I'll be back

After the last few days of disappointment in the gym, I wasn't too optimistic about my prospects for today's back session. As I arrived at the gym to a gridlocked car park, I wasn't even sure I'd be able to make it through the front door so when I eventually made my way to the bench area, I had rather low expectations.

I've never had a gym partner but today my schedule overlapped with the friend who recommended the routine to me in the first place so we performed the exercises together. It was great to have Stacy there to encourage me out of my gym funk and I am convinced I had a much better session today because it. All today's exercises were supersets so there were no opportunities for spotting each other but simply exchanging notes during rest periods improved the efficiency and quality of the workout.

As a routine, I thought today's exercises had a high degree of reliance on secondary muscle groups which might detract from the targeting of the back muscles. For example, close-gripped lat pulldowns place a lot of stress on the biceps whilst the dumbbell pull engages the chest more than the back. I also missed attempting dead lifts which I am finally beginning to make a little bit of progress on. Next time I perform this routine, I will try moving the wide grip lat pulldown and cable face pull superset to the start of the session because one of my major goals is to be able to complete fifteen pull ups. I found that by the time I got round to the wide grip lat pulldown I was quite tired so I had to perform it at a far lower weight than usual.

The only new exercise today was the one armed lat pulldown; I don't think I have the mechanics of the exercise quite right so it didn't feel particularly beneficial. I aim to go through the videos of all the exercises I struggled with during the week tomorrow so I will hopefully get some pointers on how to improve things.

Tomorrow is a rest day according to the routine but as I took a day off in the week and had a disappointing cardio week, I'm going to try an ab session followed by a 10k run. I'll probably throw in some bench presses as they continue to be a source of frustration to me. I'm a sucker for punishment.