Gym #2: Much better this time…

Tonight was visit #2 to the Louisville Gym, of which I am now a member!  I started out with our standard warmup, which was a 20 minute stationary bike ride.  I ended up doing 5.56 miles in 20 minutes, which isn’t that bad for me.

Next, we hit the weights.  Learning from past mistakes, I took it much easier on the weight (embarassingly so in some cases) and did four sets of 15 repetitions apiece.  The only area I didn’t take it as easy was the leg press, which I upped to 150 lbs.  That was somewhat easy, I have a feeling karate has lent me to strong legs over the years.  That being said, I am woefully inadequate at the bench press machine… I started out with a puny 50 lbs, and after my first two sets I had to back it down to 37 lbs.  I figure so long as it’s burning but not hurting and I can keep good form, that’s the right weight to be at.

We ended the workout with a visit to the abs station, where we used one of those head cage dealies to isolate the upper abs.  For some reason this was a lot more difficult than our standard karate fare, I did 20 standard crunches, 20 with my knees to the left, 20 standard, 20 with my knees to the right, and wrapped up with 20 Japanese situps.

I was tired after this workout, but not blown out.  I think we’re planning on another visit on Wednesday… I’m going to have to ask them if they have a general purpose room or a raquetball court I can rent in order to get some karate workouts done there when the weather is bad or we feel like a different warmup.  My team leader has expressed an interest in mixing up the workout to include some karate, so I’m going to do that soon!