Monday, July 23, 2012

Supersetting Pyramids

Between bouncing around various welfare-ravaged shithole towns in New Hampshire, raising a child, keeping a wife happy, and desperately trying to make more money than I shell out in both work and life I've realized something: 

I haven't posted here in over two months. 

Thank you for hanging around.  As I've darted around the Northeast United States, I've managed to keep some semblance of training going.  Necessity of trying to put together something that satisfies my urge for intense muscle-grinding burn in a unique manner is still alive and well.  Recently, it manifested itself in a quick routine that worked so well that I thought I'd share it with the masses.

I love supersetting with the upper body.  I've made that clear in the past.  I've a few other ways to organize a workout in the past, including pyramids.  I didn't like those so much.  I know it's not right but I feel like excessive rest when training is procrastinating.  Then, it hit me:  why not combine supersetting with pyramids? 

So, here's my idea:  I picked an upper body push and an upper body pull exercise and do a superset, adding a rep to each new set until I got to the point where I couldn't add another rep of either the push or the pull.  Then, I just worked my way back down.  Since I didn't have much time to work out, I selected Diamond Handstand Push-ups and Thick-bar, Close-Grip Chin-ups, knowing that the rep count on these two wouldn't go very high. 

I managed to get to 8 reps before my triceps just couldn't grind anymore. 

So, that worked out to 64 reps of each movement, 128 reps in roughly 15 minutes.  That certainly qualifies as good work in a limited amount of time in my book! 

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Justin,

How long did it take you to build up to diamond handstand pushups? Can't imagine those. What's the range of motion like?

Justin_PS said...

I've always been pretty good at HSPU's. So, I just tried them out of the blue a few months ago and got five on my first try. When I say good, depending on how I program them, I can get 15 and even as high as 25 reps to a set.

Calling them diamond might be a bit misleading. When I do them, my thumbs touch but not my fingers. Simply and adjustment for my comfort.

ROM is longer than a normal HSPU. Since the hands are far closer together, these are also more unstable.