Dufisthenics

So this past weekend my wife and I started messing around with our juicer.  We tried several vegetable and fruit juice combinations.  For the most part they were pretty good.  I made the mistake of adding a large chunk of ginger to one of my mixtures.  It tasted disgusting, like drinking a citronella candle.  I later read that when you use ginger you are supposed to use a much smaller piece, no more than a centimeter long.  Mine was about the size of my thumb.  Regardless, I will not be adding any more ginger to my juices.

Although juicing is sort of fun there is no denying it is a lot of work.  This morning my wife and I spent probably damn close to a half hour just preparing about a quart of fruit juice for her (blackberries, strawberries, blueberries, kiwi and apple)  All of the fruit has to be washed first.  The juicer also needs to be immediately cleaned else the pulp will dry like cement in no time.

Luckily cleaning the juicer is pretty easy although cleaning the steel strainer basket takes some extra effort.  Our intiial intent of doing a 24/7 juice fast has mutated based on our experience so far.  I think instead we will juicing to replace certain meals and filling in the non-juiced meals with some healthier choices.

Just having juiced dinners for two days dropped my night time weight to the lowest number ever, 168 pounds.

Over the weekend I posted my first normal mode attempt at this month’s Bar-barian challenge, 5 sets of max rep diamond push ups.  I totaled 105 reps, not a great number.  The only thing I can hang my hat on is most of my reps, especially from sets 2 through 5 were slow and controlled.  Some of the guys posting huge numbers are bouncing up and down so fast it is hard to even count them.

Today’s GUTS session at the gym was hit and miss.  They moved the dip bars so they are parallel to the mirrors, allowing me to clearly see my form which is good.  Unfortunately I wasn’t all that pleased what I saw, my top extension still was not good enough.  So I adjusted and really concentrated on hitting the top of the movement as you should.  Of course this fatigued me faster resulting in a few less reps.

On the plus side I bumped my pull ups back to 20 reps and felt pretty strong in doing so.  I followed up with a new high in push ups, repping out 45 although that was just the end result of patience as I held the top position long enough so I could squeeze out those extra reps.

Banging out those extra push ups really destroyed my attempted bench press session afterward.  135 pounds felt monumentally heavy.  When I dumped 185 on the bar I quit after they very first rep,  I just had no strength left in my chest.  Before I started doing GUTS before my bench sessions I was doing 3 sets of 5 reps at 205 pounds. I’ll take the small ego hit of smaller bench numbers if it helps me get closer to my ultimate goal of doing the BBR’s.

Rick made me an official moderator of the Bar-barian forums yesterday which is very cool.  I really enjoy helping out on the forums and supporting the bar community.