New Year, New Workout Routine and Goal Planning

For 2023, I wanted to mix things up and change up my fitness routine. You know that I already work out every day and it’s for a minimum of two hours. That’s just a way that I can keep myself mobile and walking right. When I miss a day, I definitely don’t walk as well. For the new year I wanted to just change up my exercise plan to make sure that I was doing a few things.

Optimize.
I want to ensure that I am optimizing the use of the big gym floor. There are different sections to the floor that the machines are divided up into. For example, there’s a cardio area. There is a Back stretch room for stretching and it’s got a TRX cable set up. This is the machine that I broke my sacrum on on 3/19/20, when the cable clip was not tight and it dropped me like a hot potato during an upright row with full body weight. I want to approach this machine in the new year, my stomach is just not ready for it yet.

There’s a free weight area, too, with Smith machines. I’m truly like a kid in a candy store, and I just need to make sure that I’m optimizing the use of all that space to make sure that I don’t waste any energy. I move across the gym floor, ready to attack the machines, but I could be better using my time and effort on the exercises, not on the travel time between machines.

I took photos of the different sections and tried to figure out a few things. One of them was how to enter the machine. Another was where to put my crutches. How I would get off of it? There were quite a number of machines that I am not able to enter because it’s a right leg entry point and I can’t lift my leg up and over a bar sometimes. Also, I definitely can’t put my knees bent on a machine, bearing my body weight on my knees like the oblique machines in the back room, or even the assisted pull up bars in the free weight area. So those are out of the question. I just need to find a modification and I don’t think at this time there is a modification as long as I wear an electronic device around my lower leg to send an electronic impulse when I tae a step so I don’t fall. Walkaide wins for now, but we shall see whats down the road on my quest to walk right again

Endurance.

So when I went to the gym today it was a Sunday, the first day of the new year. I wanted to focus on cardio because I’m thinking of focusing on building up my endurance for the new year A good time to do this would be on the weekend when it’s kind of quiet in the early morning, I will be in the back room practically alone. I could hop on the arm bike like I used to. When I peeked at my old mileage chart from a couple of years ago when I could walk without my right foot feeling like I was walking on crushed marbles. At that time I was aiming for 75 miles a month. I didn’t care so much about the time. What I cared about was logging milage, which does incorporate the time it took to do that mileage.

Today, I did 22 minutes on the elliptical, then I hopped over to do some abs for a reset and then I did the arc trainer which is weight-bearing cardio activity. On these three machines I did a little over 60 minutes. I think this is a great goal for my weekends. I want to do 60 minutes a day for two days of cardio. The other days during the week I will do 40 minutes a day.

Strength.

Now let’s talk about strength. One of the things that I want to do is to optimize the use of the equipment for strength training. Currently, I have been doing this for about the whole year and it takes a lot of time. I want to see how I can optimize my time by doing less reps, with more intensity. I was doing higher reps but keeping to my four sets which means definitely a longer workout time. Also, I can definitely knock down my leg days to just two days instead of three and only three sets of each exercise, but I’m going to change the reps to 8 to 10. I want to do maximum, so at the end I couldn’t do another rep. Now I will have to do some trial and error, but I can do it in about a week’s time. I think this will work well.

I think I will lower my leg days to just two and three sets of 8 to 10. Three sets of 8 to 10 repetitions. On all body parts except abs. For abs I want to keep that 20 for three sets. About abs, I will tell you that recently I was sitting on my couch, which I couldn’t sit on unsupported before. It is a La-Z-Boy couch, and it is a recliner. It was really difficult for me to sit without a triangle wedge pillow behind me to sit up straight. Because I have been working my abs for so long now, I finally see core strengthened so I can functionally sit up. That’s the best part of all this hard work at the gym every day. You may not see immediate results, but slowly and surely you will see results that help you enjoy life better. Even if it’s sitting on your couch that doesn’t suck you in anyore.

I can’t wait to write down my new split, my new routine and path through the gym. This is going to be a great year. I’m going to try this for 4 weeks and modify and adjust accordingly. I think this is huge for me and I can’t wait to see what gains I make. Leave a comment below if you have any questions. I also want to hear from you if you have some thing similar that you’re working on. Love to hear from you!