I'm supposed to work on reducing stress, but I often am trying to squeeze in working out between coming home from work and heading to pick up our daughter from after-school day care. The last few weeks have been busy at work too, preparing for a trip. Friday evening we three were planning to go out for Valentine’s, avoiding the day's rush. I was home an hour late, so I was wrestling with bailing the workout, doing one set only and asking the wife to do pick-up duty, or doing the usual two sets and push back our dinner out until I was done. I went for the one set option. One warm-up set and one work set. It didn’t seem like a lot of work when I was done, but I did work to failure, so that’s all I could do.

One reason I was debating canceling all together was squats. After my experience last time of the weight bearing down on me, I wasn’t looking forward to that. However, in my warm-up, no-weight squats, I noticed that my feet were wider than I had been using with the bar, so I tried using the wider stance with the warm-up and work sets. No problem doing 20 reps with the same weight.

One complicating factor was that several weeks ago I loaded the bar with too much weight and I think I pulled a muscle. I thought that was gone yesterday, but last night in bed I was awake or woke up when it pulled again, SOMEHOW. Yesterday it was still there, annoying.

I was going to mix up my "program" a bit a few weeks ago corresponding to a work trip and make the travel a week off between cycles. The trip was delayed. With the slips this past week, it’s causing longer work days and the trip is delayed another day. Messes with my workout schedule. Assuming the trip actually happens this week, which the project manager says it will, that will be my break before the next cycle.

Did I mention I need to work on stress management?

My workouts don’t seem like much unless I’m actually in the garage doing the reps until I can’t follow good form and move that bar / dumbbells for another rep, i.e., failure. That’s as much as I can do, but still waiting for progress and growth as I plod along.