Day 32: Happy Anniversary!

As of two days ago, it's been a month of Operation: Get Jacked!  To celebrate, I attempted to do pull-ups for the first-time.....and failed miserably.

I had attempted to do pull-ups the day before actually, but was disappointed to learn that the park near my house doesn't have monkey bars.  Isn't that ridiculous?  Isn't it a park law or something that you NEED to have monkey bars?  And if not, why the hell not?  Anyways, I was able to use some soccer goalposts, but I can't get my hands around them.  Doesn't matter too much, but it's rather uncomfortable.

So anyways, after going to a different park near my friend's house, I discovered (sort of as expected) that I actually can't even do a single pull-up.  I can do like a SINGLE chin-up (pull-ups are palms facing away from you, chin-ups are towards.  Chin ups are easier because you use more bicep muscle, as opposed to just your back).  So, new goal for Operation: Get Jacked - by the end of it, I want to be able to do a set of 8 pull-ups, which is apparently the fitness standard.

For now, I'll be doing sets of "negatives".  For this, you use a bench or something to start in an already chin-upped position (so chin over the bar).  Then, you very slowly lower yourself to what would normally be a starting position (it should take about 5 seconds for you to be fully lowered), and start again from the chin-up position.  The idea is that in any exercise, only about half of the difficulty is from "raising" to the positive position (for example, if you're doing a chest press, actually lifting the barbell is only half of the exercise).  If you do an exercise correctly, the other half is being able to put it into it's negative, at-rest position in a controlled fashion - this is something that a lot of people ignore when exercising.  So basically, by doing negatives, I'm still working out those back muscles that I need to be able to do pull-ups; I just need to work up to actually doing them.  Two days back, I did about 10 negatives, and I was in pain yesterday (and it's even lasting a bit to today), so it's definitely working.

Actually, I'm in a bit too much pain.  I think between my work yesterday and the negatives two days ago, I sustained.....not exactly an injury, but definitely something more than a typical muscle ache.  So I'm not going to workout for a few days for two reasons: 1. Said pain; 2. I need to focus on my drumming for a bit, as my band, The Stems (www.myspace.com/stemsnoseeds) are playing 2 shows over the next few weeks, and will be recording an EP very soon.  So I've gotta be in tip-top shape, and my working out has definitely affected my practice schedule a bit.

I'll do some more results stuff tomorrow; I just wanted to get this posted because I haven't updated in a couple days.

-Daniel