Stupid Shoulder Injury

My superb training comeback has been brought to a abrupt halt! Stupid shoulder injury, it seems that whilst the strength was coming back to my muscles at an impressive rate, the strength in my joints and tendons was nowhere near as amazing!

So now my shoulder has been put out its a fortnight off for me and then a couple of weeks of light weight / high reps... which of course does nothing for my ego.

Shit.

Getting your training partner back!

Training alone sucks, having a training partner rules! I used to have a training partner, in fact all the while my training was going well was when I had a training partner.

For the last two years I trained alone, and so I withered. But no more! For the last three weeks I have had my training partner back and now things are on the up again. Biceps are up, Chest is up, Triceps are also up. Today is shoulders and the competitve spirit that we have going on at the moment will likely mean more drop sets and heavy weights... bring it on!!!

Getting big for the summer? But not this way!

Hmm, when I said "Getting Big for Summer" I did not mean my gut! Training has never been going so badly! This can mostly be put down to work commitments, a house move and babies but also a bit to lazyness as if I am being truthful then I have used most of these as an excuse to not train!

But, after three months now, the house move is on the go, so training may well resume shortly, if nothing else then just because we are moving back "home" back to the place where my first gym is at, the place that always motivates my training. A place with a friendly atmosphere, training partners are plenty and the weights are covered in rust.

Long live the "real gym". Good bye whithering arms and expanding waistline!

Getting big for summer!

Ok, so Summer happens to have come early here in the UK at least, the weather has been fine for weeks, the laydees are coming out "en-force" in ever smaller clothes and the guys for the most part are just lapping up the sunshine. But some want to stand out from the crowd this summer, for those guys its time to start upping the ante in the Gym.

Its not ideal to be training hard in hot weather, but when it comes to going down the beach, its pecs over beer belly every time!

This weeks training had my back getting injured, possibly through not warming up correctly or perhaps simply using too much weight. It has certainly ruined my flow though.

I will get back into things next week...

Weekend Glory!

This past weekend I achieved a glorious thing... I have been back training for just a week now and things are going well, my strength is already returning and very quickly too as is size, I think it could be this "muscle memory", but what made me feel so good was that I managed to keep up with and in some cases beat my brothers efforts in the gym.

This would of course be a great achievement if only I could ignore the fact that he has a broken ankle and himself has not trained for a month and now cannot put any weight on his leg.

Oh well, I will take what I can from the experience and with any luck will actually get up to standard some time soon.

Back to Biceps training today, its a good day.

Saturday Biceps Training

Saturday the 7th of April saw me start my new training schedule, I decided to start with Back and Biceps. This was the first session after three months off so it was a wise decision to take it easy.

I started with Olympic Bar curls, don't be a clever dick now, just load the bar with some moderate weights and stick to a reasonable number of reps and sets.

So I started as follows: -

15 x Empty Bar (20kg)
15x Empty Bar (20kg)
12x 40kg
12x 40kg
10x 40kg
8x 40kg

Nothing that spectacular there, but I could see my reps in decline towards the end. Time off sucks.

Next I thought I would alternate and do some back exercises, so I started doing chin ups. I only ever to body-weight for chins so it went as follows: -

12 reps
12 reps
10 reps
5 reps

Ok, so that sucked too, though I go quite wide, its still surprising how quickly I loose it doing chins.

I have now been working out for approximately 30 minutes and I am starting to loose motivation, time to go back to biceps / forearms and do some reverse curls. Needless to say I was crap, simply managing two sets.

EZ-Bar reverse Curls

10x 20kg
8x 20kg

And to finish, lets do some hammer curls, my dumbells are not very good so it was more of a token gesture that I will not even bother to list here.
What really got me was the pain the next day... I know its probably been the longest period without any training that I have had in the last 10 or 12 years, but wow, its now Friday and only today can I stretch my arms without feeling any pain.

It is just as well because its Biceps and Back day again! Respect.

This is my site!

Build Muscle UK is my site, I created it. You may say that this explains why it looks like shit, why the content is out of date and why nobody wants to join up on it.
I would say you are right, this site was started as a hobby, and frankly it has never progressed much from there, it was a way of allowing me to learn how to make a website and it has served that purpose. I had to choose something that I was interested in, something that I would be able to make more than a couple of pages of information out of, something that would ultimately be useful to somebody.

I thought long and hard about this, and I decided that I spend a significant amount of my time in the gym and visiting other gyms, I spend lots of time reading magazines like FLEX, MuscleMag and Muscle and Fitness, and I also eat lots of foods and take supplements and shakes in order to maximise my muscular development so why not make a website about this?

Quite a few people signed up in the early days, after I had mucked around for months and finally put on a registration page and a database at the backend to store information etc, but recently it kind of died off, nobody signs up any more and I only get a few hits. Oddly this seems to have coincided with the tailing off of my weight training. See last year we had a baby, this effectively killed off my workouts, with so much to do at home and then obviously there is work to do as well, working out has taken a bit of a back seat, see this... I only trained on average two or three times a MONTH. At the start this did not bother me all that much, but as time wore on, and I could visibly see myself getting smaller it started to piss me off. My clothes were getting smaller whilst my waist is getting bigger. Its time to start going to they gym again.

Last weekend I started my new regime, the weights are back and with any luck, this blog will help me stick at it. We will all see.