I'm a bit of a shaved ape when it comes to working out. I try to start slow. I try to take things easy. It sometimes gets out of hand. ;-)
This morning, I was trying out one of their new fangled bench press/pectoral press machines. It forces your arms through a specific arc that isn't anything like a standard bench movement would be. Almost more of an arcing fly movement.
Well, as I was getting used to it, I kept upping the weight. The plates are numbered, but to do not appear to correlate to weight as the numbers are "1, 2, 3, 4"... Setting it for about 5th plate down, I started doing some deep range of motion presses. The gym worker/gal that was giving me my familiarization on the machines seemed surprised that I would just jump into the middle of the stack like that. I went to about 15 reps and stopped. Then, I moved it down to 12. This felt like a ton. Still I kept good form and did about a 12 set. Kicked it to 13. Harder yet. Last set was an 8 set at 14.
Turns out you can figure the weight by adding a zero. This gives you the relative weight for each arm. About 280 total for that last set.
Not bad for a fly movement, after a long hiatus, on an unfamiliar machine.
Oh yeah... the stack only goes up to 20. I am so gonna hurt tomorrow...
I'd probably have to stop at 2 since I can't lift heavy objects like I used to. When I was a techie, I'd haul 90 lb monitors around no problem. Now I have trouble moving my tv set a short distance. As for the 280 - there would be no way I'd be able to budge that, considering that it's well over my body weight...although I'd be able to push myself away from the weights. LOL!
All this talk of working out is inspiring! I've been trying to motivate myself to get back into the swing of things, but self-motivation hasn't seemed to work. Maybe commiserating to one another over various workouts would help me to re-start and keep going. Are you up for something like that?
I swim (love churning out laps) at the local pool, and have both a treadmill and a bowflex in the house, so those three things are available to me for working out.
Of course, now that I've been trying to gut it up to really work out, I've gone and done something to my foot. It's been getting worse over the past 10 days, so it's time to have a professional look at. Aaaarrrggghhhh!