Workout Diary……Days 3 and 4!

I could easily have been done in by the flaky monster known as sfogliatelle…..my favorite pastry…and easily a diet killer.

But I did not let it happen!

The other night, my wife surprised me with 2 of these crunchy, tasty little beasts for our 31st wedding anniversary. I mean…how could I say no. She even made a special trip into Freehold to buy them fresh!

So there they were, sitting there all sugary like and waiting to be devoured! And yes, I have to admit, I gave in….but I told myself, “…what the hell, I deserve it!” After all, during the wedding last week, I’d been pretty good. I didn’t go too far off the chart, so I felt that to indulge was not such a terrible thing.

Anyway, no harm done, ‘cause when I got on the scale Friday morning, it showed that I’d only put on a pound…which was workable. I mean, had it been more, I probably would have gone into a funk.

So, once at the gym, I started by doing some smith machine squats. The smith machine, for those of you that don’t know, is a rack that you place weights on and could do a variety of exercises with. I chose to do squats by placing my shoulders under the bar of the rack, and starting out by squatting with 50 lbs…working my way up to 70, then 90, and finally another set of 90…all the while skipping in between sets of squats for an interval of 30 seconds with my one pound rope. After that, I did some barbell deadlifts, starting with 95 pounds, then 185 for 2 sets. I also worked in some plate loaded shoulder presses, working 50 pounds each side, then 75…all to fatigue. There's probably a couple more I'd done, but for the moment, I forget. Suffice it to say that I finished off with 30 minutes of cardio on the elliptical machine.

Today (Saturday) was a big day….it’s the day most of everyone in Manalapan is in the gym, and even though there’s a fair amount of work to be done, one can’t help but socialize and break up the routine with a bit of chit chat. After all, I’m Neopolitan, and the art of the chiachione is one that I pride myself in.

I had decided to work abs and arms, but it didn’t work out that way. I did mostly abs, starting with a pike up, where I use a “dolly” and pike my rear up about 12 times to work the lower abdominals. I then did some rotational twists with a medicine ball, where I elevate my legs, holding the medicine ball in front of me, and rotate the medicine ball from side to side…doing 3 sets of each. Next came the weighted leg lifts…taking a 12 pound hexagonal weight, and holding it in my feet, elevate my legs and rear to fatigue. Oh, and forgot to mention that I did 4 2-minute rounds of boxing on the heavy bag, and 30 minutes on the dreadmill….I mean treadmill.
Again, there's one or two movements I'm leaving out, but you can say that with the chiachiaone activity and workout routine…I’d probably been there at least 2 ½ hours! More than enough time to spend there.

Tomorrow’s another day, and Monday begins another week, so we’ll see how it goes. I’ll probably do more arm work tomorrow (Sunday) since I didn’t do much of it today.

I mentioned to you the body fat composition loss competition coming up in April. That’s really the only way you can tell if you’ve made any progress. We’ll see, or as my grandmother used to say, “…’mo verrime’”.