{"id":2664,"date":"2009-09-27T05:06:24","date_gmt":"2009-09-27T03:06:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.ultimatefatburner.com\/?p=2664"},"modified":"2015-02-15T00:30:44","modified_gmt":"2015-02-15T05:30:44","slug":"alpha-male-challenge-week-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/alpha-male-challenge-week-1\/","title":{"rendered":"The Alpha Male Challenge – Week 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

John and I started the Alpha Male Challenge<\/a> program this week.\u00a0 Although we’re both veteran gym rats, there are elements of this program that we haven’t done for a while, so it was a good change up.\u00a0 It also left us a bit sore, but that’s par for the course.<\/p>\n

We\u00a0continued with\u00a0our usual early a.m. cardio routine\u00a0for the “Play Heart” requirement.\u00a0 We’ll be adding in other, more “playful” activities as we go along (like using the Prowler – lol), but figured\u00a0the\u00a0current routine was good enough to begin with.\u00a0 Since he’s a corporate warrior, John was able to follow the suggestions in the book for his “Work Heart” points, but since my “office” is at home, I had to improvise.\u00a0 I got my points by jumping rope, doing calisthenics, and hooping at intervals throughout the day.\u00a0 This is stuff I often do anyway, as it helps perk me up (I can only sit in front of the computer for so long…).\u00a0 So, nothing really new on this front.<\/p>\n

The weight\u00a0sessions were another story,\u00a0however – I haven’t done whole body workouts in a long time.\u00a0 The first “Wave” of the “Alpha Wave Training” emphasizes muscular endurance, so there\u00a0are a lot of 20 rep sets… with only 1 minute rests between them.\u00a0 Needless to state, there was a certain amount of guess work involved in choosing the weights, although I pegged it pretty well.\u00a0 John had a tougher time with this – he frequently started too heavy, and had to lighten up as he went along.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Despite the intial fumbling around, the workouts moved along at a pretty good clip.\u00a0 We’re working at “Level A”, so there are 30 sets per workout.\u00a0 That’s a fair number of sets, but it\u00a0still only took about 75 minutes\u00a0(including the dynamic warmup).<\/p>\n

One downside of the “Challenge” is that my workouts are now tied to John’s schedule, rather than my own.\u00a0 This means hitting the gym between 5:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. during the week\u00a0– definitely not my preferred time.\u00a0 But it does help to have a workout partner\/spotter around for this sort of workout, so I’ll manage.<\/p>\n

All in all, it’s a challenging workout – I was\u00a0definitely feeling it at the end (hell, I’m still feeling it NOW… time to go put my feet up for the night!).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John and I started the Alpha Male Challenge program this week.\u00a0 Although we’re both veteran gym rats, there are elements of this program that we haven’t done for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11,28],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2664"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2664"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2664\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8648,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2664\/revisions\/8648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}