Evil’s Workout Plan – May 2014
Two weeks out of the country delayed my next workout plan. Now I have to get to grips with the bothersome brachialis and front delt problems!
Evil Abroad!
If you’re a keen reader, and I hope you are, you’ll have noticed that my new workout plan was way overdue.
I was out of the country for two weeks and my workouts were in maintenance mode. Push-ups, pull-ups, dips – anything that could be done with body weight and a bit of furniture.
Coming back home I continued the regular plan and stalled on one exercise, while another just doesn’t agree with me.
The stalling bit were the concentration curls. How serviceable that exercise used to be! How nice that it seemed to work for months on end, considering you don’t have that many exercises to isolate the brachialis with when you train at home. But now my reps don’t increase.
What I didn’t become friends with were the barbell front raises. I felt like I was airing the laundry and my shoulders weren’t too happy about them either.
So how did I cope with all this? I went and called the new plan the “May Plan,” as it’s almost May, and made the following changes:
Evil’s Current Workout Plan (May 2014)
| Day | Body Part | Exercise | Sets | Repetitions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monday | ||||
| Chest, Triceps, Abs | ||||
| Weighted Wide Push-Ups | 3 | 6 – 12 | ||
| Incline Dumbbell Presses | 3 | 6 – 12 | ||
| Flyes | 3 | 6 – 12 | ||
| Close-Grip Bench Presses | 3 | 6 – 12 | ||
| Lying Triceps Extensions | 3 | 6 – 12 | ||
| Triceps Kickbacks | 3 | 6 – 12 | ||
| Crunches | 3 | 6 – 12 | ||
| Tuesday | Cardio, 60 minutes | |||
| Wednesday | ||||
| Back, Biceps, Abs | ||||
| Weighted Pull-Ups | 3 | 6 – 12 | ||
| T-Bar Rows | 3 | 6 – 12 | ||
| Barbell Pullovers | 3 | 6 – 12 | ||
| Barbell Curls | 3 | 6 – 12 | ||
| Concentration Curls | 3 | 6 – 12 (5 – 8) | ||
| Chin-ups | 3 | To failure | ||
| Lying Leg Raises | 3 | 6 – 12 | ||
| Thursday | Cardio, 60 minutes | |||
| Friday | ||||
| Shoulders, Legs, Abs | ||||
| Arnold Presses | 3 | 6 – 12 | ||
| Lying Side Raises | 3 | 6 – 12 | ||
| Rear Delt Raises | 3 | 6 – 12 | ||
| Hack Squats | 3 | 6 – 12 | ||
| Good Mornings | 3 | 6 – 12 | ||
| Crunches | 3 | 6 – 12 | ||
| Saturday | Rest | |||
| Sunday | Rest | |||
Once more a couple of the exercise links go to ExRx until I finally sit down (or rather, stand up) and do a video on them.
Mondays Explained
With the changes I introduced in the March plan the Mondays still work as advertised. Hooray for the chest – what incredibly undemanding muscles it consists of. Give them a nice exercise and they’ll be happy with it from here to eternity.
Wednesdays Explained
The good bit about Wednesdays is that the t-bar rows are a full success. They make up for my current slow progress on pull-ups, because with both of them together, I seem to get as much out of the lats as possible.
On a sidenote: the number of reps I can do on the chin-ups is always a bit up and down, depending on if I made the exercises before more difficult. If that happens to you, too, don’t worry. Finisher exercises always suffer greatly from what went on beforehand.
The pain in the brachioradialis I talked about in March is gone, but now I have no exercise to do with the other muscle that starts with “bra”: the brachialis. Going back to preacher curls could be a problem for the forearms, but the concentration curls stalled. I could do another rep, but it’d look like I’m trying to push my knee into my mouth.
Having no alternative, I’ll keep them and experiment with the rep range a bit.
Fridays Explained
As hinted, those barbell front raises didn’t work at all. At least for me. Instead I now went for an exercise I never did before: the Arnold press. They look like a nice compound movement and it’ll be interesting to see what they can do for me.
Oh, and if you have any nice bilateral exercises for the side and rear delts that I haven’t tried, shout them out! It takes ages to train with two exercises where you train one side after the other.
4 Comments
I recently started doing prone reverse flys for read delts (which were/are really lacking) and I’ve been seeing some success. It looks to be a good idea for people like me to force the little movements to be strict. It seems to have worked with seated curls and more recently incline curls too
Hm, let’s see!
You said you had problems with your shoulders and your brachioradialis. It’s possible that your smaller muscles are being forced to work as support in other exercises – not being exercised fully, but still becoming aggravated. To illustrate, your front delts work with Triceps and Pecs on Monday through pushups and incline presses. Then your delts may be involved as support on Wednesday with your back exercises. Finally, you hit your front delts again on Friday with Arnold presses.
One thought – if you feel you don’t need extra work for your front delts (they may be getting enough through pushups and incline dumbell presses), simply cut the Arnold presses on Friday. It’s quite likely that you get front delt work from your lying side raises, anyway.
It’s possible that a similar problem happened with your brachioradialis. Gripping for some of the compound exercises involves forearms, so your forearms are constantly getting hit.
You might want to cut down the number of sets for some exercises, or consider cutting down some compound movements where your aggravated muscles are being forced to work as support.
That was some food for thought, Mike, thanks! I do have a lot of front delt involvement!