Football

I have a new favorite sport, football. It's a great game and it is a lot of fun when you play with other people who are on the same level, as bad at football as you are :)

I started playing football last year with my colleagues but it didn't last long. This year we were playing almost ever Wednesday. It is a good training also because it involves a lot of running. Sadly I got injured, my left leg hurts when I kick the ball and I didn't play for two weeks, but I am looking forward to the next game.

I got a great present from my girlfriend for my birthday, a special shoe witch prevents me from slipping and my aim got better to:

Kicking the ball reminds me of my childhood, we used to play when I was in school and when we were going out in the weekend to a barbecue.

74 year old athlete

The Movement Project: LEAP from Kyle LaBrache on Vimeo.

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.