Rubbery Arms Are Good

[livingdeb]

I've been telling myself I need to do more (some) strength training. Today I finally did a little.

Walking home from Target with a bag of Epsom salt and cough syrup I worked several arm muscles:
* biceps - by holding my elbow at my side and lifting the bag up to my shoulder (biceps curls)
* upper back(?) - by lifting the bag up to my shoulder while letting my elbows rise to shoulder height (upright rows?)
* deltoids(?) - by lifting the bag from my shoulder to as high as I could reach (overhead raises?)
* triceps - by lifting the bag behind me with my elbow up in the air (triceps extension)

I sometimes do biceps curls when I'm walking; the others are much less subtle. I don't think I've done the last two while walking before. I'm sure I looked like a complete goofball, but my arms were all nice and rubbery by the time I got home.

Comments

workout efficiency

[fraeuleinchen.livejournal.com]

Disclaimer: I'm not an expert :-)
However, I think the second exercise you described actually works the deltoids; the third may work the biceps and lats.

Have you heard about wogging? I heard about it in a clue on Jeopardy, and looked it up online. It's just what you would imagine it to be, but it was interesting reading up on it anyway, about the benefits (less strain on joints than jogging, more intense than walking).

Re: workout efficiency

[livingdeb.livejournal.com]

Actually, when you first said "wog," I didn't have a guess. Then when you said it's just what I imagined it would be, I imagined something between running and walking, or speed walking.

But no, wogging is what I think of as the "(girl) scout pace." I remember it as alternating between walking ten steps and running ten steps, but something I found online says it's alternating between walking 22 yards and running that distance. This is also similar to "interval training," which a runner told me to do if you want to learn to run faster. You alternate between running a quarter-mile lap as fast as you can, then running one at a slowish pace. Unfortunately, I can't run a whole quarter mile as fast as I can! I got my heart rate up to 206 once trying, though. Which is supposedly above my maximum heart rate, even back then when I was 30, so I quit doing it.

Re: workout efficiency

[fraeuleinchen.livejournal.com]

Wow!

I may never get my heart rate up that high... but we'll see. At work we've designated the week after 4th of July as the time to do a fitness challenge, when we'll all see how far we can get on the treadmill using the Bruce Protocol, a protocol used for cardiac stress testing (for those who are able to; there are pharmacological alternatives). Under this protocol, every 3 minutes the treadmill gets steeper and faster, according to the following table:
Stage 1 = 1.7 mph at 10% Grade
Stage 2 = 2.5 mph at 12% Grade
Stage 3 = 3.4 mph at 14% Grade
Stage 4 = 4.2 mph at 16% Grade
Stage 5 = 5.0 mph at 18% Grade
Stage 6 = 5.5 mph at 20% Grade
Stage 7 = 6.0 mph at 22% Grade
Stage 8 = 6.5 mph at 24% Grade
Stage 9 = 7.0 mph at 26% Grade

Usually people make it to stage 3 or 4 and have already reached their target heart rate, so when they become fatigued, so the test is stopped.

Should be fun!