Workout Update: my new "bench press" PR

Hi there my Hivean friends and followers!

It has been a while since my last workout update and just a few days ago, I finally reached quite a long awaited "milestone" at the outdoor gym that I go to here in Prague so I figured it´s time to come up with a new workout update post here on my Hive blog.

I still go to this outdoor gym, even though it often looks like this in this part of the year but it´s not a big deal for me, I don´t mind the cold weather and I appreciate that the gym is usually empty these days and I can thus have it just for myself. Despite trying to train regularly even now in winter though, I somehow couldn´t improve my "bench press" max for a long time. Back in December, I traveled a lot. In January, I got sick (most probably covid) so it was not until recently, like a couple of weeks ago, that I finally started to "pump iron" thoroughly and regularly again. And there we go, I just hit a new PR (personal record) earlier this week, yay! :)

As the title of this post suggests, it was a "bench press" PR and you probably wonder why I keep using the quotation marks with the word. Well, because the "bench press" that I´m talking about looks like this :D

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Yeah. You might actually remember this machine from the previous workout posts mentioned above. The correct name of it would probably be something like "standing chest press" but at that outdoor gym, this machine is the closest one to the classic bench press (at least in terms of the actual movement and muscle activation) so I just call it "bench press" :)

Now if you look closely at the two pictures above, you can actually see the new PR. Those 7 big plates on each side of the machine. It was the very first time that I was able to pull off at least 1 rep with that weight. Until that day, my PR was 6 on each side plus the smaller ones.

Those big plates are 10 kg each so that´s 140 kg plates plus the weight of construction itself that can be another 10 kg at least so the total weight that I lifted was probably some 150 kg (330 lb), which looks pretty impressive, I know, but here is the thing... If you look at the machine, it actually works as a set of levers and I´m pretty sure those levers make the lift (or press if you will) somewhat easier than it would be with a classic horizontal, gravity-opposing bench press. I mean I haven´t been to a regular gym in years so I don´t know how much I would lift on the regular machines and with regular dumbbells but I doubt I would be able to lift 150 kg on the classic bench press...

I was still very happy about the new PR though as it means that I´m still making some progress in my workout efforts even after a couple of years that I have already been into it and that´s a very rewarding and inspiring feeling. Now that I finally emptied the big plate stacks, I will try to gradually add the smaller ones (they are 2,5 kg each) so hopefully, sooner or later, I will max out the whole machine, no matter how accurate or inaccurate version of classic bench press it is. I might write another update if / when I do that ;)

So that´s it for today I guess. Thanks for your attention guys and if you ever happen to be in Prague, Czech Republic or in Krakow, Poland and you feel like working out at some cool outdoor gyms, feel free to hit me up, I will tell you where you can find such places ;)

By the way this is the first time I´m posting my content into the Exhaust Community as it seems to be, according to their description, a better fit for such content than the bigger but more generic Sports Talk Social.

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This post was created by me for the Hive blockchain exclusively. All rights reserved.

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