Body weight building

I like very much bodybuilding but it requires a lot of time. Recently I discovered body weight building which requires less time and I saw results faster. I'm lucky that we have at the office a power tower and it takes me less than 5 minutes a day to have a complete workout.

I started slowly, with only a few repetitions but as I get more powerful I can do harder and longer exercises. The winter is long and the human body doesn't have limits so who knows what can happen until spring. My main goal is to be able to do muscle ups and maybe walk on my hands.

Here are some videos for motivation:

Winter training

Two weeks ago I started my bodybuilding training again. Last year I wrote about my training program, this year  I have a light program. For the first few weeks I am on a come back program. I'm training 4 times a week and I'm doing exercises for all the major upper body muscle groups. For my legs I started training on my trainer at home a few weeks ago. I don't have a training program yet, I try to get on the bike at least once a week and I try to ride for more than an hour.

I am training every weekday except Wednesday when I have a rest day. I usually train from 8:30 am, I am training in the morning because in the morning the testosterone level is higher and the training is more effective. I'm doing one or two exercises for each muscle group but I repeat one exercise only 3 times. I'm doing exercises in this order first chest, then shoulders, back, triceps and biceps. After only two weeks of workout I am starting to get back in shape and I started to increase the weights which I use.

Next year after the holidays I will have another week of warm up exercises and after that I will focus on only two major muscle groups every day. I will write another post when I will have the final program :)

Bodybuilding

Bodybuilding is one of my favorite sports, I've been doing it for a few months almost every year since the 1st year of university. This year I am doing it slightly different because I developed a cycling specific workout. So about 80% of the exercises and the style of the exercises (smaller weights more repetitions) are meant to improve my stamina on the bike and only about 20% to build some extra muscles.

I only do upper body exercises once a week. I'm planning to do this twice or three times a week at the end of this month. The main exercises are meant to make my back muscles, triceps and abs stronger, these muscles are the most important for a biker.

Here is the list of the exercises I usually do after a short warm up, I do 4 series of 10 repetitions of each exercise:
1. Chest exercises:
 - bench press or incline bench press
 - butterfly
2. Shoulders
 - shoulder press
3. Back muscles:
 - wide-grip pulldown behind the neck and wide-grip lat pulldown (about 10 and 8 repetitions)
 - seated cable rows
4. Triceps:
 - triceps pushdown and cable overhead triceps extension (about 10 and 8 repetitions)
 - cable one arm triceps extension
5. Biceps:
 - dumbbell alternate bicep curl and alternate hammer curl (about 10 and 10 repetitions)
6. Abs:
 - leg raise on parallel bars - I do this between the repetitions of the bench press
 - ab crunch machine - I do this between the repetitions of the seated cable rows (this is good for the lower back to)
 - ab twist - I do this between the repetitions of the first back muscle exercises

This training is about one hour long and after this I usually drink a protein shake :)

You can find all these exercises here.