This week I finally feel like I am out from under the haze caused by my body battling an ear infection.  I celebrated by doing a GUTS routine. I decided to try to really make it a minimal rest session.

When I have done GUTS thus far, sure I am doing dips, pull ups and push ups back to back but I am doing so with a brief breather in between which at a minimum is a minute and potentially more if I get side tracked into a conversation with one of my gym buddies.

Well today I tried to be more deliberate, taking no more time between the exercise then it took to walk to that section of the gym.  Well it made a significant difference.  I only posted a total of 78 reps but I felt like I did work equal to if not greater than my GUTS sessions where I do more reps with more rest in between.

I also think I am going to buy a cheap $10 sport watch to start wearing at the gym.  Being able to add a time element to certain exercises is very motivational.  If I do 50 reps of a movement on Monday and do the same 50 reps on Friday it doesn’t sound like much improvement. However if I do those reps in 90 seconds on Monday and 75 seconds on Friday I have made a huge leap.

I plan to utilize the watch to monitor how long it takes me to do my 5 pull up / 10 push up routine x 10.  It will also be useful to help time things like static holds since doing that in my head never yields an accurate number.

Years ago I introduced a watch into my famous 300 work out and it resulted in consistent improvement in my performance doing the routine.  It also resulted in a lot of pain and suffering as I constantly felt the need to beat whatever time I posted the previous work out.  I eventually ditched the watch because I didn’t want the added pressure.

It’s time to reapply it.