workout details for Elaine – painfully long and detailed

[Guest guest]

My routine is super fast. I only have four hours from when I get

home to bedtime so I want a high-results-per-unit-time workout. I

spend about 10-15 minutes on my routine, three days a week. My

husband and I workout together in our basement so we're down there

together 25-30 minutes 3x per week. We do some light multi-tasking

while lifting to give better results-per-unit time values. Working

out gives us time to talk to each other without the distraction of

the television, I bring the mail and checkbook with me so I can pay

bills and look at magazines and catalogs, I scoop out the litter box,

and once every other week I vacuum and dust, all things we would do

anyway. And our cats love the basement and they think we go down

there just to hang out with them so it scores points with them, too.

Our house is about eight miles from the middle of nowhere and there

aren't any gyms conveniently located on the way out of the city where

we work. The family membership at a local gym was about $400 a year

so we decided to take that money and buy a weight bench for bench

presses, a squat rack that also has a pull-up bar, a barbell,

weights, colostrum, and two $5 chairs from the thrift store (my

husband took two boards and joined the chairs by screwing a board one

on each side of the legs in order to make a crude dip bar; I know,

probably not really safe, but it seems really sturdy and we're not

real heavy and we can't dip many times so we're not on it much). We

also bought a weightlifting dvd that shows how to do all the major

lifts. As we were learning proper form for the squat and deadlift,

we would watch the video and then each other and make corrections. I

had a lot of trouble with my form on both the deadlift and the

squat. I got impatient and proceeded to heavier weights and my form

got better. (I know, bad) I seem to need some weight, not my max,

in order to have good form. I don't know if that's common. We now

both have forms that match the dvd, but my form is always best when

I'm doing my mid-range load – not my lightest (or heaviest).

I'm going to go ahead and detail my muscle program since I've got a

little time today. (I'm giving a math test and I can only sit and

watch them suffer for so long.)

I'm on the WD. I imagine that helps some, but I don't know to what

extent. I lift on MWF, but don't do any cardio and I have two part-

time jobs that are both sedentary. I used to run 3 miles 2x per

week, but the only noticeable thing that did for me was give my

calves a little shape – hardly much return for 40 minutes of time.

And it wasn't helping noticeably with weight loss, either. I'll

probably add it back later this spring.

I don't have a pre-workout meal because I haven't noticed a need for

one. I won't hesitate to add one if my workout starts to suffer. My

post-workout meal is the whey*/maple syrup combo in the proportions

recommend in the WD. (*I know, bad, again. I take extra CLO to make

up for any vitamin A it's depleting) I take two colostrum along with

the whey. My husband and I think the colostrum is what really makes

the muscles grow, but we do both the whey and colostrum `cause we

don't really know what exactly is doing it and we don't want to mess

up what we got going. My husband and I started to get competitive

and made a rule that we both have to be present when we open the jar

of colostrum so that neither of us takes more and gets way bigger

than the other one. I also took Chris's recommendation and use

Jarrow colostrum. There was some discussion as to how much better

Immune Tree colostrum is, and if Immune Tree is any more effective

than Jarrow, then I'd be afraid to take it because I'd probably break

every door knob I touched.

As for the weights, I adapted what described as best as I

could. I had several questions about how he arrived at his

particular load for each set and some other stuff, but I didn't want

to bug him to death so I just guessed and experimented. I'm pretty

pleased with how it turned out. Here's what I do:

Week A

Mon: squats, bench press

Wed: dead lift, curls, dips

Fri: squats, bench press

Week B

Mon: dead lift, bench press

Wed: squat, curls, dips

Fri: dead lift, bench press

On the squat and dead lift I do what I think referred to as a

power cycle (??) where you do a series of seven sets, each set

separated by a minute. Each set consists of the following reps: 8,

5, 3, 1, 1, 1, 3. The weight gets increasingly heavy as the reps

decrease. So for example a squat workout would be:

8 – 25 lbs

5 – 30 lbs

3 – 35 lbs

1 – 55 lbs

1 – 55 lbs

1 – 55 lbs

3 – 30 lbs

Each time I workout, I add 5 lbs to each of those numbers, so next

time I squat I would start with 8 reps of 30lbs and max at 60 lbs.

Right now 5 lbs is a huge % of my total weight, but later when I'm

doing like 100-150 lbs I might use bigger increments.

On the bench press and curls, I do five sets of decreasing reps: 5,

4, 3, 2, 1. I use the same weight for each set. On Mondays I repeat

this with two different weights and on Fridays I just do one. I use

the following pattern to increase 5lbs per week:

M: 35 lbs, 30 lbs

F: 40 lbs

M: 40 lbs, 35 lbs

F: 45

M: 45, 40

F: 50

I'll eventually adopt the bench press/curl routine for the dips, but

right now I'm still working up to five dips. Eventually I'll replace

bench press with pull-ups. I can't do one pull up right now. My

husband will continue to do bench presses, though, because he wants

big arms and chest.

I've been increasing my bench press load 5 lbs per week and my squat

and dead lift amounts 15 lbs every two weeks with no sign of this

slowing down (I know, it eventually will). At first I was tempted to

do all exercises everyday, but that would take twice as much time and

I don't think I would gain twice as much weight to make it worth the

time. So I do two exercises a day and it only takes 10-15 minutes.

Betsy