The Golden Rule

"Do unto others as you would have others do unto you"

These are words to live by and ones that I use to govern my daily life and interactions.  This is the best way I have found to bring the positive energy of other people into my life.  I also have a golden rule when it comes to the gym.  Test, test, and test again.  Now when I say test, I am talking about testing your range of motion(ROM) and letting your body tell you what exercises you should be doing on any given day.  After stretching and my cardio warmup I bend over like I am going to touch my toes.  As soon as I feel the littlest bit of stretching in the back of my legs I stop moving and see how far down I have reached.  This then becomes your baseline for the day.  You then go through the motions of the different types of exercises in your repertoire.  Just for example if you wanted to test bench press you would stand straight up and do a chest press motion 3 times.  Once you do this you again test your ROM and see if it has gotten better, worse, or stayed the same.  Depending on a variety of factors inside and outside of your body, certain exercises will test better on any given day.  The whole I idea is to listen to your body and do the exercises and movements that it is most inclined to do on that given day at that time.  My own personal baseline usually rests in the middle of my shin.  It is really amazing to see how much your ROM changes as you test the various exercises.  Depending on the day certain exercises have me reaching to my ankle or the top of my foot before I feel the stretch in the back of the leg.  I know this idea can be a little confusing at first but you can find a wealth of information on this website or please feel free to message me and I can explain the concept further.

Better Captain;s Chair

Three exercises tested well for me today.  The first was the good 'ol bent over row.  This is one of my go to moves and almost always tests well for me, especially when I haven't been in the gym for a couple of days.  I stuck with the 20kg weight and did three sets.  You can do as many or as few sets as will test well.  I usually test after each set and you will see your ROM stay good or even increase further.  Once you test yourself after a set and you are back to your baseline then you know it is time to move on to another exercise.  For me today that next exercise was the deadlift.  I started out with 140lbs on the bar and was only able to crank out 7 reps.  I gathered that this was just a little to much weight and went back to the 110lbs that I did with Ryan last week.  I did 2 more sets of 12 reps each and then my ROM was back to baseline.  Finally I hit up the Captain's Chair to finish up my workout.  I am down in Washington, DC with my parents so this one is a little different than the one at my gym back home and it actually worked much better for me than the one at my gym.  All in all I put in about an hour at the gym rocking out to some fantastic music.

Today's soundtrack was provided by Golden Touch, an LA native raised in Munich with a pension for pop music and a discernible ear that has him mixing it up with the best.  This mix really reminded me of something Lee Foss or Jamie Jones would put out, and has a lot of tracks by artists I admire.  I have to admit I had heard the name Golden Touch tossed about before but I had never heard any of his music so when the guys at Resident Advisor tweeted that this was the mix of the day I thought I should give it a shot.  This mix was done as an exclusive for Dazed Digital and you can read about it, as well as the artist here.  Unfortunately the artist does not allow me to embed this particular track on the site here so click the link below to hear the mix!

Golden Touch - Exclusive Mix for Dazed & Confused

As always enjoy the music, keep your energy high, and do unto others...

- Ian