Tuesday: Manliness Training
Behold. Now cometh day two of “Sometimes I train like this…” – my attempt to summarise roughly how I like to train on a good week. It is subject to change and outright lies. Today I shall explain the joy of Tuesday, or Tiwesdæg in Old English. This means Tyr’s Day, which is lovely. (Tyr being the one-armed Norse God of single combat, victory and heroic glory. Yup, he’s a badass).
Just hanging out with the Guild of Adventures. No biggy. Unlike this cliff, which is friggin’ huge, ammaright?
Training won’t do itself, however, so I start Tuesday back in the gym, leaving my back well alone and focusing instead on bench presses to develop strength throughout my chest, shoulders and arms. Bench presses are the archetypal man-exercise…for some reason. To be honest, I’m bad at bench pressing. I have no more to say on the matter, but I felt compelled to admit that fact. I’m not very good at it. WEAK, some would say. Pah.
Anyway, I follow bench presses with weighted wide grip chin-ups for strength in my latissimus dorsi in my back, responsible for movement throughout the frontal plane of motion (pulling downwards). These are a classic adventuring exercise and the difference between life and death if you find yourself dangling from a cliff edge, which is essentially the manliest thing possible.
As part of my training for performance wrestling, it’s also important that I spend some time developing and maintaining muscle size (body building, in a sense). Not only does this help develop the expected “appearance” of a wrestler (like the tiny pants), it provides some much needed padding when taking regular falls, big kicks and other moves in general. To aid this growth, I mix in some longer sets with slightly lower weight, which focus more on developing size throughout my chest and back.
After dumbbell bench presses and flyes to focus further on the chest, and some straight-arm pulls downs for the back, I target the smaller muscle groups of the biceps and triceps, using barbell curls, skull crushers and push-downs.
Come the evening, I head back out – this time to the dojo for freestyle wrestling, which involves a fair amount of cardio and lots of technique work. Sometimes, we’ll spar – which is about the most exhausting activity on the face on the planet. Then I sleep, mmmmmmmm. I mean, zzzzzzzz. Farewell, Tyr.
Oh, and because it’s awesome:
“Manly, you say?”