Learning About Working Out with Free Weights

Let's start after work.  In my grocery run last week, I had picked up a cheap cut of steak at Aldi's.  Monday night, I sliced it up thin, across the grain (thank you Alton Brown), and set it to marinating in Aldi's steak and chop sauce.

"Go across the grain, or I'ma cut a bitch"

(Also, this is not Drew.  Really.)

When I got home last night, I started stir-frying that in a large skillet with just a quick spray of canola oil.  Once it was mostly cooked, I added roughly chopped peppers and onions.  It was basically an americanized pepper steak.  We had brown rice and broccoli with it, and it was kick ass.  Aldi's can be sketchy on some stuff, but the sauce was killer, especially used in this manner.  It had a really nice bite to it.  We all enjoyed it, I think.

After dinner was basketball practice, which went really well.  I could definitely use more than an hour for coaching, but we used the time well.  And, I think I have Conrad's natural position figured out.  That kid can flat-out play in the post.  He actually used some up-and-under and drop-steps last night that players 3 times his age don't use.  It seemed to come to him naturally.  I'm stoked.

After practice I got the boys in bed and relaxed for a bit.  Downed a large glass of water, refilled it, and got ready for Week 3's Burn Circuit 2, the last burn circuit that I had yet to use with the dumbbells.

I fired up the video and started the warm up.  For whatever reason, I felt REALLY tight last night, and I kinda half-assed the warmup portion.

I'm stupid.

Burn Circuit 2 has several lunge-involved exercises.  Many of them combined with rows.  The third one in is a lunge with a bent over row.  So, you lunge forward, bend over keeping your back straight, and do a two-handed row.  On the third or fourth one of these, my left knee started hurting.  This was with my left knee back in the lunge, right foot forward.

By the fifth, it was hurting extremely bad.

Like...Shaun Livingston bad.  Here's an image of his knee injury if you don't know what or who I'm talking about:

Yeah, it felt like my knee was about to do that.  As if it was trying to explode out of my leg, Alien style.  I was seriously considering cancelling the entire workout.  After the twelfth rep, you switch legs, which meant it was my left foot forward.  That didn't help.  I could really only do eight of these.

I paused the workout, walked around for a couple seconds.  Did some high-knees running in place, and decided to continue on.  It still hurt, but grew less and less.  I could feel my body loosen up after a couple more exercises, and I was fine, even being able to push certain things farther than I had before.

So let's think about what happened.  I had done this twice before with the bands and never had anything close to that kind of problem.

1.  Using free-weights now.  This could be a part of it.  I was used to the bands and had developed a certain form with them.  Also, when using them in combination with lunges, the bands themselves lend a certain level of stability to the exercise, which means that the exercise wasn't ever as effective as it could be with free weights.  Now, with the dumbbells, I was using more muscles in my lower body to provide stability, adding more pressure.  Also, the weight of the dumbbells themselves was now being applied downward, where with the bands it was always behind me, as the band was wrapped around the trailing foot.

2.  Half-assing the warmup.  I think this is the major culprit.  Honestly.  I really didn't work that hard at the warmup, and with all the new stresses and forces applied to my lower body by the free weights, the muscles being used just weren't ready.  They then spread those forces to the joints.

I need to work harder at the warmups from now on.  I learned last night that if you don't do them correctly, your workout will suffer.  I might even start doing a pre-warmup routine for a bit, maybe some simple calisthenics or stuff like that.  I don't want to feel that knee pain again.

Anyway, again, thanks for reading.

Jason