Triple feature, laundry center better
Last night after work I really did not feel like doing a Bar-barian forum challenge attempt but I forced myself to do one anyway. I elected to take my second crack at hard mode. On my first attempt I managed to get 6 reps, this time I got 8 although again I struggled mightily with the stiff leg raise portion of the movement.
I decided to also finally shoot the squat video Jeremy has been bugging me for. Even though I have told him that I thought my squat form was pretty respectable he wanted to see it on video to confirm. I have never seen myself squat on video before either. I did 10 reps with only 135 pounds on the bar. The video seems to confirm that my squat form is indeed decent.
Finally I shot another quick video of my doing a couple more negative muscle ups. When I shot my parallel bars demo reel I was able to pull off my best negative muscle up ever. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t a fluke.
I figured out that part of my problem when performing the movement in the past was elbow position. As I was passing the point of no return my elbows were still out at my sides. With my elbows flared out like that I had no way to support my body weight. I realized that as I hit that point my elbows needed to be rotating downward so I could engage my back to control the descent. I pulled off the two clean negatives. Just doing two of them was enough for me to feel it in my back for the rest of the evening.
I had another small project scheduled for last night, reworking our laundry center. Our laundry center is actually a reworked dresser. Years ago I pulled the guts out of it and installed 4 wire shelves inside that allow us to house a total of 6 laundry baskets inside. Ali likes to seperate out the laundry into many sub-categories.
Although it has been in use for many years there was always an annoying flaw in my design. The small plastic brackets that I used to support the wire shelves didn’t fit real well. As a result some some of the shelves would pop off the brackets from time to time. One of the brackets actually totally pulled out of the wood a couple weeks ago.
I bought some small metal L brackets at Home Depot last night and replaced the crappy plastic connectors. Ali had actually requested this awhile back and I dismissed it as something I didn’t really feel like doing. Well for whatever reason the motivation hit me. When she got home from her after work biking and running I was almost done. I had not told her ahead of time I was going to upgrade the brackets so she was pleasantly surprised.
I was again in bed early, drilling through Dexter episodes. I have about 3 or 4 more episodes to go in season 4. After that I will get a little break until I manage to score season 5 from Randall. I could use the break.