Realizations on Rest Days

For some reason, I felt tight, tired and sluggish most of the day yesterday. I was even a little sore from Wednesday's morning workout. This might be because I didn't do ANYTHING yesterday. No stretching, no morning warm up, no Cuong Nhu stances or katas; nothing. I think I need to change that for my next rest day. I probably need to at least do my normal warm up.

This morning, I rolled out of bed and did a weight workout. Funny thing, I'm used to working out in the the pitch black of early morning. Well today, the sun actually started to peek over the horizon and light the area. This meant I could actually see while lifting. A nice bonus.

After a good warm up and the Burgener Warm Up (which is getting easier with the full olympic bar, by the way), I did 3x5 of Front Squat, Press and Power Cleans. Because I still do not have a rack, I have to clean everything from the ground to start. Of course, it helps develop my clean, but I feel it cheats something from the front squats and keeps me from doing heavy back squats.

I felt pretty strong in my exercises. I made sure to work on active shoulders during the press and keeping my elbows high during the front squat. On the power cleans, I kept thinking about getting lower, getting under the weight. Although I didn't go into a full squat clean, I did want to focus on good technique.

My weights for the exercise sets are below:

Front Squat 95, 115, 125
Press 75, 85, 90
Power Cleans 75, 85, 105

Now, next time I do the exercises, I need to increase my weights.

On a totally unrelated subject, I think I've come up with a solution for the chin up bar at the dojo. Right now, we don't have any permanent bar. I've brought my rings in a couple of times, but I want some way to do real pull ups.

Jon from AgainFaster.com offers a cool pull up bar that can hang from the middle support beam in the dojo. The cool thing about the bar is we can take it down when the fitness classes are not in session. I can see getting 3-4 bars and placing them along the beam as needed. The challenge is, they are $100 each. I better start saving.