Ignoring The Stopwatch

I did something yesterday while I was working out that I have never done since I started training five years ago. Rather, I didn’t do something.

I didn’t time my rest periods.

In the past I’ve certainly NOT RECORDED my rest periods, or been NOT ANAL about them (oh my god, I’ve rested thirty seconds over two minutes, WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO WRITE DOWN!?) but I’ve never been totally unaware of generally how long it was since my last set.

When my dad got me started with lifting when I was fourteen, he didn’t lord over me on the machines. He was right next to me working antagonist groups, but he never said: GO NOW. DO THE SET RIGHT NOW. END OF THE WORLD IN FIVE MINUTES AND YOU STILL HAVE THREE SETS.

Nope. Just “when you’re done with your set, look at the clock. After two minutes, do your next set.” So I did.

Sometimes a set would take longer than another because I recently bumped weight, or whatever. He had his own workout going on and would peek over from time to time to make sure I was using my biceps and not my ass when I did curls, but he didn’t count my reps for me. He didn’t count my rest periods for me. He kept it simple and chimed in if I was doing something horribly wrong.

In all my recent efforts to reduce complexity in my program, I’ve just found that I’m still programming my rest periods as though they really mean something. So I decided to leave the watch in the locker and just go whenever I’m ready.

Just as I thought I would, I recovered from warm-up sets quickly (in many cases, significantly less than the two minutes I prescribe myself on my workout tearsheets) and needed an undetermined longer amount of time to recover from the top sets on down.

What was once pushing three hours to do got knocked out in about an hour-and-a-quarter. Accounting for the additional 30 minutes of steady cardio I tacked on as part of a “moar srs” fat loss effort and it’s still roughly an hour of time saved.

I’m certainly feeling the after-effects of the workout now, more than I did when I took those extra minutes, but I LIKE that. It’s not a debilitating level of soreness, just “hey man, take it easy.” Which is what I want to feel on my rest days!

Speaking of rest days: I’m reconsidering my approach to frequency as well, meaning the number of times per week I work out. I can get by on one or two workouts a week, and it really isn’t a broken or horribly rigid scheme to begin with.

But MAYBE I could do more, and I’d like to allow myself the opportunities to try, should they present themselves.

Simply, my approach to rest intervals, both between sets and between workouts, is this:

“Wait until you’re comfortable, without getting RELAXED, and go again.”

That was my subvocalization yesterday, talking to myself so I wouldn’t feel obligated to check the clock.

Workout for Tuesday, February 23, 2010

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