Tuesday, July 28, 2015

New Workout

Yesterday I made into a rest day, because there is a conference on campus that I was at intermittently from 8:30am to 9pm.  That was a bit much, but fortunately today will be a shorter day.

This morning I started a trial week of workouts focused on tennis improvements.  I'm going to have a day of upper body strength work, a day of lower body strength work, a day of core work, and a day of agility work.  Today I did the lower body strength work.  First, I did walking lunges holding out an 8-lb medicine ball and twisting back and forth with each lunge.  I did 6 reps per leg.  Next, I did "monster walks", which is walking sideways while squatting and with a band around your calves; I did 16 steps in each direction.  Then I repeated those two exercises, but switching to a 5-lb weight for the lunges.

After that, I switched to plyometric moves.  I did 20 squat jumps, then 20 jumps onto a 12-in high box.  Then I did 20 jumps to the right onto the box, and then 20 jumps to the left onto the box.  Then I did 10 pull-ups, with some breaks to get them all in.  Finally, I did 20 split squat jumps and 20 tuck jumps.

The last superset of exercises was for the wrist.  I used 3-lb weights.  First, I did 15 wrist flexions (palms up and lifting up), then 15 wrist extensions (palms down and lifting up), and then 15 wrist radial deviations (thumbs up and lifting up).  I repeated all three moves.  The wrist flexions were the hardest; I might go to 5-lb weights for the others.

Then I went back and did the lunges, monster walks, and jumping moves again, but with only half the reps.

With a warm-up and stretch, this all took just under 45 minutes, which wasn't too bad.  I burned about 160 calories, which also wasn't too bad.

I realized after the fact that I didn't do enough lunges, because I was supposed to do 12 per leg, not 12 total in each set.  Oops!  Those are kind of annoying, anyway, because I don't have a lot of room to "walk" in my basement exercise room.

I got the lunges, monster walks, and wrist exercises from USTA's On the Road Training Manual.  I forget where I got the plyo moves from, but they are pretty standard lower-body plyo exercies.

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