Chest, Back, and Cardio on a Rainy Friday!

 Happy Sunday Readers,

This is Luke tuning back in for another recap of my favorite workout of the week. This week my workouts were a little different. I recently decided that I am going to focus a little bit more on building muscle mass and I am also going to train for a half marathon in February! I will be running the Austin Half marathon in three months with one of my roommates. This is going to require a lot of training but I am ready for it. 

This week, I wanted to share a little bit about my strict strength training workouts. It is good to have balance when it comes to fitness and I wanted to share what I do at the gym when I am not attending CrossFit classes. Over the summer when I was working a full-time internship, I did not always have time to find classes that fit into my schedule, so I would focus on strength training on my own. On Friday, I decided that I was going to do a strength training exercise and end the day with some cardio. 

Here is the workout:

Warmup:

• 20 Body Squats 
• 10 Band Pull-Aparts
• 20 Crunches 
• 1-Minute Plank 
• 15 Plank Reach-Unders on Both Sides 

Workout: 

• Dumbbell Bench Press - 4 sets of 12 reps 
• Lat Pulldown - 4 sets of 12 reps 
• 50 Reverse Flys with Dumbbells 
• Cable Pec Flye - 3 sets of 12 reps 
• Seated Row - 3 sets of 12 reps 
• 50 pushups in as few sets as possible 

Cardio 

• 2 mile run 

This was a huge workout day and I usually do not have time to or the energy to workout this hard. It was a special day because I had no class, I had finished all of my tests and assignments for the week, and it was a rainy day outside. There was not much going on with all of these factors combined so I decided that I was going to push myself hard that day - and it felt really good! Back in high school, I used to train at tennis academies where we would do workouts like this almost on a daily basis and I miss the feeling of being able to push myself that hard. While I do not have anymore sports tournaments that I am training for as a college student, it still feels good to keep my body in shape. 

My favorite part of this workout was the dumbbell bench presses. While I did attend a couple of CrossFit classes this week, this was my favorite workout because I got to just focus on strict strength movements such as building my chest and back. I enjoy doing rows as well because I feel like it is such a great way to build your back muscles. 

I will start running a lot more than I usually do because I have decided to sign up for this half marathon. I will keep you all updated on the progress of my runs increasing in length by the week. As I mentioned workouts being all about balance and keeping fitness fun, I believe that this will be a great way for me to reach a new fitness goal, keep myself motivated, and also an effective way to branch out from just doing CrossFit. Of course, this is a CrossFit blog, but even CrossFit professionals find different ways to get effective workouts to stay out of a rut. I'm excited to see how my running and strength continues to progress throughout these next couple of months. 

Stay tuned for next week's workout! 

Luke