300 - Day 7

My workout today:

I started out with a 600m row for a warm-up, which was a short workout - lasting only about 3 minutes.

I then moved into my alternate incline dumbbell press/pull-ups for max reps.

I set my bench at about a 30% incline. The goal of working on an incline is to move the primary muscle up your torso. The higher the incline, the higher the muscle focus - so for instance, at 90 degrees (vertical) you isolate the shoulders. At 180 (or 0) degrees, you isolate the pectoral muscles pretty near spot on.

At 45 degrees, there is a large focus on the shoulders - so I didn't want to go quite that high. To isolate the upper chest, you want to ideally work between 20 and 35 degrees. I worked right about 30%.

For my pull-ups, I wanted to get in a variety, which is what I would do if I was trying to achieve e.g. 100 repetitions with as few sets as possible. To do this, I started with a wide-arm over-hand grip, then moved to a neutral grip and finally to an underhand grip.

Here's what I accomplished, with no more than 30 seconds rest between events:

55# Dumbbell press (110# total) - 20 repetitions
Pull-ups (Wide Arm) - 12 repetitions
55# Dumbbell press - 11 repetitions
Pull-ups (neutral) - 10 repetitions
55# Dumbbell press - 6 repetitions
Pull-Ups (underhand) - 9 repetitions

I was originally going to add an additional event in there, but they were closing the locker room at 3 to paint and I got down to the gym and started changing at about 20 past 2. I wanted to make sure I got a shower in, so I made it a quick day.

I haven't made up my schedule for week 3 yet - but I have made the decision that I am going to try to work on some flexibility exercises somewhat regularly - as flexibility is one of the focuses of CrossFit - and I have poor flexibility.