I'm Baaacckk!

Hey Hey Hey! How ya been? I hate to brag, but the weather was absolutely glorious here! Oh, and I think I found my dream job! Do you think I’ll have too much trouble finding someone to pay me for sitting out in the sun, relaxing with a great book or magazine, with the smell of the newly emerging flowers wafting ever so lightly in the background? Ha? Ha? Do ya??



Bummer!

Alrighty, well then on to business it is…:(

If you remember, I originally said that Fridays would be a higher carb day. But you see Sunday my Husband and I are going out to celebrate our 20 year anniversary and Low Carb just sounds like, well, No Fun! So I decided to swap today’s high carb with Sundays low carb for this week. Meaning today became a mostly veggies and protein day. Here’s how it hammered out today…

Today’s eats…

Today’s food stuffs was lower than I would have liked. I know, I know! But my lovely daughter was off school today so I got a late start (too busy snoozin’!) And then there was the lovely sun just calling my name,and yes, I always train on pretty much an empty stomach. YIKES! CRINGE! Me bad!

M1…BCAA’s and Greens+
M2…PWO of Vega (vegan protein powder) in almond milk
M3…HUGE bowl of broccoli, cauliflower, grape tomatoes, and baby carrots served with 1/3 c hummus
M4…Mexican bowl..simple…shredded lettuce topped with refried beans; black beans that were prepared with salsa, black bean dip, cumin, thyme, garlic; fresh tomatoes; cilantro; and tofutti sour cream

I made plenty of the Mexican bowl stuffs for tomorrow too!

Today’s Workout

I decided I wanted to work on TUT today. TUT means Time Under Tension. Here, I’ll let someone else explain it better. According to Muscle and Fitness magazine

http://www.muscle-fitness.com.au/466.html

Time Under TENSION
BY DWAYNE N. JACKSON AND JIM STOPPANI

Hey, you’re less than one minute away from bigger and stronger muscles with M&F’s scientifically engineered set-timing technique

Give us a few seconds and we’ll give you stronger and bigger muscles. No, we’re not promising that you can work out for less than a minute (different magazine, different day). What we are promising is that if you focus on a specific range of seconds, you’ll challenge your muscles in an entirely new way. You see, while reps, sets and rest time are important variables in your workout, the total amount of time you spend actually doing each set of an exercise can also be critical to reaching your training goals. However, this time component rarely has been taken into account when putting together a weight-training programme… until now.

Time under tension (TUT) is a way of calculating the total amount of work you place on a muscle. It refers to the total time a muscle resists weight during each set. For example, if you did the barbell curl and it took you two seconds to curl the weight up and another two seconds to lower it, that’s four seconds of tension per rep. Performing 10 reps at this pace would take a total of 40 seconds. Therefore, the TUT for that set is 40 seconds. If you increased the speed of those reps to about three seconds, then it would take you only 30 seconds to complete a 10-rep set. Although the number of reps and the amount of weight are the same, the second set might not increase your muscle mass to the same level as the first. And that’s the basis of TUT training: focus on sets that last for a certain amount of time based on your training goals. For maximising strength, the ideal TUT is about 20 seconds or less; for muscle mass, it’s at least 40 seconds; and for muscle endurance, it’s at least 70 seconds.

Don’t abandon set and rep ranges just yet, though — you have good reason to focus on them. Research shows that the best way to gain muscle strength is by performing 1–6 reps per set; for muscle growth, your ideal rep range is 8–12; and for muscle endurance, 15–30 reps prove most beneficial. The problem is that all these ranges assume that each rep takes about four seconds to complete. If you extrapolated those figures, you’d assume that the best TUT ranges are 4–24 seconds for strength, 32–48 seconds for growth and 60–120 seconds for endurance. However, strength coaches and training experts have tweaked those values based on their own experience: Although no controlled research has been done on the subject, their anecdotal evidence suggests that the best TUT ranges are 4–20 seconds for strength, 40–60 seconds for growth and 70–100 seconds for endurance.

Armed with that information, I decided on 45 seconds TUT and created 2 tri-sets to hit my quads, shoulders and triceps. The trick is to choose a weight that is heavy enough for you. Don’t wimp out on me! By the end of the 45 seconds you should only be able to do partials! This is what I did...

Narrow stance DB squats…………35’s X 13…13…13
Arnold shoulder presses…………..17.5’s X 14…14…13
Close grip incline bench press…..EZ bar + 20 X 20…20…19

Front squats………..Bar + 50 X 12…9…11 (wrists not quite right on 2nd set)
Upright rows………..EZ bar + 20 X 18….19…23
Band pull aparts……heavy band X 50…51…47

And now there you have it! A day in the life of me.