Labor Day

I dreaded going to the gym today not because I had to lift, but because I didn’t know how busy it would be. For your reference, the gym I go to is an absolute mess - gym goers spend time chatting (or chat on the phones), terrible music, no one lifts hard/focused and worst of all, gym manners are nowhere to be found (i.e. there’s a guy who always walks around spitting at every single trash can, including the one next to the squat rack I use).

I rolled the dice and decided to hit the gym mid-afternoon. I assumed that people are either tired or hung over from drinking over the long weekend. Boy was I wrong. I had to wait 21 minutes for the squat rack to be available (talk about stretching and warming up in the corner of the gym like a vulture).

I was not able to super-set some of the workouts because there were too many people aimlessly roaming around. Specifically, super-setting back squats with glute ham raise was out of the question because I had to walk to the other side of the gym. Deadlift with DB lateral lunges did happen, but the latter was not shown in the video above.

Anyway, the workout was solid. Legs were definitely hurting from the 30 mins run the day before. But surprisingly, I was hauling ass with the backsqauts (#315). The hammies started to feel toasty after the second set of the the 5x5, and it didn’t help that I was using a bar with no knurlings on it. Everything else ended good except for the “box” step-ups. As you can see in the video, I was going to do it with 95# (see the plates on the ground), but the “box” was made of semi-hard foams, making it difficult to find a stable position while stepping up. .

At the end of the day, it sounds like I’m complaining a lot - I couldn’t do this I couldn’t do that. But in all honesty, I miss the gym that I set up back in Bangui (I’ll write a post about that later) and I cannot wait to setup my home gym once I arrive in Skopje.

Outdoor Gym in Bangui