Strength Day: Upper Body Lifting

After six days in a row of pounding on my legs, it was time to give the lower body a much needed rest. So that means a day in the weight room lifting upper body.

I like to make sure that I get a hard shoulder and tricep workout so that when I finally get back into the pool I'll at least a little bit prepared.

Workout:

benchpress:

• 2x12 warmup

lat-pulldown:

• 3x12

standing shoulder press:

• 3x12
  

cable crossover fly:

• 3x10
  

tricep pushdown

• 3x12

I struggled a bit with the workout today, only able to do 195lbs on the benchpress. My body was feeling pretty drained and tired from the hard running and biking in the last few days.

Lately, I've been telling myself that upperbody lifting counts as a day off, but that isn't going to fly for very long. I'm definitely looking forward to having an actual day off to just relax and let my body recover.

Aerobic-Threshold Running

The goal for today was to work on my running aerobic-threshold conditioning. The purpose is to get myself used to running at a faster pace, for a sustained amount of time. Heart rate should be about 160-165 for the majority of the workout.

With that in mind, I settled on a workout that would push me to run at a strong pace, getting a limited amount of rest, for a sustained distance and time.

Here was the workout (on the treadmill today):

Warmup: 1.5 miles
Main Set: 12 x 0.4 miles: 3min interval
Cool down: 0.25 miles

My mile pace for each of the intervals was (min / mile):
6:40, 6:40, 6:35, 6:35, 6:35, 6:35, 6:35, 6:35, 6:31, 6:31, 6:18, 6:00

Average pace = 6:30 min / mile

I was pretty happy with the results since I would like to get my 10k pace down to 6:30 or under.