Back to the land of the living at last!  Into our second week of weights, and third week of eating enough food to fuel some decent workouts!   We're also back onto our maintenance eating plan, so no more cookie times for this cowboy.  I'll just have to eat them all on our free eating Sunday!!

Actually that would be an interesting exercise, sort of.  Buy all the things that grab your fancy through the week, but then don't eat them, and see what you've got by the Sunday, and would you be able to actually eat them all without making yourself sick...  S'pose you could just record what you eat too, but that'd be too easy, much harder to have the food in your hot little hands and not eat it - a battle of the brains!

But I digress, for a change!  I'm not here to talk about my favourite subject (food), but weights.  Loving being able to lift some heavy weights again, and get that muscle pain the day after, the torn fibres, the ache, just the whole package, been missing that through the lean competition stage of this crazy sport of ours!

Anyway, today was legs day, and I forgot how much I love squats. Up to 150 kilos today, (just two reps, sure, but it's a start).  Nothing better than a few sets of heavy squats to get the body exhausted, it may be a leg workout, but it sure slams the whole body, loving it.

I will though, have to lift my game if I want to keep in the competition with Ness!  She is pounding out at almost double her bodyweight, so I'll have to get up to 180 odd kilos at the moment....  Could probably do a few reps at that weight at the moment if I didn't go so deep, but aim this off season is to keep my form and depth constant - so no matter what weight I squat, I am going to go to the normal depth.  No bludging and cheating myself with pretend reps!

We have been finishing with Smith Machine calf raises, and for the first time in my life I am giving my calves a decent nudge.  I've never really trained them in the past, they've always just 'been there', thanks no doubt to a million scrums and two million scrum machine sessions through my rugby playing days.  It's quite intense to say the least, and I have been amazed at the heat that radiates off my calves at the end of the last set, reckon you could fry an egg on the poor buggers!

Ness went and did a boxing class at the gym last night too, not my thing, so I threw in a cardio session - ten minutes cycle, 20 minute row and a 15 minute treadmill to finish, and then stretches. All good, 5374m on the rowing machine too, six second heart beat check at 17 - 170 odd beats per minute - at the end of the row.

Forgot the pain that rowing can give you, and the head space you need to be in to just keep rowing through it, but the memories are flooding back, still about 500 metres off my personal best distance over this time.  Might give a 2 kilometre time trial a nudge tomorrow, in my rowing days I was down to six and half minutes over this distance.  Somehow I don't think I'll even be sub 7 at the moment!

Train hard, eat well - we are!