tracking weight unless I figure something out. I usually hold pretty steady, the last few times I was weighed in the last two months or so were in the 227-228 range. I’d like to find a scale to reference, we’ll see. I’m more worried about strength and measurements for objective figures as well as appearance of course.
Anyway, first workout went down, with many confounding variables, but I felt good. Normally I wake up, take my supplements with a gulp of my preworkout (currently Focus XT) and work out half to one hour later. Being a weekend, I don’t have to work so I always procrastinate to some extent. But today, we went to the local farmers market in the morning, then on the way back, we saw my wife’s flat tire, so I decided to go ahead and fix that. The wheel was stuck on the hub, and I don’t have a hammer of any real substance, so it turned into a much longer ordeal. I ended up mixing up one of my other preworkouts that I don’t care for too much so it’s just laying around. About a half serving so it won’t bother me much (it has alpha-yohimbine). Then my actual workout was around 1 o’clock.
AlphaBuild is liquid caps, which are a little funky if you’ve never seen those before. I actually really like the smell. Something between fruity and floral I think. It reminds me of something, but I can’t figure out what it is. So after sniffing them for longer than I care to admit, I took two caps with a swig of Focus XT early in the morning. Today was also the last servings each of Anabolic Effect and Anabolic XT, so those were taken at the same time.
I can’t judge too much from today, it’s a weekend so I got extra sleep, I worked out in the afternoon instead of morning, I took extra preworkout… but subjectively, I felt fantastic during my workout. Warm ups and ramp up weights felt light and I just felt good doing it. I love working out, but not every day feels good. No difference noticed in pumps or strength today, but I’ll keep an eye on that.
Today was a chest and back day.
First few sets of bench press I kept very strict to try not to lose my technique. I’m so bad about getting looser with it just to keep raising my numbers. These first 3 sets were pulled down slow, paused at the bottom, the works.
135x10
225x6
315x4
After that, I kinda stopped caring. As long as I’m getting the tension in the muscles I want, I should still get the effect I want. But these last sets would be laughed out of a competition. Overarched back, butt off the bench, no pause at the bottom. But I do keep a pretty slow negative to make sure I’m still getting the hypertrophic effects I want.
385x2
455x1
315x18
For back, dumbbell rows. Being less of a power movement than bench press, I focus on form more to try to fatigue the muscle where I want it. Paused at the top, slow negative, full stop at the bottom, somewhat explosive positive. I don’t count the tempo, but probably something like 3011.
20x12
40x10
60x8
80x5
80x20
That’s as much weight as I can fit on my adjustable dumbbells, otherwise I’d probably try to get a little heavier work in, but this all feels pretty good. With the slow reps and squeezes, it does the job.
The rows and presses are done back and forth, not necessarily supersets. But i did the high rep rows pretty soon after the high rep bench, so I was huffing and puffing at the end there. Felt dang good though!
