WEEK 2
24 Mar
Warm up
Push ups – 12,15,12,12,22
Cool down
I had a poor night of sleep but physically was feeling quite fresh. I’m not concerned that my final set hasn’t progressed from 22 as I can tell that the first 4 sets produce quite a bit of fatigue.
26 Mar
Warm up
Push ups – 14,17,13,13,22
Cool down
I strained my neck on the evening of the 24th doing overhead press so this was very uncomfortable to complete.
28 Mar
Warm up
Push ups – 16,19,14,14,21
Cool down
I only just squeezed past the target 20 reps. I have two tricks up my sleeve, longer rest and palmer cooling.
For the first six sessions I’ve used 75 seconds rest between sets, with a slightly longer 90 seconds before the final set. Even extending this out by 15-30 seconds will make enough of a difference that I should get through week 3.
Palmer cooling is a concept I picked up from the Andrew Huberman podcast, and it’s ideal for muscular endurance. The main reason our bodies fail at high rep is due to local overheating of the specific muscles used for the exercise. A solution is to cool the body via the palms of the hands (or soles of the feet if you wish), which has been shown to make very significant improvements to fatigue management in repeat sets. I don’t want to deploy this until a) I really need to and b) I’m confident that I can gauge how many reps my body can do without the cooling, so I can assess the effectiveness of cooling my palms.