David Chiu

I’ve barely begun my next challenge to become stronger in 30-days and I’m injured. My workout started with several sets of ab crunches on the nautilus machine, then 3 sets of slow straight-leg leg-lifts. After that I decided to warm up my chest and shoulders with a couple yoga moves which included down-dog to pushup to one-arm side plank pose. After that I moved to the weight room and started with 3 sets of decline bench presses at various grip widths using moderate weight (135lbs) to warm up. Then I moved to the bench press hammer machine and did 3 sets of 175lbs. The weight felt pretty light so I hopped over to the incline hammer machine which already had 225lbs on it and tried to press it up. I got the weight halfway up and couldn’t go any further. This frustrated me since I’ve pressed 275lbs on this machine before. So I tried again. No luck. It wasn’t going to happen. So I dropped the weight to 135lbs and performed 3 sets of 10 reps. At this point I decided to go back to the “ab room” and do a couple more sets of the yoga moves I started out with. After I finished I felt pretty good, but I know I didn’t push myself hard enough since I didn’t even really break a sweat.

Later in the evening I noticed that my front-right deltoid was a little sore. Then when I tried to pickup my dog I felt pain in my shoulder. Not unbearable pain, but I definitely strained a muscle in my shoulder.

So at this point I’m going to need to rest my shoulder and let it heal before I can try lifting (or even doing yoga) again. Since my shoulder is injured I decided to jog up and down 12 flights of stairs in my building just so I can get some exercise in and get my heart rate going. It feels good when your heart is pumping and you can feel the blood rushing through your veins. It reminds you that you are alive and should be moving through life instead of sitting at some desk all day half comatose pumping yourself full of sugar and caffeine - only to go home exhausted and then wake up and do the same thing all over again. But I digress…