/mike

After my dismal showing for the first week of the diet challenge, I decided to add some exercise every couple days. Push ups may not have been easy the first day and they certainly didn’t get any easier after that.

Physical soreness is either a welcome or unwelcome side effect of overexerting your muscles. For all the nay-sayers out there I’ll just say that if you’re playing a sport and you get some muscle pains you know it’s time to stop, that’s one example of soreness being a good thing.

More on topic, since I haven’t done any type of weight training in the last year my body was feeling it yesterday. Not just my arms, shoulders and chest either, my ab’s were not very nice to me either. Surprisingly, my legs were pretty good considering I hadn’t really gone rollerblading since last summer — must be something I did in my past.

A good thing to keep in mind when exercising is to realize that the muscles need time to rest. I’ve decided to only do my push ups and sit ups every other day. Because of the short time I spent doing these exercises on Tuesday I’ve also decided that I have to actually put in more effort.

From now on I’ll be doing at least three sets of 10 push ups every other day. When they start to get a little easier I’ll either up the reps to 20 or add on more sets, I’m not sure yet. Since I’m not hitting a gym I’m going to use different hand placements for each set — so I can try to hit the main muscle groups just a little bit differently each time.

Sit ups, on the other hand, I’m going to do at least, at least 60 but more likely 80 — three or four sets of 20 — and like the push ups I’ll be varying the positions/types of sit ups I do. Just for fun — and also since the weather is unpredictable and I don’t have any harsh weather running gear — I’ll probably throw in some lunges as well. Gotta keep my chicken legs looking good for the ladies.

This little routine, which I tested out today, takes about 15 minutes. Nothing spectacular but at least it’s a start for a fat ass like me.