I am back. I've been away from this for far too long and I've been waiting for the right time to get back at it. For the last 6 months I have been rehabbing an ACL reconstruction and meniscus trimming. I had been living injured for the 2 months before I had the surgery, hoping that I wouldn't have to have my second ACL reconstruction of my life and it would just heal by itself. It didn't heal.. So I am still on the long recovery back (congrats Adrian Peterson for being a much better healer than I am). Knowing the things I learned from my first blown-out knee helped me dramatically to stay in better shape and in a better frame of mind. My first injury is what started the slow spiral to my 40 pound weight gain. I was determined to not let my body take that kind of abuse again.
6 months later, my right quad is still about half the size of my healthy left quad. This is the driving force in my workout plans currently. I have to be very careful still with my cardio. I just received the okay to start jumping a few weeks ago. While I am allowed to jump, I am not allowed to cut athletically yet and won't be cleared to play any athletic sport for a couple of months. This is a byproduct of a second ACL reconstruction as well as a byproduct of having a cadaver graft for the ACL which takes a little bit longer to heal.
My workout plans now are based on Upper-body switching off with Lower-body each day taking rest days on Wednesday if I feel sore and resting the majority of Saturdays and Sundays. I am currently doing all of the upper-body muscle groups every day that I work upper-body and the same for lower-body. I am working in modifications each day so I never do the exact same workout two days in the same week.
The majority of my training has been molded into sets of 6-12 depending on the day with 2-3 sets of each workout. A lot of my lower body workouts I have been doing single leg variations of exercises so that my body is unable to try and cheat and let my healthy leg take the most of the weight. I also try to work a little bit extra in my right leg to try to catch up as much as I can.
Today was an upper-body day, and I am in a different gym for the summer and I'm starting to get into a good routine in this gym. Going to this gym means there is less free weights and more machines. I try my best to do as many lifts on the dumbbells as I can. Before the last month I had not used dumbbells as much as I wanted to. The only thing I am really missing for free-weights is being able to bench. There is something about having a good bench-press Monday that just makes life seem to have a little extra color in it. I just have to work my muscles in a different way and, to be honest, this isn't too much of a bad thing. It gives me a chance to confuse my muscles.
My workout today-
6 Minute warm-up on the stationary bike
3x8 Dumbbell Shoulder Press
3x8 Pull-ups (use assisted pull-up if a guy was on it forever and you had to do it last instead of second in your workout..tsk tsk)
2x20 Dips (close to failure)
3x8 Bicep Curls
3x8 Lat Pull-Down
3x10 Tricep Pushdown
8 minutes on the Arc trainer 1 minute intense intervals
Sometimes all you need is a little prod of inspiration to get you out there working to improve your health. This blog had been such an inspiration to me knowing that people were reading what I did in the for my workout each day. This made me excited to create new workouts to try and test out.It gave me the prod that I needed to work that little bit harder. If reading my blog can give that inspiration to a single person, I would be overjoyed. I may have a new body part in my knee, but I'm still the same person who wants to be the biggest help that I can be. I am more than willing to respond to questions in the comment section. I would actually be overjoyed to know that I could be of some help. So please, do NOT hesitate to comment.
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