Back to losing again

Rather than move to the week two fitness routine I thought I'd try upping the weight of my hex dumbbells first and sticking with the week one routine. It worked! I'm down another pound and a half over the weekend and that included a bacon cheeseburger cheat meal with a beer on Saturday night at Cactus Club Yaletown! I was doing the first two weeks of the routine using 5 lb. dumbbells. While slightly heavier than a can of soup as suggested in the book for beginners, it was still a pretty sad statement for how low I had dropped strength wise. After two weeks I moved on to the 10 lb. set. You could feel the increased resistance immediately and the related after burn was more pronounced. This is what you REALLY need to keep an eye on. As soon as you are able to do all the reps of any exercise comfortably it's time to up the resistance.

This weekend I moved up to the 12 pound set and while it's only 2 lbs. more per arm you could feel the difference immediately. I am also trying to get to 30 reps for each exercise now, or at least to the point where my muscles start to tremble. You don't want to push yourself too far though and get an injury. One or two reps after you start to feel the tremble is enough I think. I am able to do 30 reps for most all of the exercises save for the bench dips (hard stuff, even at the novice level) and the squat raises. I can't remember if it's mentioned in the book or not, but another thing that is important to keep in mind is that you should not take too long a break between exercises. If possible just move from one to the next. I usually take about 10-15 seconds between each one just to wipe my face and have a small drink of water. You want to keep your heart rate up there for as much of the 20 min. (approx.) as possible.

I'm now on the lookout for an adjustable set of dumbbells as 12 lbs. is the largest I have. The hex set belongs to my wife but it's time for me to get a set you can add plates to in order to incrementally increase the resistance. I will be looking for a set comprised of 5 and 2.5 lb plates. The 10 lb. plates have too large a diameter for my liking. Plus I see myself topping out at around 25-30 lbs. per arm anyways. That's about four 5 lb. plates plus the weight of the dumbbell itself. The 2.5 lb plates allow you to gradually up the intensity rather than go a full 5 lbs at a time. Plus, you don't necessarily have to add equal amounts of weight to each end of the dumbbell either. Just go 2.5 lbs on one side first, then add another 2.5 lbs to the other end later. There are expensive dumbbell sets out there (i.e. Powerblock) but I don't want to spend $250 (shipped) on a 3-33 lb. dumbbell set. Rather I'll be looking for something like this from York Barbell. These are available through my Direct Buy shopping club so I'll have to price them out. Maybe I'll go with the regular steel ones instead of chrome. :-)