I’ve just finished a four week exercise program that I found in Men’s Fitness magazine. It’s not designed to work any of the major muscle groups directly but works some of the smaller muscles that often get avoided in the more common exercises. It’s all meant to be conditioning work to prepare the next four week cycle. I’m someone who likes to keep track of my exercises. Well, not so much “like” to as absolutely need to. You’ll always find me down the gym with my A5 black ‘n red book trying to keep track of what I’m doing. It’s useful because a) it takes all the guess work out of working out what weight I should be using next and b) I can’t just do a weights session without a plan. If I do, then I just end up wasting time not doing any exercises properly. Plus it’s also a very good way of seeing progression. For example, I started on one exercise using an 8kg dumb bell and after four weeks was able to do the same set using a 14kg weight. It’s encouraging (apart from the one exercise where I just couldn’t manage to increase the weight much at all.)

The routine was identical each week and, fortunately, didn’t require any complex gym equipment that the gym didn’t have. It went a little like this:

Monday

Single leg squat
Swiss ball leg curl
Front lunge to shoulder press w/ dumb bells

Tuesday

Swiss ball press-ups
Cuban press w/ dumb-bells
Swiss ball crunch to press w/ dumb bells

Thursday

Single arm curl to press w/dumb bell
Swiss ball arm curl w/ dumb bell
Diagonal raise w/ dumb bell

Friday

Bent over lower trap raise w/ dumb bell
Single leg bent over row w/ dumb bells
Swiss ball back lift

Four sets of each exercise, 10-13 reps each set. Wednesday was a rest day.

Although I missed two of the Friday exercises due to prior commitments (and skipped the rest day this week because of the bank holiday) I’m quite pleased that I managed to be quite consistent about getting this done. Next week I’ll be mostly running at lunchtimes in last minute preparation for the half marathon the following sunday and then the week after I should be on the next routine. I’ll bore you with that next month.