Workout Reconsideration

I should get out of here (“here” being my office). For the last few days I’ve been staying late trying to finish as much stuff as possible because today is my last day at the office (tomorrow I’m driving to the plant, next week I’ll be attending meetings in Florida and the following week I’ll be out of here). However, it seems that work never ends: there is always new stuff that comes up regardless of how many hours I work so I think it’s time to call it a day and go to the gym. All the stuff I haven’t finished will have to wait for… who knows how long...

A couple of weeks ago I started reconsidering my workout routine in order to make it more functional, that is, my workouts must serve the purpose of improving my performance in at least one of the following sports: skiing, sex and climbing.

Obviously, working out will, in general, improve your performance in any sport. However, if you’re interested in specific sports, there are certain workout routines and exercises that will help your performance more than others. After some introspection, I’ve decided that the two factors that I’ve not been paying enough attention to are aerobic resistance and grip so I’ve been introducing some changes in my workout in order to address these two weaknesses.

Aerobic endurance is easy to improve: run! I’ve never been a fan of running but lately I’ve been forcing myself to run at least twice a week and I’m already feeling the difference (the good thing about being bad at something is that it’s easy to notice even the slightest improvements). Both skiing and rock climbing require brief periods of pure anaerobic strength and relatively long, baseline periods of sustained aerobic effort so I think improving my aerobic resistance will improve my performance in both of them. In the case of sex and mountain climbing (the Mont Blanc goal for example) it’s even more apparent that endurance is critical.

On to the second weakness: grip. Last summer I only went rock climbing a couple of times but I got a bit frustrated because, even though I was feeling strong, the first thing to go was my grip. And, once your forearms are gone, you’re done climbing even if your other upper body muscles could keep pushing. I had never done a forearm workout before but I’ve been doing some research online and now I’ve included grip exercises in my weekly training routine. Hopefully I’ll gain strength and endurance in my grip as well as strengthening individual fingers, especially the thumb. I’ve read that static hangs on a bar is the best way to improve the strength of your forearms so I’m doing that as well as some forearm curls with dumbbells. After a few weeks with this new workout I should go to the climbing wall in Ciudad Universitaria to see if I feel any improvement. The forearm workouts are not going to help me with any of my other two sports (well, maybe if we consider that jerking-off is sex…) but as long as they improve my rock climbing I’ll be happy.