Stepping into the cage.

It’s been a minute since I posted about my workouts, so I’ll just summarize by saying that things on going fairly well on the weightlifting front, and less than stellar in the running.

I switched from doing a close-grip lat pulldown to doing close-grip assisted chin-ups. I love it. It works my stomach, too, which is nice. I also switched to a decline bench press, and boy did I feel that one. Also fun.

Last Thursday, I tried to do squats, but couldn’t figure out how to unrack the weights already on the bar (which was lying on the safety rails near the floor) without the bar tilting and hitting the floor when I removed the 45 lbs from one side. So I didn’t do squats, and I endured the embarrassment of fumbling around and looking like an idiot who didn’t know what she was doing.

Yesterday, though, there was an empty bar already properly placed on the hooks in the cage, so I jumped in and got under that fucker. I learned that the cage is too narrow for me to do the sumo stance I prefer, so I just did normal, full-depth squats.

I managed to hurt my shoulder, though, because I was holding the bar incorrectly–it was too low, my hands were bent too far backward, and my right shoulder got pulled out of place for the duration of the exercise.

But I got into the damn cage and did a full set.

Now I just need to do a little work on form, and I’ll be set. I don’t know how I want to handle failure (or a lack of) on that exercise. I’m not keen on dropping the bar just to do a set to failure, so I may do a couple lighter sets.