Persistence is Best

This month so far was pretty interesting. My job wanted me to get vaccinated, so I had to do it but thank God the only reactions I had from the vaccine were muscle aches at my right heel from the first dose, pain on my left shoulder from the needle, and just good naps from both doses. So besides that, I’ve been getting better with the pulling exercises and grip training. With grip training from doing dead hangs, when it comes to overhand and underhand grip I will have to do that in the park. The reason is that in the park the pull-up bar is straight so it allows a natural feel for the positioning of your arms and hands to hang. In the gym like Blink, the pull-up bars there are ergonomic in design so certain positions won’t feel that natural. Only neutral grip dead hangs I can pull off from there. Overall my grip strength from dead hangs from all three grips improved to four sets of 50 seconds, so I am close to the one-minute mark.

I also have a confession to make… That confession is that the exercise I hate the most to do is push-ups!! It’s so bad to the point I would put dips over push-ups, but I know that if I want to have full mastery of my body weight, I will then have to do it until I love it. So this month I’ve made myself do three hundred push-ups in a training session and I am happy I did it. It forced me to be willing to go past a hundred reps to get the benefits of push-ups and train my mind to work harder. I am so glad I did it. I did thirty sets of ten reps, for me, it is whatever it takes to get to a particular number as the goal it will be done.

I also started to do assisted single-leg squats and I would hold a pole at the park while doing it. I managed to do five sets of ten repetitions and it is challenging I must say for that day. On Wednesday I did it again but this time five sets for five repetitions doing isometric holds at the bottom of the squat. I had to keep in mind that my knee needed to track the right way. As for back training to add, I’ve done ten sets of ten repetitions of horizontal pull-ups but alternating hand positions. So the pattern was underhand first set, overhand second set, and neutral the third set and repeat until the ninth set. In the final set, I’ve done all three grips (five under, five over, and five neutral grips) which will make it fifteen repetitions. Doing that will hit different parts of my back and get it stronger.

I am hoping that the rest of November treat me great with training and to bring into the last month of 2021 more improvement. It is best to enter 2022 with a bang!

Originally published at https://amufits.com on November 20, 2021.