Dave’s Locker Room Training May 23 ‘11

My weight on Monday morning was 217 pounds, that’s still 26 pounds from my goal of 190 by September 1st. Today was chest and back… chest is always a bit of a challenge for me because of my shoulder injuries. For me that means only 3 exercises are possible. Sometimes I just stick with one of them for the entire workout doing 8-12 sets. I may vary the grip to hit slightly different angles. Today I went with Smith Machine bench presses. After a few warm ups a 20 year old guy asked to work in which was cool. He weighed about 140 pounds and told me a friend of his was encouraging him to get on steroids. This just drives me crazy. The kid hasn’t even built a foundation yet. He could pack on 30 or 40 more pounds of muscle drug free before he even matures. I was trying not to lecture him, so I just said look give yourself a few years and gain some muscle on your own first, THEN make that decision.

So on the Smith Machine bench I ended up doing my entire chest workout there Pyramiding up to 3 sets of 3 then a couple sets of lockouts, then 5 sets 12-15 to pump and ‘stretch the fascia’.

Then I moved on to back. Normally I superset chest and back to keep the pace of the workout high but the gym was crowed so it just wasn’t possible to hold two pieces of equipment at the same time. I love training back for two reasons. I can still train pretty heavy and my back is an easy growing body part for me. Today I did 8 sets of close grip pulldowns with an overhand grip. The key to building lats on these in my opinion is to start sitting upright and then very s-l-o-w-l-y lean backwards as you pull the bar to your chest flexing and contracting the entire back and the pec’s through the movement. I finished off with 4 sets of two arm dumbbell bent over rows for 4 sets of 8-10 reps and 4 sets of dumbbell shrugs. Then abs. 3 sets of cable crunches and 3 sets of bent leg raises.

I did a half hour walk for cardio earlier in the day.

Diet was a good day. I’ll stay with it. Here is what I ate today:

Meal 1 –– 1 egg, 7 egg whites, 1 slice Ezekiel Bread
Meal 2 –– 2 scoops whey and casein protein/ 16 ounces water
Meal 3 –– During workout 2 scoops whey & 16 ounces Gatorade
Meal 4 –– Post workout 2 scoops whey protein, 16 ounces water, 4 Brown Rice Cakes
Meal 5 –– I Chicken Breast, 1 Roma tomato, onion slice, 2 slices Ezekiel bread, brown mustard, baked potato
Meal 6 – 16 ounces low fat cottage cheese & 1 nectarine