My journey to fit life - Day 1

Hello everyone!

I want to share with you my thoughts about an experiment upon myself. As you may have read from my First Blog Post:

I also like to stay healthy with good eating habits, play sport (I’m a skilled road cyclist) and stay in contact with nature.

Untill now I was only focusing on my cycle training, that is indeed a very good cardio and endurance training, and I’m still enjoing it! But I wanted to focus more my body shape and muscle strength, because I was totally negletting my upper body parts.

I therefore decided to intersperse my cycle training with cross training and body building workouts.

The Plan

As a good Software Engineer I start by enumerating the requirements:

Goals

1. improve body shape
2. enhance muscle strength
3. keep a low-budget
4. use high-effective tools
5. take advantage of good enough semi-professional aids (in respect of 3.)
6. must be household

Tools

After some market research I ended up with these tools from Decathlon stores:

• 500 Abs Bench (bought used, saving 25%)
• 20 KG Dumbbells kit (bought used, saving 25%)
• Pull up bar 500 (brand new, price very low)
• Road byke + Home trainer (already owned)

Please note that they don’t pay me, this list is for anyone who wants to know what kind of tools I’m using.

Semi-professional (and free!) aids

How to start a job without expertise? Searching for a skilled aid may lead to betray goal 3… So I had to find some free (but proven working) tutorials about cross training and body building workouts.

My searching led to “Domyos E Coach” , a free video coaching website by Decathlon, created to promote it’s products. So I decided that it fits perfectly my needs and I’d give it a try.

Please be advised that I’m not affiliated with them and I’m providing this content “AS IS”, without warranty of any kind, express or implied.

Plan description

I’m starting from scratch so I need to turn down the difficulty and split the excercises in groups marked with a letter and spreading them onto several days, in the first try I’ll go for: A-B-C-D-B-D-D.

You can find a video gallery here

Day A - Cross training

• Warm-up: jumping jacks 3 series of 30s effort + 30s rest
• Hammer Handle Pull-up Bar 3 series of 10 reps. rest for 1 minute
• Pronation Pull-up 3 series of 10 reps. rest for 1 minute
• Supination Pull-up 3 series of 10 reps. rest for 1 minute
• Pectoral Exercises: Dips 3 series of 8 to 10 reps. rest for 1m30s
• Bench Weight Bench Exercise: Abdominal Crunches On Bench 4 sets of 10 repetitions

Day B - Cycle training

• Warm-up: free ride 10 minutes
• Endurance training more details soon, 40 minutes

Day C - Body building

• Warm-up: Squat 3 series of 30s effort + 30s rest
• Incline Press With Dumbbells 4 sets of 10 reps. rest for 1 minute
• Bulgarian Split Squat 4 sets of 8 reps. rest for 1 minute
• Incline Pumps 4 sets of 10 reps. rest for 1 minute
• Kick Back and Rowing 4 sets of 10 reps. rest for 1m30s
• Lying Triceps Extensions 4 sets of 10 reps. rest for 1m30s
• Sets Of Curl Biceps 4 sets of 10 reps. rest for 1m30s
• Bench Weight Bench Exercise: Leg Raises 4 sets of 10 repetitions

Day D - Recovery / Rest

No exercise, recommended walking or something similar.

Final thoughts

I want to track my progress (if any! ) and fine tune this plan. What I hope to achieve is a good plan that can be carried on without too much effort (in terms of money but especially time) and hopefully be an inspiration to someone else!

May the #fitlife be with me!