Craig Ballantyne

Today was one of those days where I felt tired and weak at the start of the workout, enough to make most people skip the workout all together. Fortunately, I know from experience that once you get started, you start to feel better and stronger (due to catecholamine hormone release - aka adrenaline).

So if you are struggling, just force yourself to go to the gym and get started, as you get moving, your brain and body will kick into gear to catch up to your committment.

While I trained, a girl was in the gym doing abs, including several lame exercises where she stood on two inflatable discs and did stuff like triceps pressdowns. Laaaaaaaaaaaaame.

She also did a ton of ab exercises. Poorly. In my world, she could have done 1-2 total body ab exercises from my NEW abs workout program in about 10 minutes and been done with it...rather than the 50 minutes she wasted. But then again, in her mind, anything that takes less than an hour is probably not a real workout (she was still there when I left 50 minutes later). Alright, so I did an extra long warm-up to get going...

General Bodyweight Warm-up

Bodyweight squats - 10
Pushups - 10
Shoulder Circles - 10 per side
Waiter's Bow - 10 per side
Some warmup exercise from Bill Hartman's Inside Out DVD - 10 per side
1-Leg RDL - 8 per side
Hip Flexor stretch - 20 seconds
Chest Stretch - 20 seconds
Neck circles - 5 per side

Then specific warm-up sets for the squat:

Bar x 12
95x8
135x8
185x6
225x5
275x3

1A) Squats 3x8 - 300 pounds
1B) Chin-up + Knee up - 13,9,7

2A) BB Bulgarian SPlit Squat 1x8 - 145 pounds
2B) Plank with arms on ball - 50 seconds

3A) BB Row 3x8 - 175
3B) Stability Ball X-Body MC 3x10